mat t hewwo o dward.co .uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/steal-competito rs-best-content/

Dave Schneider

How To Steal Your Competitors Best Content & Use It AgainstThem

Matthew Woodward - Tried & Tested SEOOn 25.03.14, In Tutorials, by

Today you are going to learn how to steal yourcompetitors content and use it against them to getbacklinks and social signals.

This is a guest post written by Dave Schneider whoyou might recognise as one half of the income report round up dominating ACoupleTravelers.com team.

Af ter a f ew beers, steak, curry & kittens in the UK & Prague with the ACoupleTravelers team I know that Davehas an awf ul lot to share – so sit t ight!

What You Will Learn

How to steal your competitors best content

How to use your competitors content against them

How to steal their readers

How to steal their backlinks

How to steal their social signals

Time To Get Your Hands Dirty

Quality content is one of the most powerf ul marketing tools available. There is no better way to enhancenatural growth than to write content that people are compelled to engage with and share.

While black hat techniques and SEO tools are by no means dead, all the signs are telling us that sustainable,long term growth is best achieved through consistently giving our readers quality content.

At the same time, how many of us have tried that and gotten absolutely nowhere?

How many of us have written that epic article, only to see it f all f lat on its f ace, and cursed the bloke whocoined the phrase “content is king”?

Meanwhile, our competitors, possibly benef it ing f rom having larger audiences and more powerf ul socialconnections, write cookie cutter articles that get hundreds of comments.

Well, it ’s t ime to level the playing f ield.

Today we are going to discuss how to take your competitor ’s best articles and use them against them.

Oh, and everything I mention is COMPLETELY FREE to use. No expensive sof tware here.

Identifying Your Competitor’s Best Content

English class is over with. We’re not interested in who wrote the best f ive paragraph essay. There are keymetrics to tell us, which articles are the best.

This is the internet af ter all, and there are three things people do when they like an article.

Share it Socially

Link To It

Comment

That’s it. So let’s capitalize.

How To Track Social Shares

Let’s pretend f or a minute that I run a business website and my competitor is Pat Flynn f rom Smart PassiveIncome.

If you want to know which of his articles got the most social shares, there are some great f ree tools available.My personal f avourite is this tool f rom Neil Patel.

Simply plug in the URL and let it rip. Then head over to Social Analysis.

When analyzing the results we want to be caref ul to avoid red herrings. There are clearly things like the homepage or about me page that we are going to ignore.

There may also be articles that were part of a giveaway or in which there was an incentive to share. Thesedistort the results and will be dif f icult to replicate.

Lastly, we want to f ocus on articles that will apply to our own audience.

As we all know f rom high school, trying to be something we’re not just because it ’s popular is only going toleave us sitt ing at the wrong table during lunch with nothing to say.

This is only page one of the results, browse through the rest to f ind more!

How To Track Backlinks

We can also f ind our competitors best content based on backlinks and page authority.

Log in to Open Site Explorer , put in the domain, and then go to Top Pages.

All the results will populate and they can be easily exported f or your leisure. You’ll notice f rom this example thatthere are some overlaps with the most shared posts, and that should make sense.

If you’re a subscriber, you can also see Facebook likes, tweets, and Google +1′s (last three columns).

How To Track Comments

Unf ortunately, my research has yielded no good, f ree hack that will allow you to see the most commentedposts of a competitor ’s website, unless they have a most popular widget installed of some sort.

Luckily, if you use both of the above, you’re well on your way to knowing all the top pages anyway.

Taking It To The Next Level

The next step is to write our own version of content that out does the other person’s.

This is really a topic f or a whole other article, and has been discussed to death on the internet.

Honestly there is no f ormulaic tool that spits out quality content, so I will only brief ly discuss a f ew techniquesto get your creative juices f lowing.

Leverage Comments

Your advantage with this article is that you didn’t have to go f irst. You are able to see how people react to yourcompetitor ’s article and adapt your article to it.

What questions did people have?

Identif y points of conf usion and address them in your article.

If the article asked f or some input, what did people say?

For example, if a popular article is something to the ef f ect of “7 Ways To Promote Your Content”, it probablyended with “How do you promote your content?”

Now we have a bunch more ways that the author didn’t even think to mention that we can put in our article (14Ways To Promote Your Content).

This is gold, because we know it ’s directly relevant to our target audience, since they suggested it.

Add New Media

If your article is a tutorial, perhaps add a video, or a f ew print screens to delineate steps.

Perhaps add an inf ographic or provide some data/illustrated graphs to make your point.

It ’s these litt le extras that make an article stand out.

Be The Ult imate Resource

Make your article a one stop shop f or everything related to the topic.

If you competitor ’s article is about how to hire a virtual assistant, write “The Ultimate Guide To VAs”, which notonly includes the above inf ormation but also everything else you need to know about virtual assistants.

Write with the aim of creating the very best guide to virtual assistants on the internet period.

Search Google

Old school but ef f ective. Chances are your competitor is not the f irst person to write about this topic.

