Who Are Their Affiliates

Another way to take advantage of your competition is to find out who their affiliates are. If you offer an affiliate program, this may be an ideal strategy for you. Track down your competition's affiliates and persuade them to promote your product or services, instead of your competitor's.

If your competitors offer their affiliates a lower commission percentage than you, then you already have upper hand. How? Affiliates are always looking for away to make more money and by offering them a higher commission percentage, they'll be able to increase their affiliate profits.

How do you find your competition's affiliates? You can use same methods to find their affiliates, as you would trying to locate their link partners, by using Arelis and/or Marketleap's Link Popularity Tool.

Spying On Your Competition

Thanks to power of internet, spying on your competition couldn't be any easier. You can easily find out what their marketing angle is, what they have for products, how much they are charging for their products, and any new products that they may be working on.

If you were to go to your competition offline and evaluate their establishment, while taking notes on their products, you would immediately draw attention to yourself and get thrown out of store. There is nothing worse than letting your competition know you are keeping tabs on them, but on internet, it's completely anonymous. Your competition will never know you are there or what your doing there.

When you pay a visit to your competition's web site, first thing you want to know is, what their weaknesses and their strengths are. That way, you can capitalize on opportunity of making their weaknesses, your strengths.

In time you will find that traffic to your site has dramatically increased. This will be targetted traffic from visitors having read your articles.

Success doesn't happen overnight and takes hard work and perseverance but if you write a couple of articles a week you will soon find an increase in visitors to your site.

3) Write your own ezine

Start your own ezine and publish it regularly. This is a good way of informing your visitors of any news and updates on your website. Have an opt in form on in a prominate place on your site so that people can subscribe to it.

The ezine should also have an unsubscribe option as well. Any visitors who do unsubscribe should be deleted from your database immediately.

You can install some free cgi scripting that enables visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe to your newsletter or ezine. Go to http://www.siteinteractive.com/subscribe/index2.html There are tutorials as well to help you install script.

A good idea is to have a pop under box for visitors to subscribe. This will appear after they have closed your site. I personally find pop up boxes annoying, but with a pop under box visitor has already left your site anyway. You can get cgi script for a pop under box at http://www.clickforcontent.com/pop_under_script.htm

If you need articles to put in your ezine there are many sites that have databases of free articles that you can use. Try http://www.freezineweb.com and http://www.ezinearticles.com

Submit your ezines to following ezine directories http://www.bestezines.com http://www.ezinesearch.com/search-it/ezine http://www.ezine-universe.com http://www.escribe.com http://www.e-zinez.com

4) Offline methods of getting traffic to your site

These are just some of methods that you can use to get traffic to your site. There are also many offline ways as well including just talking to people you meet!!

You could design and print out some flyers to advertise your business and place them in cafe's, libraries, supermarket customer advertising boards, and even place some on car windscreens in car parks that you are passing through. I have often gone back to my car after a shopping trip and found a flyer on my car advertising a business or local event!!

Design and print out business cards. You can get some nice quality paper for printing these out on to make them look professional. Hand these to everyone you meet and leave one with a bill whenever you eat in a restaurant. Use different colour paper as well to add interest.

How about designing a car sticker and place it on rear windscreen of your car.

Placing an ad in your local paper is a good idea and reasonably inexpensive.

Always make sure that you carry some cards and flyers whenever you leave house you never know when an opportunity will occur!!