Using competitors sites for your marketing

As a business owner, you are constantly looking for new ways to market your company. But have you ever considered turning to your competitors sites for your marketing? This is an effective way to market to new customers.

How can competitor sites help?

Other websites in your area of expertise can greatly increase your marketing efforts and drive more traffic to your site. Websites that are linked to your competitors' sites are often able to link to yours as well, helping you to build more traffic and increasing your marketing efforts. When you know who is visiting your competitors, you have access to information that will identify customers who are interested in the products and services that you provide.

Once you have identified your competitors' customers from their websites, you can then direct your marketing efforts towards them. Using the knowledge you obtain from their websites, you can also take a different angle when it comes to marketing than your competitors are using. Your competitors' sites will also lead you to sites you have probably never heard of before.

So how do you use competitors' sites for your marketing? Here are a few ways:

Search engines

Search engines are a great tool for marketing purposes. There are a number of search engines that will let you see who is linking to your competitor, and will also show you the amount of traffic that site receives as well.

• Alexa. With this search engine, you can see which sites are linking to your competitors' sites while also displaying the rank of each sites that link to it. However, this is not updated often (no more than six times each year), so some incoming links for certain websites are not recorded. However, it is easy to use; just type the URL of the competitor's site into the Sites Linking In box.
• Technorati. This search engine will show you which blogs are linking to your competitors' blogs. This is useful because blogging is so popular now, and it's a great way to market your site. The rank of the linking blog will give you a good indication of the size of the audience.

Some websites will allow you to access their traffic statistics, allowing you to see who is visiting your competitors' sites. These are often found on stats counter buttons. Click on that, and you can see the URLs of the websites that link to it. This is one of the easiest ways to find out who is visiting your competitors' sites, but not all sites publish their information on their sites.

Top lists

Top lists, which are public rankings that rank sites based on the traffic they receive, are also a good source for finding out the traffic of your competitors' sites. There are a number of these available, but some, such as Blog Top Sites, are more detailed than others and will give you more specific information about who is visiting your competitors' sites.

Backlinks

With a backlink tool, you can find out who is linking to your competitors' site. You can visit each site for more detail, then build up your own link profile by putting the link to your website on the web pages of those linking to your competitors. Sites to check out include Yahoo Site Explorer and Backlink Watch.

These are a few ways you can use your competitors' sites for marketing your own business.