One of the questions I get often is, “How do I deal with competition.” Most people want to know how they can prevent competition or what steps they can take to overcome competition successfully.

These days, on the Internet, there are two sides of a coin.

It is so easy for a person to get into a market because it is simple to start a business in just about any niche.

There are low barriers to entry to most businesses, so competition is rampant. You may realize an opportunity and start making good money.

The chances are high someone else will see your success and try to mimic it.

So how do you deal with this? How do you protect yourself from copycats?

It’s easy to have competitors.

In fact the more money you make the more competitors you will have.

You have to think faster than people can copy you, and you must develop what I call hidden advantages to dominate your niche.

Copycat “syndrome” as I like to call it is common.

You may be in a good niche, and some guy sees you are making good money, so he decides to copy your ideas. He comes up with a new product to compete with you.

People want to prevent this, but you can’t prevent competitors.

You will always have competitors regardless of what you do. The more money you make the more competitors you’ll have. It’s just the way things work.

You can however, overcome any threats associated with competition. How?

Innovate faster than they others can copy your material. Develop hidden advantages.

That’s the key to overcoming competition.

If you want to dominate your niche, you must have some hidden advantages that are hard to copy. Your competitors should not even know you have these advantages.

They may copy what you are doing, but they won’t be able to copy your hidden advantages.

Many competitors will then fail because they are confused about what you are doing. Why? They won’t understand the reasons behind what you are doing. They won’t realize you have hidden advantages.

How can you make hidden advantages work for you? Let me give you some examples.

Let’s take the internet guru business. I have many competitors, many new people coming in trying to be marketing gurus.

My secret? I’m not an internet guru. My specialty is website conversion. I teach people how to convert more visitors into paying customers. I niche. I don’t claim to be the number one “internet marketing” guru. But I am the world’s number one website conversion expert. That is a hidden expertise, a hidden advantage.

I was there first, found this niche first, so that gives me an advantage. When people come into my niche, when they want to compete, they are only reminding people of my success and experience.

People see my name everywhere that is a hidden advantage.

High name investors and entrepreneurs also endorse me. That is a hidden advantage. I have testimonials from high people in high places. Best-selling authors and multi-millionaires. That is a difficult hidden advantage to duplicate.

I give out free CD’s, I combine online and off-line marketing techniques. These hidden techniques are hard to copy. Competitors won’t see this, they won’t know whether these techniques are working or not. I do things to confuse my competitors. This is also a hidden advantage.

My personality is also an advantage, a hidden advantage. My personality is impossible to duplicate. My experience and my ten years of experience in marketing aren’t easy to copy.

Most newbies also don’t have all the products I do. I have much more than an e-book for example. By the end of the year I’ll also have 4 published books, and other offers worth $3,000 and more. I am established, and it is hard to compete with this.

My question is this… What are your hidden advantages? If you don’t have hidden advantages you better come up with one or two very quickly. There must be something you have, something you posses, something difficult for your competitors to duplicate.

Once you have those hidden advantages, you don’t have to worry about people coming into your niche and competing.

They say, “He is so established, so well-known I can’t compete.” So they move on. That is the barrier you want to create to discourage them. You want to make it difficult for them to complete.

Sit down and write down what your hidden advantages are, then work on building them. That is what you can do to crush your competition and discourage people from competing against you.