Residual Victory Blog

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website is a fundamental lesson for anyone seeking to develop or promote their website.  Real-world marketing basics still apply to the virtual world.  The 3Ps (Product, Pricing and Promotion) expand into 4Ps (Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement).  SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) applies to website search engine optimization.
Analyzing a Competitor’s Website is similar to analyzing the business itself.  Learning how to analyze every aspect of your competitor’s business will ensure your advantage in building successful search engine, marketing and sales strategies.

If you are targeting a specific competitor, it’s obvious you go to their website to start.  Research your competitor and their parent company, subsidiaries, legal names, and domain names.  Go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov, World Intellectual Property Organization www.wipo.int, and the US Securities and Exchange webpage at www.sec.gov, and www.hoovers.com.
Now you have information for cross-referencing and their financial status.  If they’ve been losing money, you may be able to take over.  If your competitor has a strong financial background, you should concentrate on finding your niche.  Do a search for “similar pages” to locate other similar competitors.  See if they are involved in cloaking or link farming.  Check out www.copyscape.com to see if they have duplicate pages.

Analyze all of the links on your competitor’s website: reciprocal, inbound and outbound links for each page.  Google “link:nameofwebsite.” This will give you a list of the websites that link into the website.  Evaluate those pages.  Firefox has new SEO tool at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html which includes tools that will tell you about links to blogs, del.icio.us, Technorati, Google PageRank and age of the domain.

Keywords are at the heart of search engine results.  You can determine the keywords, keyword count and keyword density at  http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php.  Think of tangents.  See if the keywords are used in the links, file names, document titles or body text.  Google allintitle:keywordyouchoose” (finds keyword in the title of webpages) and “allinurl:keywordyouchoose,” (finds keyword in URLs). There are online tools, toolbars and downloads available for analyzing websites.  Do a search for “tools analyze seo” or “free online tools analyze competition.” Check for downloads for marketing competition analysis software at www.Zdnet.com and www.download.com.

Once you know who your competition is, you need to know who the customers are.  That’s traffic.  Make sure your “toolbox” includes tools to analyze the traffic patterns to each page.  Find who’s clicking where, how much, and why.  Content defines your competitor.  What is missing from theirs?  Can you fill a void or compliment each other?  Is there room for expansion or a niche?  What services do they offer?  Can you provide better customer satisfaction?  Are there complaints on the web?  Check blogs and social communities for possible criticisms about the website.

Learning how to analyze a competitor’s website is just the beginning.  Once you collect the information, and evaluate it, you need to use it and develop a strategy to beat it.  Take your competitive analysis seriously, and make your mark in the search engine results.  Analyze your competition today, and you could beat them in their rankings tomorrow.  Learning how to analyze your competition is the first step, now use what you learned!

Streamline your Business and Increase your Profits with Autoresponders’ inexpensive, cost-effective multi-tasking capabilities.  Autoresponders are  powerful e-marketing tools that send automatic emails so you can take care of the more profitable aspect of your business by creating new email strategies. Investing your time in developing e-marketing strategies has a much higher rate of return than spending time manually answering emails.  That’s the first increase in profit with Autoresponders.  The usefulness of Autoresponders is only limited by the amount of marketing and promotional material that you can dream up to send your customers.

Some of the typical uses for Autoresponders are sending email replies for confirmations and subscriptions.  These are useful and cost-saving tools, and many of these services can be found in free online Autoresponder programs.  But Autoresponders’ capabilities are worthy of being used to develop relationships with your customers and facilitate further sales opportunities. Autoresponder can be set to send emails at the same time and same day for a period of time you determine.

Build an email list with Autoresponders, and offer an incentive for visitors to sign up.  Incentives can vary from sending coupons, samples, a quote or picture of the day, to an e-book, newsletter, or an e-course that is emailed one course at a time, or even a list of useful links.  Create fast-breaking news updates - keep in touch with your industry and let your email clients read the latest news from your auto-generated newsletter.  Use RSS Feeds to your advantage and pass on updates to your subscribers. Make sure all incentives are directly related to your website and target market.

You now have an email list with email addresses to send product, pricing and promotional material.  And with every email is an opportunity to upsell. What else might your customer be interested in? If you don’t know, ask them in your auto generated emails and send an auto-response thanking them for their input. 

As an online sales tool, Autoresponder is useful for sending follow-up emails and responses to commonly asked questions.  Make sure your emails sound personal.  Spend time considering the signature line, developing the format, and personalizing the impersonal. Make sure contact information and unsubscribe information is always available. Try to incorporate your branding strategy into your email marketing strategy, and don’t forget your visuals to make a more complete imprint on the customer’s mind.

