Competitor Intelligence – Use Cutting-Edge Technology To Focus Your Internet Marketing Campaigns

Have you ever gotten the urge to find out what your competition was doing! You’ve probably gotten there too late, huh? It’s never fun if the party’s already over and you weren’t invited!

You may, or may not know the story of William Tell. As a Swiss national, I’m proud of my courageous forefathers. Here it is as told in Wikipedia:

William Tell from Bürglen was known as an expert marksman with the crossbow. At the time, the Habsburg emperors were seeking to dominate Uri. Hermann Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf raised a pole in the village’s central square with his hat on top and demanded that all the local townsfolk bow before it. As Tell passed by without bowing, he was arrested. He received the punishment of being forced to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter, or else both would be executed.

Tell had been promised freedom if he shot the apple. On November 18, 1307, Tell split the fruit with a single bolt from his crossbow, without mishap. When Gessler queried him about the purpose of the second bolt in his quiver, Tell answered… read more here

Back to our topic!

As diverse as the crosshairs in the picture are, so diverse are the tools you must use to become a success at understanding and “picking off” your competition on the first, or if needed as Tell intended, the second try. Competition goes back to way before 1307, and with the event of the Internet, we’ll surely see it heat up as more players become expert marksmen.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to a tool that I have in my tool belt that is compact, but feisty. It lays low until your competition decides to make a move! To be honest, I even use it on my own critical pages so I know immediately when a change is made on an optimized page. URLy Warning is a great little “gotta have”. Although it is free, there is a suggested donation of $29.95. This is truly a small price to pay for a utility that will keep tabs on your competitors web content. Remember, you don’t have to pay it an hourly wage. Not even vacation or sick pay!

Only URLy Warning has all these great features:

• Pops up and/or plays a sound when a page changes.
• Shows what’s been added or deleted since the last time you checked the page.
• Create alerts for when specific words and phrases appear on a page.
• Limit alerts to a subset of the page, or to a specific number of changes.
• Watch password protected sites.
• Receive an email or page when a change occurs.
• No Ads. No Spyware.
• And it’s really easy to use, too!

I’ll bet you’re still not convinced! How about this:

Here’s some things you can do with URLy Warning:

• Gather business intelligence.
• Monitor Craig’s List
• Watch your competitors Web sites.
• Monitor news topics.
• Monitor Google Queries.
• Track Usenet postings for keywords.
• Get alerted to new job postings.
• Check auction sites for hard-to-find items.
• Know when software updates are released.
• Track changes on your corporate intranet.
• Get instant updates on overnight shipping or airplane flights.
• And much, much more.

As my nephews would say: “cool, huh?” Here’s the deal: once you’ve identified your real competition, you’ve got to know what your competition is doing. The sooner the better! Then, like I do with my partner, on critical pages of your own website, if more than one person has editor rights to it, make sure that you are aware of what’s happening there too!

If you really do decide to use the tool, please pay the $29.95 to the guys that took the time to write the code. He’ll thank you for it, and I will too. Honestly, I don’t make anything off of it, but I’ve fully embraced the freeware / shareware concept since John McAfee brought out ViruScan…that’s another story though!

This brings me to my conclusion and a final story. Know your competition, know their moves, react quickly if you need that second bolt!

After my wife and I adopted our 8, 9, and 10 year old daughters from Russia, Tina homeschooled the girls. Probably in the first few weeks, Tina was writing words on the whiteboard. Suddenly, back turned, without warning, Tina told one of the girls (who stood up and was goofing off) to sit down and pay attention! For months, the girls were convinced that Mom had eyes on the back of her head. In reality, Tina saw her reflection and shadow on the whiteboard!

Do you really know your competition? Have you been able to track their movements? What do you think are other tools that make sense to attach to your tool belt? Let’s discuss this.