Internet marketing takes years to perfect. Entering the new world of Internet Marketing, your number 1 goal is to try and find the most productive strategies with the most positive results through extensive experimentations. But for the average marketer, this may seem impossible. Whether it be experimentations on your website presentation, ad campaigns, to even choosing affiliate programs to promote, it is crucial for any new marketer to learn from the more experienced marketers, because it may save you years of head ache and tweaking. You want to find the best performance from your website that you can ever possibly achieve. But what is considered best performing? Best performance could mean more subscribers, more sign-ups, or more sales. There is an endless possibility to what you may consider best performing. And just by a simple study of your competitors, their years of extensive experimentation and research, can be openly beneficial to you as well.
Alexa – Use Alexa to find your competitor’s traffic sources to try and also imitate what they are doing. Sometimes with Alexa, you may even see what top keywords your competitors are ranking for in the search engines. This knowledge over your competitors overall will supply you the information you need to study as well as discover how they pull in massive daily visitors.
Archives – One of my most favorite free online tools on the web is archives.org. The reason why this tool is really amazing is because you can see many of your competitor’s sites back weeks, months, and even years ago. You can see nearly every single tiny change your competitors have made over the course of a few months and even years. This information is crucial to studying their overall behavior because most often changes are made because of new discoveries in performances. And with this tool, you can imitate what changes your competitors have done too and best of all, for free too.
When using this tool, try to look for the following things:
Advertisements
- Font size
- Font family
- Is it simple?
- Wording. Look for tiny edits as well as tiny changes.
- Look at the title page. Look if they have changed anything there as well.
- Have they added a picture? A video?
- Have they removed ads?
- Have they changed the line-height in the text for more reader visibility?
- Have they started promoting a different product?
- etc…
All these things are crucial to look at because your number 1 goal is to try to find the most effective techniques as well as incorporations without having to spend much. You think big companies like Google don’t research these types of things and they just blindly just throw out a bunch of text? Think again. They have invested in years of research to discovering a more user-friendly platform and they continue to test to this day. Did you know that Amazon has a conversion rate of 10% through extensive changes in their platform for it to be more user-friendly? There are a lot of places you could study from and if you plan on opening a eCommerce site, Amazon is the site for you to study. Through these examples, it comes to show that every tiny tweak can have an impact overall no matter how large or small the tweak is.
SeoQuake – Download SeoQuake onto your Firefox browser for you to be able to conveniently see on your browser, why websites rank where they rank in the search engines. This tools makes it very easy to study your competitors in terms of competitors in the search engines, more easily. And every bit of information provided from SeoQuake, can help overall increase your knowledge as well as your skill on how to better your website through studying of your competitors definitely.
SEMRush or Spyfu – Use tools like SEMRush or Spyfu to see if your competitors are doing any PPC advertising or advertising beyond just organic search engine traffic. With tools like SEMRush and Spyfu, it makes it quite easy to see if your competitors are doing some sort of campaign in terms of trying to generate web traffic to their website. Once finding their ad, a great way to utilize this information is to study their ads as well as their usage of text within their ad block. If your competitors have had a PPC campaign running for sometime now, it must mean something.
