Competitive Intelligence: How to Track your Competitors & Uncover Their Not So Hidden Secrets

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How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing. part 7

By William Milligan

In my last article (part 6) I shared the fifth step with you concerning the secrets to Internet Marketing. I'm going to list off the sixth step of my system. The importance of knowing where to advertise.

6. Knowing the secret of exactly where to advertise
The reason this is a secret is because 95% of all internet marketers are failing. And the reason they're all failing is because they're all advertising in the wrong places. The reason I say they're all advertising in the wrong places is because they're not targeting their niche closely enough. Or in some cases they're not reaching their niche at all. And in even worse cases they don't have a niche. But let's talk about all the internet marketers that aren't reaching their niche.

Right now the average internet marketer is paying for clicks at places like Overture, Google Ad Words, and many other pay-per-click companies. And there's nothing wrong with these pay-per-click companies. They can be one of the best places to advertise if you know how to use them right. How are all these people using pay-per-click wrong? The 95% of failing internet marketers are paying for broad clicks that get clicks from the entire mass audience. A typical failing internet marketer is bidding on terms and keywords such as "Business Opportunities", "Make Money", "Internet Marketing", "MLM", "online sales", "internet shopping", "internet mall", "discount products", "health", etc. The marketers using keywords in the example above are failing.

Then there's a group of smarter people that aren't failing quite as bad as the group of failures I talked about above. They're getting slightly better results by using keywords such as "Books", "DVD", "Fishing", "Real estate", "Work at home", "Internet business", "Insurance", "Mortgage", "Golf", "Vitamins", "Healthy Diet", "Cosmetics" etc. And the reason this group of people are doing a little better is because they're getting a bit more specific about the keywords they're choosing. By targeting a less broad audience, they're actually paying less for their advertising and getting more sales per click than someone using keywords that appeal to the masses.

Now let's talk about the most exciting group of people that actually understand the power of using very specific keywords that appeal strictly to the people in their niche market. These successful marketers are using very carefully chosen keywords such as "Trout fishing books", "trout fishing lures", "Work-out DVD", "Exercise DVD", "Video dance lessons", "Work out video", "Southern California real estate", "Florida homes for sale", "Part time work at home", "Car Insurance", "Home Mortgage", "Discount golf clubs", "Complete Vitamin Supplements", "MLM Vitamin", "Low fat diet", "Low carb diet", "Clearance Cosmetics", "Avon Make up", "Mary Kay Make-up", "Mary Kay Lip stick", "Avon eye shadow", etc. As you can see, the successful group of marketers that use keywords like the examples above know how to target their niche group. By using much more specific keywords, they know and understand that less non-interested people will type those keywords into the search engines. They know the mass, broad audience will never even think to type those keywords into a search engine. And this is important because that means you won't be paying for a bunch of wasted clicks from people that typed your keyword in by mistake.

Being very specific and targeting your niche keywords carefully, you'll be able to easily and effectively reach your target niche audience that you're after. And you'll be able to reach them for less money than your competitors who don't have this information or knowledge. Plus you can take this whole principle offline and use the same technique to advertise in specialized magazines with lower circulation, which means lower ad prices and a more responsive niche audience.

You'll find most of the offline marketers have made their fortunes by ignoring the major publications like USA Today, Cosmopolitan, and the National Enquirer. Sure these, magazines have the largest audience but that's because their audience is the "Mass Audience" or "Broad Audience." And it's because of this huge audience of readers that these types of ads in major publications cost so much.
But when you advertise in those publications, you're always paying to reach hundreds of thousands of readers that won't even be interested in your product or ad. So your tiny ad just ends up being like a needle in a hay stack inside these large publications.

If you're interested in marketing to the business opportunity seeker niche or get-rich-quick niche, you can take out an ad in Entrepreneur magazine, Small business start-ups, or any Home Business magazine But on the other hand if you were at a friends house and saw a copy of "Parrot Breeders Monthly" sitting on the coffee table, you'll probably have no desire to pick it up, but if you took that magazine and set it on the doorstep of someone who breeds parrots, I guarantee they'd read it cover to cover without skipping a word.

Now just imagine what kind of response you'd get if you placed an ad in that magazine that said: "Famous parrot breeder reveals the secret to teaching any parrot to do 7 amazing tricks in 7 days.
For FREE REPORT visit my website at www. Anyway, I think you're starting to get the idea here. There are literally thousands of different niches and each one has it's own magazines, newsletters, websites, search engines, news groups, ezines, etc. These hidden niches are one of the key ingredients to becoming wealthy on the net.

