Ever heard that you need a plan to get ahead? It’s sometimes exceedingly tricky to formulate a plan though isn’t it? Luckily, in online business it’s really easy to formulate a plan to get ahead in your niche–whatever that is.

Finding Your Niche Competition

First you need to identify those websites that are ahead of you in the search results for your chosen keywords. You can do this by doing a search on Google, Yahoo and Bing (and whatever other search engine you’re interested in) for the words and phrases you want to be searched for. Take a look at the top 10 results for each one. Check what other keywords/phrases these sites are using because you can often come up with some interesting new search terms you hadn’t thought of by doing this.

Comparative Analysis

Then you do a comparative analysis on each of the top three, and you’re away. You will have an itemized roadmap that will take you exactly where you want to go, and you will be able to implement it at your leisure-whenever you have a few minutes to spare.

Let’s take a closer look at the criteria:

1. Search terms (we’ve already covered that)
2. Title tags (what you see in the top, left-hand corner of your screen for each page). This is arguably the most important item of optimization. It dictates a large part of how the search engines see you. If you have fabulous content, but your title tags say ‘welcome to (your name)’ you will be sunk. Don’t miss the opportunity to put to or three of your major keywords in here, starting with the most important.
3. Your article/post title should also include at least one of your major keywords.
4. Look at the images your competition is using. Learn from this, and try to get bigger, more interesting images onto your pages, not forgetting that there is a balance: make the images too big and you’ll make your pages slow to load. Oh, and don’t forget the alt-text because this does matter for a number of reasons.
5. Make sure that your web content is far and away more readable, and more informative than that of the competition.

It will help if you arrange your results in a table for at-a-glance assessment.

Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket…

Don’t rely too heavily on a competitive analysis though. Nowadays off-page activity can have a major impact on your ultimate traffic and visibility results. Social media is a must. Don’t overlook Twitter, in particular, as a tool for networking, getting the word out, and even getting valuable links for your website.

I am dismayed at the number of Twitter users who are openly using my favorite networking implement as a spamming platform. They are seemingly unrepentant and unapologetic. They can’t possibly be profiting from it: I know I’m not alone that I will NEVER retweet a spam tweet. I will NEVER follow an obvious spammer.

There have been many blog posts recently about the events over at Twitter: How #FollowFriday has degenerated into a spam exercise.

I have noticed a steep decline in the general quality of new users following me, with tweets like:

Hello Please Check by Free Earnings report ! Make money online with me

and

Get start in online business – sell more products and get rich . Check my free raport about it

The problem is, these people are misguidedly under the impression that they are engaged in Social Media Marketing. They are nothing but spammers, pure and simple.

Social media marketing is all about building relationships and trust. It’s all about providing useful information and assistance to your network: in short it’s about making the Internet a better place to be–not creating a cyber-hell on earth.

For Heaven’s sake: Next time you go to tweet something that most of us will regard as spam, stop and think. Would you want to receive 100 tweets just like it? If not you probably need to stop tweeting, stop blogging and read. Read the blogs and tweets of people like Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, Andy Beal, and David Risley, to grab just a handful of good Twitter people off my timeline.

What can we all do to keep Twitter and the Internet spam-free? Don’t encourage spammers. Don’t follow them, don’t engage with them, and if they bother you, block them and tell your timelines why you’re blocking them. Be loud about it.

Blogging is a new industry, and while it is already huge, it seems the surface hasn’t really been scratched yet. Learning how to use blogging to enhance business might be something you’ll want to do in order to establish your online brand. One of the latest forms of blogging is micro-blogging, as in Twitter or Plurk.

