Competitive Intelligence

When it comes to success online, there are three primary things you have to master. I like to call them the three T's:

1. Target Audience

You have to learn how your customers think. Find out what they like, where they hang out, visit their forums, speak their language and get into their skin.

Research complementing products they buy, services they use, their average income, lifestyle and shopping habits.

2. The Competition

Your competitors have been doing this longer than you have. They spent gazllions of dollars and countless hours researching the market, testing different approaches and coming up with winning offers.

Save time and avoid early failure, by studying from your competition.

3. Testing

If you've been doing Internet Marketing for quite some time, you're probably sick and tired of everyone telling you how important it is to Test - Test - Test.

Guess what? Testing is by far the most important skill you have to master, to achieve online success. And you have to test -everything-. Collect every single piece of data you can and then experiment with different pricing, landing pages, creatives, banners, greetings messages, automated emails etc. Remember the golden rule - anything that gets measured will improve over time.

--

As part of this post, I'd like to focus on Competitive Intelligence.

In short, competitive intelligence is about finding out what's working for your competitors and copying their tactics, then testing and continually improving.

If for some reason you feel copying from your competition is wrong, this business is not for you.

I recently had a chance to meet with the good people of HitWise.

HitWise is the industry leader when it comes to competitive intelligence. They have more Fortune 500 customers than I could mention. Every single online brand name is relying on HitWise and they sure know their stuff.

HitWise is in the business of analyzing Internet Usage data across multiple verticals, to produce up-to-date ranking reports covering PPC, Organic, Clickstreams, Search terms, Demographics and PRIZM analysis.

Before you get too excited... a typical HitWise subscription starts at $40,000 annually.

We purchased a few of these reports in the past and they are definitely worth their weight in gold.



If you don't have an extra $40,000 to spend, there are other ways you can research competition on your own -

Competitor's Traffic

Alexa.com (comparing several sites in the same niche)
Compete.com (estimated pageviews and unique visitors)

Organic Search Engine Rankings

Google.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com - query all major search engines for your target keywords and write down the top 10 organic listings

Or use your favorite Keyword Tracker that shows rankings over time (DP, EarnersForum or SPI).

PPC - Ad Creatives, Bid prices and Landing pages

KeyCompete.com
SpyFu.com
GCDetective.com
KeywordSpy.com

Short Tail

Find out which keywords are driving the most revenues to your competition

Compete.com Search Analytics (Beta)
KeywordDiscovery.com
HitWise.com

Long Tail

Find your niche's long tail (the sum of revenues driven by longtail is often greater than the sum of revenues driven by the short tail)

Wordze.com
WordTracker.com
NicheBot.com
KeywordElite.com

The Offer

Study competitor landing pages and related affiliate marketing offers, to understand which offers convert best with your target audience

GCDetective.com (Research competitor's top converting landing pages)
AzoogleAds.com, NeverBlueAds.com, ShareASale.com (signup as an affiliate, then research the top offers for your niche that have been around for more than 90 days and find out why they convert so well)

--

If all of this seems like too much work, Software Projects has a service where for a small fee, we will do all the heavy lifting for you, go through all these tools and provide you with a detailed 10 page report telling you exactly what you should focus on. For more information, visit our competitive intelligence product page.