How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing part 6

By William Milligan

In my last article (part 5) I shared the fourth step with you concerning the secrets to Internet Marketing. Below I'm going to list off the fifth step of my system. How to make a serious income on the net starting with less than $150.

5. Lead Generation Marketing
This is yet another critical ingredient that is responsible for making this system all come together for you. But what's the definition of the term "Lead Generation Marketing?" Well it simply means that you're never trying to sell anything directly from one of your ads. Lead Generation Marketing means you're not listing features and benefits in your ad to get the prospect excited enough to get his/her wallet out. With Lead Generation Marketing, you're not even trying to describe the product in your ads at all. No, at this point, you don't want money; you just want to get the reader as curious as possible.

There's only one reason to use Lead Generation Marketing and as the name implies, that's to get people to email me, call me, or fill out an online form. Your objective is to simply get as many people as possible to stand up and come forward, telling you they're interested in what you've said so far. With this kind of advertising, you're basically using a strong headline to make the reader curious enough to request the free details or free report you offer in the ad. And the people who respond to these types of ads are called your "Leads."

When you're paying for an ad, you're usually very limited on space. With the average paid ad, you've only got enough space to display your headline, a sub-headline, a couple intriguing statements and some sort of directions telling the reader what you'd like them to do next. See below for an example of a typical ad:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Why Your Day Job Might Not Be Sending Your Next Check! …And what you can do to protect yourself now!
A typical day job offers you zero long-term financial security. I'd like to show you something that puts you in control and puts YOU in front of the money!
For complete details visit my website at: www.NewInsideInfo.com
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The above example is acceptable because I'm not trying to sell the reader anything yet. I'm simply getting the reader excited, curious, and motivated to take the action of visiting my website. Notice how I'm just asking the reader to take one step. I'm only asking the reader to do one little thing. Now, I'll use the same version of the ad above but change it to show you why it's a bad idea to ask the reader for too much in the beginning.

My money-making plan can make you up to $25 for every Sale you make. It's easy, just sell my ultra-vitamins. Everybody Needs vitamins. Right? Of course, so sign up now by calling My toll free order line at 800-000-0000. It's only $99 if you join Today and you're membership lasts for a 1 full year!

You can see in the example above that I'm asking the reader to do too much. And not only am I asking the reader to do too much, but I'm asking them to do it too quick. I'm asking them to commit their money way too soon. Advertisements can be compared to dating in one way. If you come on too strong too quick, it's a turn-off, and most people walk away.

The main process of "Lead Generation Marketing" is to separate people that are interested from those who are not. This technique works right from the beginning to weed out people that would otherwise end up wasting your time. This allows you to focus all of your energy and efforts on the people that may actually buy something from you. This pre-screening process helps you to avoid the prospects that would end up just wasting your time and never buying anything from you.

The "Lead Generation" technique is simply a method of offering your niche market something free. Make sure the item you're offering them for free is something with high perceived value to your niche market. Even if it's just a 2 page report that cost you nothing to send to the people who respond to your ad, it can still have a high perceived value. To create this high perception of value in your free give-away, you simply need to know what your niche market craves the most.

Now it's important you understand that the free report you'll be sending to the people who respond to your ad is actually just a sales letter in disguise. You don't want it to look like a sales letter because then your prospect will just throw it away. No, the secret is to make your free report look like it's mostly high quality information designed to help the reader out, but toward the end of your free report, you weave a subtle sales message into it. If you over-do this sales portion too much, or if you're too obvious about what you're up to, you'll lose your prospect and they'll never become your customer. So you must walk a fine line between giving your prospect some good information and selling them all at once within your free report. That's what makes your "Lead Generation" so effective and efficient.

How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing, part 5

By William Milligan

In my last article (part 4) I shared the third step with you concerning the secrets to Internet Marketing. Below I'm going to list off the fourth step of my system that I learned from that guru and from my own testing.

4. Knowing how to choose the right niche and product

Here's a fact for you: "Everything we do as humans is to either avoid pain or to gain pleasure." So the product you choose for your niche market needs to either offer your niche more pleasure in life, or a way to help them avoid some of the painful irritations of their life. Think about the types of pains, hassles, and irritations your niche is likely to be experiencing right now and try to teach them a valuable solution. On the same token, think about the kinds of things that are likely to give your niche more pleasure in their lives.

