This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
In today's episode, free and effective ways to analyze your competition, how can you in fact use simple Google searches, free tools, and social media insights to keep your side hustle ahead of the game? That's what we're going to talk about here on Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Today's question comes from Jason in North Carolina. He's looking for ways to analyze his competition without spending any money.
I love that. That's a key part of so many things we do here at Side Hustle School to keep you from spending money, keep you from spending any money or at least make it low cost. Competitor analysis is something you can in fact do without paying for these fancy tools. There are some cool tools. Sometimes they have a cost, but let's first break down some free and effective methods you can use to gain insights into what competitors are doing.
You might learn what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, and how you can apply that knowledge to improve your own business, either your current business or your next business. If you've got a business idea, you might want to in fact do this competitor analysis on the front end. That would be before you get started. Anyway, let's talk about it in my answer to Jason's question, it's all coming right up. Hi Chris, I'm Jason from Charlotte, North Carolina.
I've been side hustling for a little while now and I know I should be keeping an eye on my competition. However, I don't have the budget for expensive tools or software to conduct competitor's analysis. What are some effective methods I can use to analyze my competitors for free or at least low cost? Jason, great news, you definitely don't need to spend money to conduct some simple yet solid competitor analysis and really what we're doing here is just trying to determine who else is in the market, what they are doing well, and where might there be some opportunities for you as you enter this new market. Of course, this might vary a bit across industry, across product, market, and so on, but here are some free methods you can use to get the information you need.
First of all, you start with a simple Google search. Now, if you're thinking, "Wow, Chris, that's profound," no, no, there's more to it. Start with the Google search, search for your main keywords, look up the products or services that you offer or that you're thinking of offering using the same keywords your customers would use. This is important. Pay attention to which competitors are ranking on the first page and what kinds of content, products, or promotions they're offering.
Look as well at the organic results, so those are the free search results, you usually have to scroll down to get to them, but also look at Google ads. Notice which competitors are running Google ads and how they're positioning themselves. This kind of gives you insights into which keywords they're targeting and what messaging they're using. That's a great start, of course, completely free. Number two, check competitor websites.
Now, you've got a list of some potential competitors. Spend time analyzing those websites to see what they're doing well and, as noted, what you could do better. You want to look at their homepage, you want to check their product pages, see how they showcase products or services, look at their pricing models, and then also, free tip here, well, it's all free, of course, sign up for their newsletter. If they offer a newsletter, sign up, you might want to use a different email address if yours is really obvious, like if you've just registered a domain for your site hustle, maybe use a different one, but that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how they communicate with customers and what kind of content or promotions they prioritize. All right, a couple of free tools you can use after you do that initial searching.
Number one is called Ahrefs, Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S. They have a free backlink checker. You can go and see how many websites are linking to your competitor's content. That basically gives you an idea of how much authority they have. Authority is a term that's used in the search engine world, and you might find opportunities to target the same sites for backlinks or partnerships.
What else could you do? I mean, there's more. Read reviews. Go to Google, Yelp, Amazon. Look at both positive and negative reviews, again, to identify those strengths and weaknesses.
All right, so that's a bunch of stuff you could do. There's more. We could create surveys. We could do polls. We could use Facebook ad library.
Lots of stuff you could do, but I think I've given several actionable tips, so let's stop there so we don't overwhelm anybody. I try to keep these episodes really short, action-packed, so you can go off and do something or at least have a point of inspiration or motivation for your day. Jason, cheering you on. Listeners, if you have a question or comment, sidehustleschool.com. Free resources there, notes on every episode, and much more is coming up.
I'm excited to go into the month of December. That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
