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Content Generation Idea: Industry and Competitor Newsletters



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Content Generation Idea: Industry and Competitor Newsletters

Keep your friends close - but keep your enemies closer!

If you're in a fairly big and widely dominated niche, and you want to keep a finger on the pulse of that niche, one of the best ways to do that is to get close to your competitors, your rivals. By close I mean by following them on their social media accounts and also by subscribing to their email newsletters. By doing that, you can get to see what sorts of things they're sending to their subscribers and clients. Since most of their subscribers will be made up of people that like their brand, products or services and their existing clients and customers too.

And you can gleam a lot of content ideas from your competitors newsletters! A lot! Content Generation Idea: Industry and Competitor Newsletters So what you'll want to do is subscribe to most of those major league leaders in your niche. Just go to their website and most times you'll get a popup asking you to subscribe to their newsletter. So do so. You'll probably have to confirm your subscription by confirming the first email they send you. But from here on, you'll always receive their email newsletters.

Now just wait for them to arrive. When they do open and read them. These email newsletters will often be packed full of tons of great ideas for content and posts. Just by the things they are covering and touching on in those emails. These news stories, when they arrive, will often be packed full of many topics you can cover since they usually send condensed versions of their own latest posts and events.

And that's basically how you use your competitors newsletters to come up with content generation ideas!

But I just want to mention something else here about doing this. And that's you should try not to subscribe with an email address that gives you away who you are. Some competitors scrutinize their email newsletter subscribers as they know that some of them might well be their competitors snooping on them.

And some will even remove them from their list because they know that they are only subscribed to see what they are up to and talking about. You can sort of think of this as International espionage. As you're a spy or an informant working for the enemy but really working for yourself or the government.

So if possible, don't subscribe with your company email. Instead just use a Gmail account or something else (even your wife's personal email address) and then set up a label and have them forwarded to your main email address. That way they wont ever know that you're subscribed to it and poaching them for ideas! Content Generation Idea: Industry and Competitor Newsletters

Have you ever or do you use this method for content generation ideas?

Do you scrutinize your email subscribers to see if you have competitors subscribed to them?

If so and you find you do, do you remove them from your list or do you not mind?

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DarthHazard
It's never a bad idea to get inspiration from your competitors. A lot of big companies actually do it. Think about Snapchat's Stories feature. How many other social media sites have taken that idea and incorporated that into their sites. Facebook and Skype are the best examples. But like you said, it is important that you don't copy their exact side, try to just get some inspiration and not copy that idea like for like onto your site.



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Corzhens
In one similar thread, I had posted about a noontime tv showhost who spied on the competitor’s show. It’s like picking the brains of your
enemies, he said in an interview. With the newsletter of your competitor,
that’s a nice idea of knowing what they are up to. Of course, they are not your
enemies, just plain competitors whom you can learn from. And their newsletter
is one way of gathering data from there. That would surely give you some ideas
on what’s going on in the field you are in.



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jaymish3
I think this is an excellent way to get a 'heads up' on the competition. You definitely can generate some ideas from their content, but you need to be sure not to copy their work. That would defeat the purpose of why you're in business.The main reason we are in business is to be as creative as possible. If you copy someone else's work you do yourself no favors. I would rather you have your own ideas and subscribe to their newsletter, to see what they are doing, for improvement purposes.



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