Internet Marketing Course

byBogdan FiedurAdlandpro.com

Lesson 7

Research your competition

In today's lesson you will be zeroing on those keywords which you have spent so much time researching so that you can now research your competition.

These keywords will help you later to optimize your pages and purchase advertising

To help with this task you will need to download one toolbar and some browser extensions.

Before talking about the download, what are browser extensions?

A browser extension is a computer program that extends the functionality of a web browser in some way.

The Toolbar that you will be downloading is called the Alexa Toolbar.The Alexa toolbar will allow you to determine how much traffic the site you are visiting is receiving. You will be also able to determine their physical location, find their contact email and see other related sites. Once the toolbar is installed this information is instantly displayed for you while you are browsing.

Download the Alexa toolbar for Chrome Alexa toolbar for Chrome Download the Alexa toolbar for Firefox Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

There are two extensions that you will find very useful and needed.

FirefoxSEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar

Chrome Page Rank Status

If you don't want to install any add-ons, you can use this web based page rank checker.

A working example of how Alexa shows in Firefox

What you are seeing is how Blogger.com is showing. As you can see Blogger.com has the number 49. This means it is the top 49th site in the world. The smaller the number the more traffic a site is getting. * Since the writing of this internet marketing course blogger is now showing as 78

Remember that Alexa is ranking the entire site, whereas Google is ranking the page.

To put this in perspective Adlandpro has a page rank 4 and Google.ca has a page rank 7 as seen in the image below.

Look for pages with a Page Rank of 3 and higher as these are the sites that are worth looking at. Your goal is to search for sites which score well for your keywords and visit them because not only are they your competition but they are sites that will give you ideas on how you want your business to look and work

When you use the Alexa toolbar and your extensions you will be able to judge how important a site is through the data that will be shown to you.

Pay attention to what attracts you when you visit a site. Is it easy to navigate and did you find what you were looking for? Write down what you liked and even what you didn't like so that you can create your business that will be unique to what you are doing.

Does the site have a newsletter? If so join it so that you can get ideas from what they are doing. You can learn a lot about what a site is doing that is making them so successful.

Does the site have an affiliate program? If so join it - businesses who have affiliate programs will show you how to run a business and give you tools to use that may be useful to your own business.

You might also want to check the sites which are on the right side of the Google pages from Adwords. These are paid advertisers which are bidding for your keywords. This is your most aggressive competition.The more you understand the success of your competition, the faster you will be able to get your business off the ground. If you have a business already in that area, this will help you on improving it.

Take the first keyword that you did in the last lesson and put it in the Google Search and then using the Alexa Toolbar and extension - start studying your competition. In lesson 8 I will show you how to Start looking for your customers based on my experience ~ Bogdan Fiedur on G+

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Kudos to Mark Dewey for this great graphic