Welcome to the latest edition of Empire of One.

Today's edition is about how to learn what sells by auditing three competing product pages.

Picture three products in the same small niche, lined up on one marketplace page. One sells a handful a month. One sells steadily. One sells a lot. You'd expect the best seller to be dramatically better. When you open all three side by side, the gap is smaller than that.

Most of it sits on the page itself.

Inside this issue:

The Real Problem

Most beginners pick a topic, build the product, and only then look at what else is for sale. By that point the cover is done, the title is chosen, and the description is written. Changing any of it feels like starting over.

Looking at competitors first reverses the order. Three product pages in one niche contain the title style, the cover look, the description tone, the review comments, and the price range buyers already accept. That's five clues per page, and you can read all of them in one sitting.

The weak pages teach as much as the strong ones. They show you what to avoid.

Why "Be Better" Is Too Vague to Act On

The usual advice is to make something better than the competition. It sounds right and gives you nothing to do on Monday morning.

Better at what? Title, cover, description, interior, or price? Without a list, you end up polishing the part you enjoy, which is usually the content. Buyers see the page first, and a strong interior behind a weak page never gets opened.

Weak pages tend to share a few habits. A dark, generic cover on a topic that's meant to feel hopeful. A title that names the topic and promises nothing. A description that reads as if a chatbot wrote it and nobody edited it. A claim like "number one" with no credential behind it. And a price set without a glance at the other two pages.

Score Three Pages Before You Build One

Open three products in the niche you're considering. Pick one that sells a little, one that sells steadily, and one that seems to sell a lot. Review counts or the number of buyers listed on the page can help you guess which is which.

Give each page a score from 1 to 5 on five parts: title and subtitle, cover, description, reviews, and price. A 5 means a buyer would feel sure about clicking. A 1 means they'd hesitate.

Now compare. The best seller rarely scores 5 on everything. It usually wins on one or two parts, and those are the parts buyers in that niche care about most.

Find the Lowest Score and Build Around It

Look at the lowest score on the weakest page, then the highest score on the strongest page. The gap between those two tells you where a new product can win.

Maybe every cover in your niche is dark and heavy, and a bright, clear one stands out. Maybe every description lists features and none describes how the reader will feel afterward. Pick one gap and make it the obvious strength of your product page.

Write it as one sentence: "My page wins on ___." Then build the product to match.

The Digital Leverage

AI can do the slow part of this audit. Paste the title, subtitle, and description of each page into a chat and ask it to point out every claim that has no proof behind it. Ask it to rewrite each description in plain words, so you can see what's actually being promised.

Then ask for a table of the five parts across all three pages, with your scores filled in. The judgment stays with you, and the copying and formatting go to the chatbot.

That turns a long afternoon of browser tabs into about twenty minutes, and you finish with a one-sentence reason your product deserves to exist.