Unless we are incredibly lucky, none of us sell in isolation. Almost every niche market has some degree of competition and it doesn't pay to be complacent. It's important to monitor our competitor's activities.
Here are a few methods that I use personally to keep up to date with what my competitors are doing..
Google Alerts - Set up an alert for your competitor's brand names, product names and websites. This is especially useful for spotting press releases, newly posted articles, forum activity, blog posts and other announcements.
Ezines - Subscribing to your competitor's ezines and newsletters offers an excellent way of keeping up with their marketing activities. They often announce new initiatives to their subscribers before going public.
Products - Purchasing a competitor's product can give you a much better view of their sales and marketing processes. You can see at first hand how effecient they are at delivering on their promises and you can analyse the quality of their products and customer service. You'll also get those customer only announcements and offers.
Affiliates - There's probably no better way of getting access to a competitor's marketing and promotional approach than to become their affiliate. You'll get to see all the creatives that they give their affiliates including banners, text adverts and ezine adverts.
Links - Search engine rankings are, to a large extent, driven by a combination of the number and quality of incoming links. Not only is it a good idea to see who is supporting your competitors, it's also helps to identify where you too could get links to your own sites.
Social Networks - Social marketing is rapidly growing in popularity. Consumers are driving conversations about what they purchase, from whom they make those purchases and what they think about the products and services that they buy. Not only should you be paying attention to what they are saying about you and your products, you can also monitor what is being said about your competitors.
Twitter - Probably the fastest growing network online right now and a great place to see who's talking about your niche market and what's being said. If you're not participating in Twitter, you should be.
BackType - A relatively new site that aggregates the comments from blogs you wish to follow. When you think about it, blog posts are only "one way" comminication. However, blog comments can take on a life of their own and all that interaction can become a mine of useful information. Especially when you monitor the comments on your competitor's blogs.
Bookmarks - You can bookmark your competitor's sites and you can see how popular those sites are on sites such as Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Stubleupon and many more similar social bookmarking sites. I'd suggest sticking with the most popular social bookmarking sites in your niche, it can become very time consuming.
Friendfeed - Another aggregator that allows you to stream feeds from several sources. Subscribing to your competitor's feeds with Friendfeed and paying attention to the content will save you a lot of time.
Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list, please add your own tips and suggestions in the comments section below.
How do you monitor your competitors?
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