There are lots of reasons why opening an account with Twitter is a great thing to do for your business:

1. Joining Twitter is free, easy and takes only seconds (OK you’re right, that’s two reasons right there).
2. You can create a Twitter network that links you up with some really impressive people in your niche. We even have celebrities like Britney Tweeting now. You can find best selling authors like Scott Allen and towering business personalities like Guy Kawasaki.
3. Twitter is one of the best ways there is to keep abreast of trends in your niche. Communication is essential for anyone wanting to succeed in this information age, and if that information can be had in real-time on a breaking news basis, just imagine what an edge that would give you compared to your competitors who have not yet discovered Twitter. Many times we hear important news before it breaks in print and broadcast media. There have even been instances where they’ve taken queues from us–not always successfully. Jill Whalen calls it the ‘water cooler aspect,’ and that about sums it up.
4. Even if you don’t feel like it now, grab your Twitter ID (especially your name) now in case you really regret it later when you see that everyone’s using Twitter, (chances are you will).
5. Twitter is a fantastic way of getting inspiration for your blog or website, or any other project you’re working on. Users often use it for feedback, canvassing the market and a lot more. Here’s just one example of how bloggers get material for posts as well as business development ideas.
6. Have questions about business? Give them up to the Twitter universe. Chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.
7. Used correctly Twitter can be a superb reputation management tool both for getting the good word out and suppressing the bad. But that will only work if your Twitter network is already well established when you have a reputation crisis to contend with.
8. Some really interesting writers/artists are easy to link up with.
9. Itinerary coordination: Obama’s presidential campaign made extensive use of social media channels including Twitter for announcements and coordination.
10. Twitter makes a very effective mode of communication and coordination if there’s a crisis, or heaven forbid, a disaster. But if you’re not already established on Twitter with an effective network, when a crisis erupts it’ll be too late.
11. If you choose to you can keep an eye on your market/network anonymously by signing up for Twitter in another name. You can have as many accounts as you want, and if you use an Twitter client like Twhirl, Spaz or Tweetr for Mac you can tweet in more than one profile at once.
12. You can Tweet from your PC, laptop, handheld or smartphone.
13. Twitter takes far less effort to keep up with than some other social media platforms, such as FaceBook, for example. You are in complete control of how much interaction you choose to take on.
14. All the coolest bloggers like Tech Crunch, Problogger, Copyblogger and lots more, are on Twitter. And before all my blogger-friends raise a howl of protest, I cannot list all you cool and notorious bloggers on here I want to finish some time today.
15. You can post your Twitterfeed to your blog or website to increase your network and provide enhanced interactivity for your clients/customers.
16. Join a multitude of entrepreneurs who are actively promoting their goods or services via Twitter in the form of special offers and so on.
17. There are a multitude of Twitter applications such as Twitter Grader, or Mr Tweet that will help you gauge your popularity, market reach and even shortcomings. All vital for social media marketing in any form.

Ever noticed how sometimes a few straggling birdies get left behind each year when all the others are migrating to better climates? Chances are those that get left behind end up not making it at all.

I hate to be a drama queen (not known for it), but if you are stubborn about not getting involved with twitter, you might just find yourself wishing you’d joined the rest of the flock, especially if you work online.

I know there are a number of online personalities who, like me in the beginning, see twitter as just one more social-media drain on our time, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on that score. I’m now a self-confessed twitter-holic.

The twitter world is fast developing into a hub for the various industries. All you need do to ensure permanent access to professional opinions, great company, and breaking news, is open an account and search for all the people in your industry you wish you had access to. You’ll probably be surprised how many are already on twitter. Join as many communities you want, and you’re all set.

Remember though, that if you want to use twitter for family and friends too, you’d be better off opening more than one account so that your professional associates can’t end up reading your family small talk.

Like many others in the SEO industry in particular, I’ve discovered that twitter is wonderful for keeping me in touch with what’s going on. We’re even privy to breaking news as it’s actually breaking, and I love hearing about stuff before anyone else does!

There are a number of twitter clients designed to help you get the most of your micro-blogging experience. Instead of exhausting (and boring) myself, I’m going to send you over to this brilliant list. That should be plenty to keep you going for a while. My favorite (and the only one I use) is Twhirl. It’s easy, non-intrusive, meaning I can work while I’m using it, and it seems to have few bugs. In the bargain, you can log onto multiple accounts and read them all from the same tiny window. Brilliant.

My one pet peeve with Twhirl, however, was that it opened links in IE instead of FireFox, which is my default browser. I tweeted about it a couple of times but no one answered my cries for help. Then yesterday Andy Beard encountered the same problem, so my eyes were glued to his tweets until he came up with an answer, which I knew he would. So it is with full credit going to Andy that I present to you the solution here! I’m so happy that now when I click on a link in a tweet, it comes up in FireFox. I HATE IE!

