Thousands of people will start an online business in 2018. They all have the potential to become successful and profitable.

However, only a small fraction of these people will make it. Why? The ones that succeed establish an unfair advantage early on and continue to widen the gap between their businesses and the competition.

What is an unfair advantage? An unfair advantage is something that your competitors can’t easily copy or buy.

Instead of thinking about your business in terms of doubling it or tripling your growth, you need to start thinking about how you can 10x your business (grow it exponentially).

To help you get started, here are 7 things you can do right now to start establishing an unfair advantage over the competition.

1. Do What the Competition ISN’T Doing

Instead of looking at the competition and simply copying what they are doing, change that. Instead ask yourself how you can meet the gap in the market where you feel that consumers are not being served.

2. Use Insider Information

Helping you to establish an unfair advantage is why I am such a big cheerleader of building your business based on your passions and existing skills rather than trying to go into an area where you have no experience.

Consider this: If you’ve worked as a personal trainer for 15 years, you already know a ton about fitness products, nutrition, and what your clients worry about when it comes to improving their health.

Therefore, you already have insider information in this field that a random person trying to start an online fitness business does not.

3. Improve Your SEO Ranking

Getting to the top of the search engines is extremely important for establishing your unfair advantage. Instead of trying to out rank huge sites like Amazon, the way you can do this is by ranking your website for long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are longer search terms that your customers are searching for but you also have a higher chance of ranking for because the competition isn’t as fierce.

To establish your SEO rankings, publish fresh content that is optimized for these keywords to your website regularly. If you can publish every day, that would be even better. Make sure that you also address any SEO issues on your site by performing an SEO audit on a regular basis.

4. Tap Into Your Connections

Given your experience, you have access to people in your industry that others do not. You can use these connections to provide value to your customers.

For example, you can invite people who you know to help you teach live classes, to simply review your marketing materials or to provide you with business advice when you need it.

Who do you know in your industry that others might not?

5. Write Your Story

Everyone’s story is different. If you’re smart, you’ll use your story to your advantage in your business to help build a stronger connection with your audience. This is something that the big businesses won’t be able to do because they’ve already grown too large to be able to sill connect with the little guy.

Of course, you shouldn’t make up a story just to say that you have one. If you are unsure how to tell your story in a way that sounds compelling, have a friend help you brainstorm some interesting aspects about your story that will help bring your business to life.

6. Rethink How You Work

As I mentioned at the start of this post, not everyone that starts an online business this year will make it. Another reason why they won’t is because they never learn how to work smarter not harder.

When it comes to starting an online business, there’s an insane amount of work to do. In addition, you’ll have to keep at it even when you’re not making any money.

In order for you to get ahead, you’re going to have to create an unfair advantage by changing the way that you work. That means that you step up when you need to but you also learn how to pass the torch to someone else.

Write down three things right now that you could outsource to someone else. Then make a list of the top income grossing tasks that you should be spending more of your time on and the tasks that you still have to do yourself because your budget doesn’t allow for them to be outsourced yet. Repeat this exercise every week until all of the small stuff is out of your hands.

7. Reward Customers for Referring Others

If you already have customers for your business or know someone who can find you customers, start a referral program like yesterday. Referrals are like cheerleaders for your business and they’ll only promote your business as the best. A referral also immediately eliminates the competition in the eyes of your potential customer because the customer trusts the person who referred them to your business.

These referrals alone have the potential to help you 10x your business as your referrals refer their friends to your business. You can also maximize the impact of referrals by creating a system that rewards customers for referring multiple people.

The Bottom Line

Many online business owners struggle with identifying an unfair advantage. The key thing that you need to understand is that there is room for you too as long as you stay committed to your online business.

If you liked this article, I would like to invite you to leave your comments below. Please share some details about the online business that you’re currently building and where you want it to go in 2018 and beyond.