Friday, June 1, 2012

Track Your Competition If You're an Internet Marketer

By Patty MacDonald


The notion of observing everything your competitors do may seem a little odd. Granted, you probably are not going to take note of every website they visit. Still, it's no more than common sense to be familiar with how they are doing business in your niche. If you want to succeed in any kind of business, you have to show people that you are superior to your competition. If you actually are giving better value than your competitors, this becomes easy. Once you are very familiar with your competitors, you can form a plan to do better than them. Here are some ways that you can keep track of your competition.

Perhaps the easiest tool you have at your disposal is Google Alerts. Set up a Google Alert for each person or company that you want to track. You can tailor Google Alerts to deliver at specific times. Google Alerts will send you all newsworthy information on your chosen subject each hour, each day, or even each month. Plus, you can tell Google Alerts to send you the information in your email or you can choose a feed reader to receive the info. Google Alerts is totally free. You've probably already used it to internet stalk your favorite celebrity.

A program called BoardTracker will let you know what sort of conversations are going on in the forums these days. This software will look for posts about your competitors. The software is preprogrammed with over thirty thousand forums so any posts that are relevant to your competitors will get flagged and you'll be told about it in your email box. You can select between entire threads or you can just look for certain posts. The software will even let you track your own actions. This is crucial if you want to maintain a good image.

Another resource that can help you dig up useful data on your competition is CI Radar. This is equally good for locating targeted prospects for what you're selling. For Internet Marketers who want to do business to business selling, this is a great tool. You can learn what companies are doing, what they need to improve and what people are saying about them. This is something that can give you detailed information on your competition If you don't feel comfortable digging up facts about others, this tool is something that should put you at ease.

Learning about your competition can be accomplished in a variety of ways. You can often find out quite a bit by simply looking them up in a search engine. If you want more in depth information, however, there are other tools that you can use. You want to be as well informed as possible, but you want to do it efficiently, so it doesn't take all your time. You want to leave yourself some time to build your own business. On the other hand, knowing what your competitors are doing has to be considered when you operate your own business. You are in a much better position when you know all about them!




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