Just in case any twitter people get to read this, one thing both twitter and Twhirl are lacking is an efficient search mechanism. If you just know you saw a tweet about something important a few days ago, you can’t find it in search (well not reliably). You need to go back through all the tweets, which can be an extreme headache, particularly if you’re pushed for time which we all are.

But I love twitter, and even the attractions of FriendFeed can’t lure me away, well not for now anyway.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t miss the twitter migration?’ It seems to me that at some point they’ll probably have to change the rules for twitter, when it gets too big to manage in its present format. Maybe there will come a time when you can’t just decide to ‘follow’ any person of your choice. For me this is a totally valid reason to get in now before things do change (of course, then again they might not). And then there’s always the fact that some pretty impressive individuals are still willing to follow you back. Once they’ve got upwards of 10,000 followers that’s unlikely to be the case.

Oh, and if you love the little birdie with attitude featured in the twitter logo, you’ll be impressed to know that it’s the work of another twitter-holic, non other than cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void.

If you want to start somewhere, follow me on twitter!

Guide to Networking with twitter
There’s no shortage of social networking sites online. In fact, if you’re like me you sort of get a sinking feeling every time you see that another one has been launched. It’s getting overwhelming. And worse, most of them are a total waste of time; a short flash-in-the-pan that fades away to nothing.

I actually thought twitter was going to be like that. Boy was I in for a surprise. I never thought this tiny, simple micro-blogging application would soon be the one I use more than any other. In fact, twitter has a way of growing on you, and now I see it as my most useful networking tool: I can easily choose who I network with. I have even been getting backlinks from twitter, and a small amount of traffic (hey, traffic is never to be sneezed at, especially if it’s targeted).

It would be churlish of me to try and create a twitter resource without making reference to others who have done a far better job than I might have done:

Let’s start with this ‘how to’ guide from New Media Bytes. It tells you all you need to know to get twittering in the shortest amount of time. I should mention that it was intended for journalists, but bloggers and just about anyone else will find it very useful too.

Second up we have Lee Odden over at Top Rank Blog with a pretty comprehensive twitter guide.

This list of SEO twitterers is the work of MarketingPilgrim, and you’re going to love it if you’re at all interested in SEO.

That should be more than enough to get you started on twitter. Now tell me you don’t love it?

Stumbleupon: How to Get Tons of Traffic in One Easy Lesson

Stumbleupon quickly became my all-time favorite once I reinstalled it last year. I say reinstalled because I dabbled with it some years ago when it was new on the web, but couldn’t see a purpose for it at the time. Wrong again. When I began using it this time, I noticed a curious thing just a few days after I installed it: a huge spike in my web traffic. I couldn’t understand it–about a thousand visitors from nowhere. When I investigated, every single one of them had come from Stumbleupon. I was excited about this discovery–so much free traffic at absolutely no cost–it deserved to be investigated.

Oh, just one word of caution here: I actually had to change my hosting provider once I started using Stumbleupon because they closed me down a couple of times saying I had used up all my bandwidth. Don’t burn traffic by not being prepared for it when it comes with plenty of usable bandwidth.

You can be sure this nugget of information piqued my interest: The more active you are on Stumbleupon, the more traffic you get. So you can even control how much traffic you get. But you can’t just go in there and spam members. If you do you run the risk of getting buried, or worse. Be sure you’re doing it right: read these highly informative articles about using Stumbleupon before you even download the Stumbleupon toolbar. This one is for Firefox, but you’ll find the IE version there too.

Here’s an explanation of how to use Stumblupon like a Pro that should put you in a great place to start stumbling right away.

Tamar Weinberg wrote this Stumbleupon How-to guide for 10e2 a year ago, but it’s well worth a trip over to read it.

Andy Wibbels wrote this article about how to find great websites using Stumbleupon, and this is useful information too.

OK, so now you know why you should be using twitter and Stumbleupon. Don’t forget to follow me (I’ll reciprocate) on twitter, and be my friend on Stumbleupon. See you there.