As you think about both of these feelings, you'll realize that there's a close relationship between the avoidance of pain and gaining pleasure. In fact, they're almost the same thing. Think for a moment about how they both cross over into each other.

As you begin to understand this principle, you'll begin to see how important it is to reach your niche on an emotional level. Setting up your marketing so that it evokes a strong emotional response along with powerful feelings is a key ingredient that makes this whole system come together. Don't try to sell based on the logic and reasoning of your customers or niche. I know you'd figure people must use logic and reason when considering a purchase, but they don't. All great marketers fully know and understand that people always shop in an emotional state and their purchases are determined by how the ad copy makes them feel.

That's why you'll hear the term "Impulse Buyer." Because people react so quickly to emotional ad copy that makes them feel good. People react especially quickly to ad copy that causes them to momentarily day-dream and imagine how much better the future will be with this product. Or if they imagine how much irritation, pain, and frustration this product will help them avoid. Do you see how both lines of thinking cross over into one main objective? It's all about improving their lives.

In the case of my Pro Snooper software niche, I knew and understood that this small group of people wanted to alleviate any concerns that their children were up to no good on the internet (adult sites.) Or they were sometimes just concerned that their child may come into contact with a perverted internet predator in a chat room. Another pain I knew my small niche group was concerned about was whether or not their spouse was cyber-cheating in chat rooms or singles sites.

All of those concerns above fall into the category of helping my niche avoid pain. And when you think about it, they'd be gaining pleasure because of the peace of mind they'd get from knowing all is well. I also knew there were other people in my niche that just liked to spy on other people's computers. And watching the computer activity of a room-mate, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, co-worker, gave them some sort of voyeuristic pleasure. Hey what ever floats your boat.

So I created the Pro Snooper website because I knew this small niche market would love this kind of software. And they did and they still do! Take a look at the Pro Snooper website and you'll see how I reach that niche on a very emotional level.

As you may have noticed, I do very well with this niche, because I understood a long time ago, that there's about 750,000 people looking for a "Work at Home" business opportunity at any given moment in time." And I also knew that 95% of the business opportunities out there don't work! Maybe you already know this too! Maybe you had to learn it the hard way like I did. Either way, only about 5% of this niche is truly satisfied with their current income. So this niche is definitely starving for something that stands out from all the garbage.

I'm going to start showing you how I sell my products so quickly and easily, but first I want to summarize and review what you've learned up to this point. First of all, you learned what a niche market is and how important it is to target a niche market as your audience. You learned why it's a bad idea to target a broad, general, mass audience and how that can hurt you. You learned that people do everything in life to avoid pain and to gain pleasure.

You've learned why it's so important to reach your prospects on an emotional level and why your need to understand how they feel and what is likely to be causing pain or irritation in their life. You've learned that each market has its own irritations, frustrations, and pains and that you need to identify that of your own niche so that you may then offer your niche solutions to their problems. You then learned to custom tailor products specifically for your niche market. You learned that this will help them avoid pain and bring them more pleasure which will make them a satisfied customer coming back for more.

You learned why it's so important to have complete control over your own products and full ownership of them. Those are a few of the basic ingredients that can put a serious income in your pocket quickly and easily. Keep reading future articles to explore even more key ingredients that are about to make others jealous of your success

How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing, part 3

By William Milligan

In my last article (part 2) I shared the first step with you concerning the secrets to Internet Marketing. Below I'm going to list off the second step of my system that I learned from that guru and from my own testing.

2. Choosing the correct niche market
One of the biggest secrets that makes this whole thing come together is carefully choosing a niche market. But almost every marketer on the internet is fixated on selling a broad product with wide public appeal. And that's why 97% of all internet marketers are failing at what they're doing. There's a famous saying that all great marketers fully know and understand and it goes like this: "When you try to sell everything to everybody, you end up selling nothing to anybody." Another one goes like this: "When everyone's your market then no one's your market."

