When people market their business, they pay little attention to their competition. However, they can learn a lot from them. Your competition plays a large role in your business and in your marketing efforts, so don't ignore them.

There is an old saying, "Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer". In this case, your enemy is your competition. You shouldn't look at your competition as an enemy, but, as a guide or a valuable tool.

Your competition can be an asset to your business. I want you to think about this for a minute, your competition is like having a one stop shopping center, they have it all. Let me give you an example, take a look at your fearsome indirect competition, they have it all. They may have targeted an area of market that you've missed, on web that's not hard to do.

Who Are Their Link Partners

One day when I was analyzing my competition I immediatley noticed something about their link partners, a lot of them were different, but some were same. Let me give you an example, if you were to take three of your competitors, you may only find a few of them with same link partners, other than that, a large portion of your competition's link partners will be different.

Once you've found out who your competitor's link partners are, persuade them to link to you. By getting your competition's link partners to link to you, it will take some of your competition's traffic away and give it to you, bringing targeted traffic to your web site.

Do you have a great online business but few customers,and a very limited budget to work with?

Just uploading your site onto internet is not enough, even submitting to main search engines and directories takes time. Often it may take months for a website to get listed.

You don't have to spend a fortune on marketing your site, best methods are often very inexpensive or free.

1) Pay Per click search engines

Pay per click search engines work by bidding for keywords. This is an immediate way to get your site listed. They work by bidding for specific targetted keywords related to your site.

You pay only for hits to your site and bidding can start as low as $0.1 depending on popularity of keyword. Only bid for words that are specific to your site. For example if you sell blue widgets then "widgets" is to vague. "blue widgets" will get visitors who specifically want to buy blue widgets!!

"Widgets would probably be more expensive as it has a more general audience but "Blue widgets" is more targeted to a particular audience and would most probably be cheaper.

http://www.overture.com Overture can get you listed on majority of leading search engines and portals, including; AOL, Ask Jeeves, Freeserve, Lycos, MSN, Tiscali and many more. You set up an account with them and deposit an initial £60

http://www.go-click.com You can create an account from $10 and they have a minimum bid of $0.1

2) Submit ezine articles

Submitting ezine articles is free and often one of best ways of getting visitors to your site.

Write an article about a subject that relates to your site giving useful information, but don't use it as an advert for your site or it probably won't be accepted.

You can however advertise your website in a resource box at end of your article.

Articles should be of a 65 character line length. textpad enables you to word wrap your document. For a free trial download go to http://www.textpad.com/download/index.html

Submit your articles with online article directories at http://www.ezine-writer.com/article-lists.html http://www.ezinewriter.com op10.html http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.articlecity.com http://www.goarticles.com http://www.webmasterslibrary.com http://www.marcommwise.com http://www.mailbiz.com http://www.UltimateProfits.com http://www.vectorcentral.com http://www.freezineweb.com http://www.smarteremarketing.com

Make sure that your article is in keeping with directory before submitting it. Some directories are specialised in their subject matter.