Plan your e-marketing and Autoresponder strategy.  Find out what options are available in different Autoresponders.  Some are free if you include their advertising, some are online and have monthly charges, and some have a mass of useful features and utilities that you can install on your website.  Begin responding to more customers, and provide them with content they can’t get enough of.  With a well-thought out Autoresponder program your emails will multiply, your customers will multiply, your profits will increase, and you won’t be typing in email addresses all day. So get streamlining, and start Autoresponding.  Your market is waiting for you.

It Depends on how Successful you Want to Be.

Starting an Internet Business could take just a few days depending on how much you enjoy sleep.  The 2007 World Bank “Doing Business” economic data reports that it takes 5 days to start a business in the United States, 2 days in Australia and 77 days if you’re stuck in Iraq. Starting a SUCCESSFUL Internet business may take a little bit more work.  Technology grants us the opportunity to start a business on a shoestring, but the competition is immense.  A business without customers isn’t going to get very far.  Planning is paramount.

Let’s define “start.”  Mere web presence is not the start of a successful business.  Every business must have a plan, and creating a thoroughly researched business plan is crucial to any successful beginning.  This could take a couple days or a couple years.  You should first be able to describe your business in one sentence.  Then you need to develop your revenue sources, market analysis, services and products, pricing strategies, profit and loss statements, marketing and sales strategies, strategic planning, growth and exit strategies, legal structure, proprietary information and, yes, even on the Internet, location, location, location.  The plan doesn’t have to be professionally written, but it does have to be thoroughly researched.  Moreover, you, the business owner, should be the one thinking it out since you will be making the business decisions. 

Not every Internet business requires you to have a website.  There are many options available for you to have a business working from home using information or advertising from another website.  If you are a web guru, then you’re way ahead of the game.  If you have some capital to invest, you can hire a website developer.  There are many free website building tools on the web, but they often come with limitations.  Many companies offer services that create and host your website.  Your domain name is a factor in determining your volume of traffic, so it is important to spend time choosing the right one.  Rushing your website development will stunt your growth.  If you truly want to be successful, spend time optimizing your site. 

Once your website is ready for trial and you have found a hosting site, you have to announce your arrival to the search engines and find some traffic.  This can be done through search engine submission, pay-per-click advertising on search engines, listings with directories, posting blogs, and press releases announcing your presence and a variety of other creative methods.  Ideally, you should have a marketing strategy that announces your website presence in a variety of formats.  Once the search engines have indexed and you have a good solid plan, a quality website, and quality products and services, it’s uphill from there.

So how long did that take?  The World Bank says five days - they didn’t say if the business was successful.  Take the time to plan and develop.  The more solid your foundation of your internet business the longer you will stand.  The best time to start that foundation is now.

The Freedoms of Working on the Internet are abundant.  Whether you are at home or in the office, the Internet offers flexibility.  And Flexibility is Freedom.  Of course, the freedoms are extreme when you’re working from home, but even being able to work on the Internet at the office has some liberating effects.

If you don’t have an addictive personality like the majority of the web surfers, the Internet has great potential to free up your time.  The problem is, the more free time you have, the more ways you look to fill it.  Now you fill it sitting on your butt looking at pictures of the Fiji Islands or playing solitaire instead of saving the world.  However, the potential is still there. 

The Internet gives you the freedom to be smart.  You can research anything in an instant.  No more trips to the library to look up your competitor’s business statistics.  No more flipping through cookbooks looking for a recipe for dinner.  Something’s wrong with your car?  Save yourself a trip to the mechanic and look it up online.  Homework help is at your fingertips - and so are the answers.

The Internet also gives you freedom to be stupid.  Not only are there spell checkers, that you use so frequently you forget how to spell; but there are math calculators, currency calculators, recipe calculators, birthday calculators, JavaScript calculators, graphing calculators and calorie calculators.  (I try not to use the last one.)  With the Internet, you have the freedom to never do another calculation in your head again.

You have the freedom to travel quickly.  Directories and maps are available in an instant.  No more looking for out-of-state or outdated phone books.  No more rummaging through faded maps and scribbled directions.  Just search and print.  You also have the freedom to avoid a trip to the post office.  Bill payments can be made online, gifts can be purchased and mailed, and postal services offer click and ship services.  No need to stop at the bank because you can do all of your bank transactions online for your home and your business.

You have the freedom to outsource.  You can get help from anywhere in the world, at any time.  You have the freedom to make international friends that would have never been possible before.  You have the freedom to cry or complain and nobody will know who you are.  You have the freedom to think about what you’re going to say before you’re going to say it.  You have the freedom to “talk” 24/7 without waking anybody up.  You have the freedom to hit “send” or “cancel.”  You have the freedom to hit “delete.” 

You can hear the latest news from hundreds of sources.  You have the freedom to easily keep in touch with politics and law and courts and hearings.  The Internet gives you the freedom to hear the opinions from millions of others and give yours back.  The Internet gives thousands of hearts and homes the freedom to share, without ever once worrying if the toilet is clean.  The Internet has made us flexible and it keeps us free.