Has your website been struggling to make sales? Wondering what your competition is doing better than you are? Trying to figure out what your next online move will be?

I personally feel the best way to leap ahead of one’s competition is to first figure out what your competition is doing better than you are. How are they marketing their website more effectively? Where are their customers coming from? Who is your competition targeting demographic ways? If you don’t know what your competition is up to or who they are marketing to that may be a different demographic than you are, you are most likely missing out on sales.

I am going to assume you have an idea of who your competitions are. If you do not know who you are competing against, I would first suggest starting with that before you read any further.

• Tip #1 – Find Everywhere Your Competition is Online. Are their websites your competition has a link back to their website where you do not have one? A great tool to find all the websites your competition is on is Yahoo Search Explorer. This site allows you to enter a URL and find all websites that URL is on. Searching through the results may take some time if Yahoo Search Explorer returns a large number of results, but it’s worth taking the time to look over them. Once you have a list of website you feel you should be on as well, either contact the website owner and see if they will place a link on their site to your business website or submit your website listing if find that website has a way to submit your URL to them (most the time these are online directories that may target a certain demographics).
• Tip #2 – Are they using social networking? Is your competition on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. If so, see who they are friends with and what they are talking about on these networks. Most businesses do not put their profiles private, so you can search their social networking profiles and discover what they’re up too as well as how they are connecting with current and new customers. If your competition isn’t using social networking to help attract new customers, this would be a great way for you to jump ahead of them in this area, allowing you to connect to hundreds to millions of people who are currently using social networking websites. If they are using social networking website, study what they are doing and figure out a way to do it better. Maybe it’s offering 10% off a purchase if they mention they follow you on Twitter while your competition is only offering 5% off.
• Tip #3 – Discover who your competition visitors are. This will not work for every one of your competition websites, but you may find that one or two of them use a service by Quantcast. Quantcast allows websites owners to keep track of their website statistics. You won’t be able to see all the data collected by Quantcast about your competition website, but you can find some valuable information, such as male/female ratio of visitors, age range, and income level. All things that you can use to develop a more effective marketing campaign and website.

It is important in today’s market to know who your competition is and how they are using the internet to make sales. Knowing what your competition is up to will give you an advantage allowing you to use that knowledge to make changes to your website and marketing campaign to leap ahead of them.