Did you ever have this conversation with your Mom? “I don’t care what so and so is doing, you just need to keep your nose in your own business and not worry about anyone else!” Well I don’t know about you, but this just used to infuriate me.
Well, good news, success in the world of internet marketing…can be found in…yep you guessed it…putting your nose in other people’s business! The internet has made it easy to find out what your competitors are doing, what people are buying and all kinds of other trends and information that you can use to drive more traffic to your site and grow you profits.
So let’s be nosey! Here are 5 easy ways to get your snooping started.
1) Google It!
This may seem like a “duh” but you would be surprised at how many people never think to do this…go to google and type in the keyword/s that you think describe your market. The important thing to note is how many paid links show up.
Paid links are those little ads that pop up on the right hand side of the google search page. Sometimes they also show up at the very top of the search page in a soft yellow box.
Count them (note you may have to go through several search pages to get a complete count). Are there just a few or are there too many to count?
This is a shorthand way to learn how hot your market and keywords are. If there’s just a few, that may mean demand is low. If there are pages and pages, that means lot’s of competition.
2) Use the magic “Page” icon on your IE browser!
When you visit a site…let’s say a competitors site, you can snoop and find out what key words they are using. How…just go the to the page icon on the right hand side of your IE toolbar. Click on it to see the drop down menu.
Three fourths of the way down you will see “View Source”. Click on this and a new window will come up that will show a lot of code like info.
Look for the words <meta name=”keyword” content= and voila…you will see the keywords that your competitor is using. It will look something like this:
<meta name=”keyword” content=”referrals, referral marketing, business referrals, referral selling, business network referrals”>
Don’t see anything like this…it may mean that they have not added this SEO function to their site yet…and that’s interesting too.
3) Want to know how many links your competitor has?
Google loves sites with lot’s of inbound links…so if you want to find out how many and who is linking to your competitor’s website…Google is happy to give you a hand.
Simply go to Google and type in link: and then the URL.
For example link:www.ediets.com returns 200 links.
This tells you two things…the more links the higher the google rating and the amount of credibility that your competitors site is given by others. Also, Check out the links to see if there is anyone who might be a good link partner for you!
4) Want to know what people are buying?
Two quick ways to get a snapshot:
First visit eBay at http://pulse.ebay.com. This eBay site will provide you with daily information on things like that days popular searches, largest stores, most watched items etc. What’s really great is that you can drill down on every single category and get this information!
Amazon is also another great place to get a quick snap shot of what people are buying and their opinion. The key is to make sure that you sign in as a new visitor otherwise everything will be served up to you based on your previous buying patterns.
Just go to the sign in page for new visitors, don’t fill in the information, just click on Amazon home. You will now see information that is based on raw numbers instead of your past buying preferences!
5) Want to know what keywords people are using for online shopping?
Visit www.shopping.com/top_searches. This site is from Shopping.com, one of the largest shopping and customer review networks online (and is owned by eBay).
When you go to the top searches page, you will be able to click on hundreds of categories. The index will deliver the top 100 keywords used to search for an item. It is updated every two weeks and contains a wealth of information for keywords!
So remember, when it comes to Internet Marketing, don’t listen to what Mom used to tell you!Happy Snooping!
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