Working with your competition isn’t just fun, but it really does alleviate the fear of competition. You’ll realize as you work together that you’re in this business for the same reasons – to solve problems for your customers, add value to the community, and earn a living for you and your family. By joining forces, you can boost revenue, increase goodwill, and make your work even that much more fun to do.
Fill the Gaps in Value and Service
This is especially true if you are working alone and don’t have a massive staff of people or deep pockets of a large multinational corporation – you can help each other do more for more people by sharing skills, processes, and systems.
For example, if you’re a website designer who can only serve ten clients at a time, why not partner up with another website designer and agree to share overflow clients.
You can set up an outsourcing agreement, an affiliate agreement, or some other revenue-sharing agreement so that you can each do parts of the project that you’re best at. If one of you is better at software and one of you is better at content development, you can work together to make everything better.
Reach New Audiences
When you share resources, you can both build your audience bigger and better. For example, there is no reason you can’t share your competitor’s offers between your offers to your email list. This will work best if you both have an affiliate program to profit from the recommendation.
For example, share your product calendar for the year with your competitors so that you can promote each other. Stagger your offers so that none of you make offers at the same time that directly compete or just offer to guest blog or create a guest newsletter article that the competition can share.
Promote Good Will
When the audience notices you working together, it will make them feel good about your business. When the industry gets together to do good in a community, that also increases goodwill from the audience. There is no reason not to get along when you realize there is plenty of customers to go around.
If you really want to succeed in an online business, stop thinking of the competition as something you have to eliminate to succeed. Find honest competitors to work with, and you’ll both grow your business healthy while also giving your audience more choice. More choice means more satisfaction. After all, it’ll feel good to join forces to educate your joint audience or to raise money for a charitable cause because you’ll be giving your audience what they want and need.
