30 Day Challenge: Day 3, Competitive Analysis

My journey through the 30 Day Challenge continues. I understand that a few of my AfroSpear colleagues may be joining me on the 30DC journey. I hope that they will also share their thoughts as they engage in the process.

Anyhow, Day 3 is all about analyzing our competition. The first two days helped me to determine the keywords that I plan to use in building an online business. Today, Guru Bob showed us that it is one thing to find a phrase that has the right number of searches and the right amount of traffic ... it's something else entirely to determine if someone has already staked their claim on that phrase, making it extremely difficult for us to compete.

There are two videos that run about 40 minutes in Lesson 3:

1. SEO COMPETITION ANALYSIS - Guru Bob walks us through Market Samurai to map out the competitive landscape in your niche. I had two keyword phrases entering into this analysis. At the end of the analysis I settled on the one phrase that I think I have a good chance to compete with other webpages that are currently in Google's Top 10. Over the next 27 days I will find out if my decision was a good one or not.


2. TRADITIONAL COMPETITION ANALYSIS - Ed Dale uses the second video to show us how to get the same data provided by Market Samurai using a free plugin for our browser. Unfortunately, this plugin is only useful for folks using Firefox or Flock operating systems. I'm old school. I still use Internet Explorer. So, this video didn't help me as much.

Today's lesson again showed me the power of Market Samurai. I still have 38 days left on my trial period with that software. I haven't seen the cost to upgrade it yet. Are any of you using the paid version of Market Samurai? If so, what are your thoughts.