Why is this? Well, the simple answer is that it costs a lot more money to advertise to that broad audience we call the masses, than it does to advertise to a small niche market. Yes, you get a much better deal on advertising when you sell to a niche market. I'll give you a couple different examples of why that's true. First, let's pretend you're selling hearing aids. Well, if you decide you want to reach as many people as you possibly can, you'll probably end up advertising in a newspaper like USA Today.
USA Today reaches that broad audience we know as the masses. Let's say you spend $250 on a classified ad in the back of USA Today. I know from experience that even if your classified ad is well written, you'll only get about 5-10 people who call you from that ad. And out of those 5-10 people that contacted you about that ad, it's a safe bet that only about 1 or 2 will actually purchase a hearing aid from you. But let's be safe and say that 3 people end up buying from you.
If you weren't charging at least $83.00 each for your hearing aids, then you lost money. But let's say you were being a fairly smart business person and you charged $200.00 each for your hearing aids. That means you made about $350.00 profit when you subtract the $250.00 ad cost from your $600.00 net profit. Well, you just put $350.00 in your pocket. Is that good? Well not if that was all you were able to do for the whole month.
Now let's go back and pretend you were a much smarter marketer and you decided you might do better if you focused your marketing efforts on a small niche market instead of a broad mass market. So instead of advertising in USA Today, you first ask yourself who tends to buy hearing aids the most. And a light bulb goes off in your head and you realize that older people are the most likely customer for a hearing aid.
So you then look around to find a magazine or newspaper that is published for the elderly. You find there are actually many publications that go out exclusively to the elderly community. So you choose to advertise in the classified section of a little newspaper that is published exclusively for a gated retirement community. Well, your ad in that newspaper is going to cost you about $11.00(that's how much it costs to advertise in the retirement community newspaper next to where I live.)
Well, I know from experience that you're likely to get at least the same response you got from the same ad you placed in USA Today for that type of product. So after you get 3 sales from that $11.00 ad, you now just made a profit of about $589.00. It was the same ad and the same product but you can now see how there are two different markets involved in the example above. The first market we targeted was the mass market (broad market.)
The second market we targeted was the elderly. Are you starting to see why it's important for you to avoid trying to market to the masses in a broad market? Are you beginning to see how you can significantly cut your advertising costs by finding smaller, niche markets to sell to? You could even find a smaller niche market to sell those hearing aids to than just the elderly. I'm looking on the internet right now and I see that there's a publication just for people that have impaired hearing. Can you imagine the results you'd get if you were to place an ad for your hearing aid in there?
I think you're starting to get the idea. And keep in mind; I'm not suggesting that you sell hearing aids for a living. I simply used hearing aids as an example of how advertising in broad markets Vs niche markets works. It's probably quite clear to you by now that I chose "Business opportunity seekers" as one of my niches. But keep in mind, that's not my only niche. I also chose surveillance software as another niche. You can see what I'm doing in that niche by looking at ProSnooper.com Another niche I'm involved in is email marketing software of the non-spam type. At that site I promote a list mailer that is for the niche of people who are only interested in sending out email ads to people that have given them permission. You've probably heard of this responsible type of email advertising referred to before as "Opt-In" or "Permission Email."
Anyway, these are just a few of the many niches that I do business in and all of those businesses I mentioned above are extremely successful. Why? How? Because I apply all the techniques that are in this article you're now reading. The most common method people use to decide which niche market to get involved in is to simply ask yourself what you're hobbies are? Or ask yourself what is of most interest to you in life? What fascinates you? This is often a niche market that you already know and understand. You may even be an expert on a niche market that you didn't realize was a niche. Are you? Think about the things you spend your spare time with.
The best thing about dealing with niche markets is the fact that they're so easy to manage. What I mean is that instead of trying to reach 300 million people that mostly don't care about your product, niches allow you to focus on around 20,000 prospects at a time. For instance, in my spy software business, there are only about 25,000 people that are subscribers to spy magazines. This means instead of trying to get lucky advertising to 300,000 people, I can now go directly to the 25,000 people that are most likely to become my customers. Kind of like shooting fish in a barrel when you think about it.
Most niche markets have a nice small audience to focus your efforts on. But the people that make up this audience study these niche publications inside and out. This type of audience pays close attention and they're eager to read about anything related to their special niche. This makes these people highly responsive to your advertisements and this increases your return on investment. I will elaborate on these steps in future articles, but if your hungry for more information. Please visit the site or e-mail me with your questions. Thank You.

How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing, part2

By William Milligan

In my last article I shared some information with you concerning the secrets to Internet Marketing. Below I'm going to list off the First Ingredient of my system that I learned from that guru and from my own testing.

1. Total control over your life, your business, and your finances.

The products you're going to sell must be 100% yours. You need to be the owner of your products making sure none of your money is going to a middle man or to a company. This means you'll be keeping 100% of your profits and you'll have complete control over every aspect of your business and your products. You'll even be the one that gets to name your products if you want!