Old school but ef f ective. Chances are your competitor is not the f irst person to write about this topic.

Google what other people wrote and get a f eel f or the dif f erent angles f or approaching it.

Make a note of what you like and don’t like about each one and combine everything into one super article.

Using Your Competitors Content Against Them

Now it ’s t ime f or the f un part, using their content against them.

You competitor has done you a great deed. They have dragged everyone who is interested in this topic outf rom hiding and revealed them to you in the f orm of social shares, comments, and link backs.

Now, all we need to do is f ind these people.

Stealing Social Shares

The problem with most social platf orms is that they either don’t have a search f unction or the search f unctionthey do have is not really built f or this, probably f or personal privacy reasons.

But that’s OK.

There is still at least one solid way to retrace social shares: Twitter Search.

As you will see, if you are truly selecting the most popular posts of a worthy f oe, there will be more thanenough people to contact.

Twitter Search is quite easy to operate. Simply hit advanced search, then put the tit le in “This Exact Phrase”,then, when the results populate, hit “All” (instead of Top).

The beautif ul thing here is that you can reply directly to these tweets if you are logged in, which makes it supereasy to do.

Just remember not to spam.

Another one that works OK is Social-Searcher.

This searches Facebook, Twitter, and G+. Since we have Twitter covered, and the Facebook search isn’t sogood, I would only use this one if you want to target people on G+.

Stealing Comments

While you might not have been able to f ind the most commented article, that doesn’t mean you can’t approachcommenters in the articles you did f ind (or any f or that matter).

In many cases you can check the person’s website through the comment as it is linked through their name.

If they have a website, they probably have a contact f orm.

The exception to this is when people set their comments to link back to the article itself (that’s what Pat does,but it is not that common).

Stealing Backlinks

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail with this audience on how to retrace links. For example, Matt hasa tutorial that is completely dedicated to this.

But there is also just good old Ahref s, Majestic SEO or Opensite Explorer.

Plug in the post link and start collecting backlinks. Check out Matt’s post comparing the best backlink checkers.

Contacting Our Target Audience

By now we have our list of contacts.

The scripts here are f airly straight f orward.

If it ’s Twitter, you can simply reply to the tweet. Caref ul if it ’s a really old post though, as replying to a 4 yearold tweet might come across as unnatural.

If it ’s email, then a simple message stating

Who you are

Where you got their contact inf o

Why you’re getting in touch (you saw they liked this post)

What your relevant post is

Will do the trick!

Why This Is Worth Your Time

Perhaps this looks like a lot of work with no guarantees. But let me explain why this is worth your t ime.

Firstly, it ’s a perf ect, straight f orward task f or a virtual assistant.

I will usually ask them to go through the steps above and get me the person’s name, contact f orm/email, andtwitter handle, which makes the pitch real simple and gives me another f orm to reach out to them as a f all back.

Secondly, this is all part of content promotion, which should be the f ocal point of any blogger wishing toexpand his audience.

I’ve heard some of the top bloggers say they spend about 20% of their t ime on content creation, and the reston content promotion.

We must look beyond the mere f act that we are trying to promote this one article, and see that we are gett ingin touch with the most active, and engaged members of our target audience.

Connecting with them in a meaningf ul way as well as showing them the quality work we deliver has muchbroader implications.

It can lead to more social shares, comments, and newsletter subscriptions down the line.

If they share your competitors posts, maybe they will share yours too.

Lastly, this strategy is a soup to nuts approach. We start with idea generation and take it all the way throughpromotion with a tangible strategy in mind.

No more guessing games. No more wondering what you’re going to do with something af ter you write it. Nomore vague searching f or people to reach out to.

Find out the content your target audience wants. Give them something uber quality. Then tell them about it.

Results From My Own Attempts

This has been a f undamental part of my strategy f or launching my new business blog a f ew weeks ago. So youmight be wondering how are the results so f ar?

Well, to speak generally, the blog has gotten over 1k unique visitors in its f irst two weeks as well as severalhundred social shares, due in large to connecting with people through this method.

In f act, Twitter right now is my biggest ref erral traf f ic.

Af ter writ ing my Ultimate Guide To Using Of f -Shore Virtual Assistants I went on my promotional hunt that I hadplanned f rom the get go.

I f ound that the f ollowing site was linking to a post by Pat Flynn on virtual assistants.

I sent an email to the webmaster and made him aware of my new post and that if he was interested in sharing itwith his audience he was welcome to do so.

Instead, he took it one step f urther and added my link to the page.

Wrapping It Up

If you want to get your f irst 100,000 visitors, you have to put content promotion at the top of your list.

Af ter all, content does not promote itself .

Matt started f rom day 1 being active in f orums and eventually incorporating this strategy into his daily routine.

This led to him creating an award winning top 100 blog.

However, what these strategies are really about is getting your content in f ront of people who want to read itand share it.

This is what I have shown you to do in the most direct way I know how.

If you are interested in more strategies f or running your blog like a business, come over and say hi.

Lastly, let’s brain storm!