Reverse Engineer Part 2: Interviewing my target

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Last week I showed you how I reverse engineer my competition in 10 minutes.

Today, Nathan Wright of Theme of The Crop joins the Matt Report podcast to tell us how accurate my findings were. We’ll also explore what he’s doing to improve on the weak points I had identified in this analysis of his digital business.

So how did Nate react to my “take down” of his website? Let’s find out!

The Painter’s House is Never Painted

When I created this analysis of Nate’s business, I wanted to explore this as an exercise of the discovery process. It isn’t just about finding weak points in your competitor’s marketing plan, but a method for researching a market for your own unique marketing initiatives.

I want you to walk away with a new found respect for just how many moving parts there are to make the digital marketing wheel spin.

• Content marketing


• Call to actions


• Proper messaging


• Design


• Site speed


• SEO


• Link building


• Branding & awareness


• Social channels

These are the core concepts Nate and I chat about in this episode. Recently I wrote about the Plight of the Cobbler, which depicts entrepreneurs as tinkerers consumed by the process and the tools we use. We could spend hours or days obsessing over finite details that barely move the needle of our business. Why? Simply because we enjoy it — which is okay — but doesn’t allow us to achieve scale and clarity in our business.

There’s nothing wrong with being The Cobbler and I’ll argue it’s the most important phase we go though. The problem is, The Cobbler will immediately try to consume all of the areas I outlined above as her immediate task list. “I must tackle all of this!” she screams. Not so.

It is to become refined and great in a few of these areas and then scale to the next level. As we’ll learn from Nate, he’s currently working on a new design and messaging for his website. He’s not actively trying to approach all of this as one big problem and that’s smart.

Interview with Nate Wright

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Resource Mentioned: Yoast eCommerce Tracking plugin

What about you? What area are you struggling with and what are you doing to address it?