There are very few cases when you should ever even consider being a distributor, dealer, or reseller for someone else. I'm going to show you how to be the owner of your own products. And it will be 100% your decision whether you want to let anyone else sell your products for you. If you decide you don't want anyone else selling you products, this can some times be a good thing. This means you will have no competition for your product titles.

Letting others sell your products (licensing) can also be a profitable idea. This means you've got other people out there working for you. They're helping to put money in your pockets! This means you're now making a residual income with possible life-time royalties!

Both methods can work under the right circumstances. I'll talk more about this later. Now I know what you're probably thinking: "Isn't it only big corporations and companies that usually own products? Isn't it going to cost me a fortune to become the owner of my own products? Isn't it going to be a big hassle to create even one product by myself?

It's definitely not going to be a hassle and it's going to cost you next to nothing to own your own products and I'm going to show you exactly how to do it in the next few articles. I believe it's actually much easier to become the owner of your own products than to try to become a dealer and reseller for someone else’s products. I know that sounds hard to believe, but you'll soon understand how easy this is as you continue reading below.

And not only is it easy, but nobody can ever downsize you, lay you off, fire you, or lower your wages! This means you'll no longer need to live life feeling insecure about your future and your retirement. With your own products, you'll never again have to live your life paycheck to paycheck. Life is so much better without fear and nasty financial surprises.
I will elaborate on these steps in future articles, but if your hungry for more information. Please visit the site or e-mail me with your questions. Thank You.

How you can Uncover the Secrets to Internet Marketing, and put the Gurus in their Place!

By William Milligan

Can you be a successful internet marketer? Yes you can! But it will take some work and success won’t come over night. You may already know this, but sales, marketing, and advertising are very similar to magic.For instance, only a small percentage of the people in the world fully knows and understands how to perform a magic show.

Likewise, only a very small percentage of the people in the world know the true secrets of sales, marketing, and advertising. Even less people know how to generate anything more than 10,000 visitors a day to their website. And trying to get these people to reveal their secrets is next to impossible.

Sales, marketing, and advertising are a true art and science. And the people who have mastered this art and science are not usually willing to tell others the secrets that keep their bank accounts full of cash. They are afraid that if others find out their tips, tricks, and secrets, they will become far less effective. So they keep their mouth shut!

I hate to sound like a pessimist but in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the internet is mostly one big lie! During my first year of internet misery and torture, I had been lied to by over 175 companies on the internet. I really feel that I was scammed, conned, lied to, and ripped off by over 175 companies. It’s sad to say but the truth is most business opportunities on the net are one big lie designed to do one thing and one thing alone, and that is… Take Your Money and run!

The result is that 98.5% of all people starting a new business opportunity will never see an income from it. The reason why is actually quite simple. You see, there are a few “True Professional Internet Marketers” that actually do know the big secrets that really do generate enormous money on the internet. You may have seen a few of them giving their pitch on TV infomercials. But even though these big-shots are truly making enormous cash, they will never tell you the big secret of how you can do it yourself. They will only tell you just enough to keep you excited and optimistic.

I won’t do that to you, this is the information I uncovered and would like to share with you.

1.) You must have total control over your life, your business, and your finances.
2.) Seek out and choose the correct niche market.
3.) Working with information based products,
4.) Knowing how to choose the right niche and the right product,
5.) Lead generation marketing and doing it the right way,
6.) Knowing the secret of exactly where to advertise.
7.) A simple piece of software gets you leads for pennies.
8.) How to make sure your profits never come to an end.

I will elaborate on these steps in future articles, but if your hungry for more information.
Please visit the site or e-mail me with your questions.

Competitive Intelligence: How To Track Your Competitors and Uncover Their Not So Hidden Secrets

In business, you always need to know what your competitors are doing. To survive you must perform competitive intelligence activities and monitor the broader market for new developments that could affect your company, your products and brands, suppliers, and distributors.

Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively, and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you will significantly increase your margins and profitability.

There's one resource that's often underutilized in this regard: your competitors' websites.

Today's digital footprint, while increasing corporate transparency and yielding greater power to consumers in the marketing dialogue, enables marketers to measure conversions. Companies spend enormous sums of money on maintaining their websites so that they can attract and influence prospects, customers, and analyst.

Your competitors may wish they could block you from their websites, but remember that the information they post there is public. If you aren't harvesting this rich - and free - resource, you are the loser!

Here are 5 things you must do regularly to effectively track your competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets:

1. Identify your competitors

Now, this may seem odd to you. You’re probably thinking, “doesn't a company know who its competitors are?” Not always. New firms come seemingly out of nowhere, preempting existing companies with different technologies or approaches they never saw coming.

