COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND WEB SITE MONITORING

Competitive intelligence is the art of staying one step ahead of your competition by gathering information about their operations. It's absolutely critical that you have an up-to-date, accurate picture of who your closest competitors are and what they're doing. You need to legally and ethically carry out strategic research on your competitors that will help you to succeed.

If you want exposure and traffic on the internet, then the whole idea is to get noticed! you can't get noticed if you are trying to hide from your competition! So rather than burying your head in the sand and hoping that they don't notice you, it makes more sense to proactively research them.

By locating your competition and carefully researching their businesses, you will find yourself in a position to...

• Discover your competitor's angle-- their unique selling proposition--and compare it to your own. Are you both using the same angle? Can you change your position to make your offer more attractive to potential customers?

• Find niche markets whose needs are not being met. You may discover that your competitor's are neglecting a portion of your target market... allowing you to use this information to start capturing the potential sales that are being ignored!

• Avoid being caught off guard and left obsolete By staying alert, you'll know if your competitor is developing a new product or service that could damage your sales... and take immediate action to improve your position.

Your competitive intelligence strategy should include...

1) Internet Monitoring For Mentions Of Your Name

There are both free and paid services that will monitor newsgroups, discussion boards, web sites, search engines, etc for mentions of your name, your business, your URL, or whatever keywords you want?

This is extremely powerful information that you can use to give yourself a competitive edge! Here's how...

1. Anytime a competitor tries to "slander your name" in a newsgroup or public forum, or even compares your products/services unfairly, you can be there within hours to set the record straight and ensure that your reputation is not damaged.

2. Bad news travels ten times faster than good news! One dissatisfied customer will tell ten other people, while one satisfied customer may tell one or none. All it takes is for a few postings of dissatisfied customers to lose a lot of business.

   Can you imagine how powerful it will be when you are right there to publicly take care of any customer service problems and respond to dissatisfied customers who criticise ore complain about your product or company?

3. Monitoring services can make promoting your business through newsgroups much less time-intensive. By automatically looking for keywords and notifying you when they appear, these services allow you to easily take advantage of posting opportunities without wasting hours and hours each day sifting through individual newsgroups and discussion boards.

   Obviously for this to work, you will need to use very specific keywords and phrases, or you will receive too many results each day to make it worth your time.

Free Monitoring Services:

• Tracer-lock
• SpyOnIt.com

Paid Monitoring Services:

• eWatch
• Mark-watch

2) Find Out What People Think Of Your Product Or Service By Posing As A "Regular Customer"

A good way to get an honest opinion about your product or service is by posing as a regular consumer in newsgroups, discussion boards, chat rooms, etc...and just asking!

Choose an obscure name, keep a low profile, and when appropriate, ask people such questions as...

"Do you know of any product or service that could help me with this problem?"
"Have you tried this product?"
"What did you think of it?"

...Be attentive to the answers you receive! (warning: do not try to sell people your product or service. Do this and you will blow your cover and hurt your reputation!)

4) Visit Consumer Review Sites

People visit consumer review sites to rant and rave about products they love... and products they hate! This makes them great places to visit to find out what people are saying about you and your competition. You can use this critical information to improve your customer service, your "angle", your web site, or your product or service!

Great sites to visit for this information include:

Consumer Review.com
Consumer Search.com

5) Remove Your Competitor's Mailing Addresses From Your Customer And Subscriber Lists

If you are keeping tabs on your competitors, then you can be sure that they are keeping tabs on you! Stay one step ahead of them by collecting their names and e-mail addresses, and then removing this information from your e-mail databases.

You'll be surprised by the number of your competitors that are signed up to receive your promotional e-mails, newsletters, updates etc.! By taking them off your mailing list, you'll make it much harder for them to keep track of what you're doing.

6) Know What Country Your Customers Are From

As you begin to do more and more business internationally, it is useful to know who you are doing business with and what country they are from. Global domains such as .com, .org, .biz, and .org are not connected with any one country. However, there are 200+ countries that accept registrations with their own customised extention.

You may feel comfortable doing business with someone with a .ca address (Canada), a .us address (United States), or a .uk address (United Kingdom), but you may be a bit more cautious doing business with a .ukr (Ukraine) address.

Why? Because you may not know the legal implications. Are you protected if you don't get the product you ordered? If you were to set up a joint-venture, what kind of contract do you need to protect yourself? What happens if there are legal problems?

It is not a question about whether people in a particular country is honest or not, you need to be aware of whom you are doing business with so that you can protect yourself.

There are other things you can do, apart from those mentioned above, in gathering information about your competitors and staying one step ahead of them, including...

• Find Out Exactly Who You Competition Is And Where They Are Located.
  Use "Who Is Inquiries" to collect contact information of your competitors.
  

  "People Finders" such as:
  
  World Yellow Pages.com
  Yahoo People Search
  World Pages.com

• Know Who Is Linking To Both You and Your Competition
  Finding out exactly which sites are linking to your competition is very easy to do with two great free resources

  Visit Linkpopularity.com, type in your URL, and find out (1) how many sites are currently linked to yours in Alta Vista, Info-Seek, and HotBot, and (2) exactly which sites they are.

  Alexa: Alexa is a free web navigation service that works with your browser to provide you with essential information about each web site you visit... each company you consider making a purchase from... and all of your competitors! Download your copy by visiting Alexa.com This is a great tool!

• Measure Your Site's Performance Against Your Competition's
  Netmechanic's Toolbox, can help you locate potential problems with your web site and repair them quickly (i.e browser compatibility, HTML repair, link checker, load time, etc...). You can use Netmechanic's Free Toolbox for a competitive search. Go to
  Net Mechanic.com and type in your URL.

• Know Exactly How Your Web Site Ranks In The Search Engines In Relation To Your Competition'sAs mentioned in section on Search Engine Strategies,Web Position Gold software generates reports that will show you exactly where your web site ranks in each search engine under specific keywords, keyword combinations, and search phrases, so you can make improvements, correct problems, and increase your web site's traffic.

  However, to take this one step further, Web Position Gold will also allow you to monitor your competition's ranking in the search engines.. so you'll always know exactly where they rank in relation to you! This is extremely important because you need to know when your competition has outranked you so that you can take corrective action

  This is where Web Position Gold is a huge timesaver. It automatically looks after a chore that would otherwise be a full-time job. If one of your web pages has been gradually slipping down the rankings, you can quickly identify the problem and correct it.

For a free initial consultation on all aspects of competitive intelligence and staying ahead of your competitors contact now