Often a company in an adjacent area will change its positioning to try and address your market, or a new startup may emerge in a related area. You need to create a master list of your key competitors and make sure you keep this up to date.

To do this, Google the terms, which describe your industry, your products and services. You can also use a little known feature in Google. In the search box, type in "related:www.yourcompanyname.com" and Google will display a list of companies that it considers related to yours. Look for new companies that show up and see if any of these pose a threat.

2. Check your competitors’ home pages for positioning changes

When you visit a company's website, first look at its home page to see if they have made changes to the way they describe their products and services. Carefully scrutinize how they emphasize different features or benefits and how they are positioning themselves. Sometimes, you can learn a lot even from the subtle changes your competitors make on their home page.

3. Review the trade shows they participate in

Trade shows can take a big chunk out of a company’s marketing budget, so it is important to know which shows your competitors participate in.

Regularly review the events page on their websites and maintain a spreadsheet with names, dates and locations of the shows that your competitors plan to be at. You can then see which ones you might want to sign up for.

If you spot one of them at a new show, you might ask yourself, "why are they exhibiting at this defense-related show?" It might be an indicator of a new market they are entering – perhaps one that you should consider as well.

4. Create a competitive intelligence database of white papers and webinars

Increasingly, white papers and webinars have become the preferred way for a company to establish its mind share and leadership -- so this is another area you should be tracking. You should maintain a list of titles of the whitepapers and webinars your competitors create or host to get an idea of their new direction.

You may not learn much from one single event or white paper, but you'll learn a lot when you look at these as a whole. You'll see trends and patterns that clearly indicate how these companies are positioning or repositioning themselves.

5. Check who they are hiring and firing

Once in a while, check the management team and job postings pages on your competitors’ websites. Try and see whether your competitors have added or removed any names from their management team. This is often the only way you may learn that your key competitor has lost their VP of Sales; no press announcement is likely to be made about such events.

Competitive intelligence is rewarding, but not easy

You’ll gain a lot by making these activities part of your routine, but this work does take serious time, effort, and discipline!

If you don't have the time to invest in such activities, you can always stick to just using Google Alerts to get the top-level news about your competitors. But the truth is, you're short-changing yourself if you do this. Quality competitive analysis may not come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your business success.

The good news is that some new automated competitive intelligence tools are now starting to become available. Such tools can automatically scan company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one of these to make this job significantly easier.

Competitive Intelligence Smarts

Understanding what your competitors are doing NOW and where they are HEADED is what Competitive Intelligence is all about!

From the smallest of businesses running from a home based office, or even from your laptop at Starbucks, to the largest corporate giants in the world, Competitive Intelligence IS A MUST! This data should be used as the driving force for your Advertising, Marketing, Pricing, Management Planning, Mergers and Acquisitions, R & D (Research and Development) and of course your Trade Show selection and Trade Show activities!

SO, WHERE DO YOU FIND INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR COMPETITORS?

The opportunities to find data about your competition are somewhat endless, you just need to make a conscious effort to actually be looking for it; once you do that you'll start finding information EVERYWHERE! Here are some examples of where to start your search!

- Company Websites - Press Releases - Government Filings - Financial Analysts - Employment Ads - TRADE SHOWS - Meetings - Conferences - Panel Sessions - Reps & Distributors - Former Employees - Web Search - Portals - Search Engines - Industry Analysts - Suppliers - Partners - Networking - Sales Force - Media Articles - Customer Interviews - Customer Surveys

HOW DO YOU BEGIN YOUR STRATEGY?

- Research and Determine your TOP 3-5 competitors - Record the information you already know about them - Determine the Additional Information you will need to collect - Document the information you collect - Determine WHO will be tasked to collect this information internally, or if you will hire an outside agency

WHAT INFORMATION SHOULD YOU BE LOOKING FOR?

- Products/Services - Features - Sales/Marketing - Sales Representatives - Support (if Applicable)

- Strengths (List all known) - Weaknesses (List all known) - Company - Financial

Linda Musgrove, the TradeShow Teacher helps companies improve their Trade Show Results through customized Trade Show Marketing Help; with programs for individuals, or entire departments and with the Trade Show Training Manual she authored, titled: Trade Show Training, for Increased Return On Investment. Visit http://www.tsteacher.com to register for the FREE Monthly Trade Show Tactics Newsletter!

10 Steps to Researching Your Competition Online

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