They say that spying is the second oldest occupation in the world. Spying on the competition is very old business method and one of the ways to keep ahead in a very competitive world. It is also highly immoral and often illegal. But, since everyone is doing it, if you want to survive, you’ll have to play the game.

Spying also work the other way around. You may never know when you are being spied upon. Make sure you have all your bases covered. For instance, most people don’t even bother thinking about log files and visitor information their ISP is holding. This alone, if bought by your competition can bring ruin to your company.

The rise of Internet has made spying all too easier. If you know your way around it, there’s little you can’t find out about pretty much anybody. After some research, we have compiled a list of perfectly legal tools you can use to spy on your competitors.

Domain Tools

This use to be WhoIs. Want to know who owns particular site? This is the place to go to. You will get listing with owner’s name, address and date of expiration. This is usually the first step in spying. You can also see what other sites they have registered to the same name, thus seeing in detail your competition’s activities.

SpyFu.com

Formerly GoogSpy, this service can reveal to you which keywords your competition is using and revealing their AdSense strategy. Even though it isn’t free, it is still a very powerful tool.

Google Alerts

Wondering when your keywords, or for that matter, your competitors’ keywords, will be indexed by Google? Subscribe at Google Alerts and get an email when that happens.

Google Trends

Another Google service, it allows you to monitor latest trends on the Internet. See what competition is doing and beat them to the next hot keyword. It is updated daily with data from Google.

Google Sets

Google Sets helps you find similar keywords to the ones you are already using. In essence, you will get a list your competition is using successfully.

Alexa

Alexa offers site rankings for any site you are interested in. It also provides a statistics for demographic, incoming click and more. Useful for determining if competition is doing better than you.

Seeking Alpha Transcripts

With this site you can search the Internet for your competition’s transcripts. Usually, there’s always something useful found there.  Remember, these services are completely legal to use. Of course, there are more powerful ones you can find, but we would n’t recommend them.  You can easily get your self in trouble for unauthorized access to someone’s data, a crime followed by a hefty fine and often a jail time as well.

We get a lot of questions regarding differences and benefits of SEO and SEM. To most people, these terms are synonyms. They even sound suspiciously similar – search engine optimization and search engine marketing. But don’t be fooled by this, because they are quite different in nature. Each one has its own distinctive benefits and good webmaster will employ both to increase his or her site’s earnings.

Search engine optimization is a process designed to increase your site’s organic search engines ranking by clever use of keywords. Some of the key components of this process are quality content, backlinks building, keywords integration into meta and title tags, and search engine and directory submissions. SEO provides natural traffic to your site by increasing search engines’ rank. The higher the position on the search engine result page (SERP), the more people searching for your keywords will visit your site.

Search engine marketing, on the other hand, consists of number of procedures that employ classic marketing tactics. These are:

Paid inclusions – Basically, you pay search engines to include your site on top of the SERP for given keywords.

PPC Advertising – Pay-Per-Click ads are very popular with advertisers because they can control the whole campaign. There are text only add and you can control what keywords will trigger them what will they say and how much you want to spend.  You will only be charged for ads that get clicked.

Traditional Ads – These are not so popular, since they are paid per impression or the number of times they showed up. This means that you can spend a hefty amount of money and not gain a single visitor from them.

The key difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO can be done for free, if you know how. SEM cannot. That is why SEO if most popular strategy with small and start up sites, while SEM is mostly conducted by wealthy and established companies. SEO is also a bit more unpredictable, since it is based on search engine algorithms and because of that, we have no saying in its final success. While there are plenty of methods out there that work, nobody can guarantee you that they will also work for your site. On the other hand, SEM is using proven marketing tactics and its results can be predicted, but it will cost you a lot of money. Both SEO and SEM have their place in successful campaign.

Internet marketing is a very competitive field. There’s a lot of competition and industry is changing almost on daily basis, so keeping up is very demanding. Everyday new players are coming in, trying to take a slice of the pie for them. Being successful or simply surviving in this world is becoming increasingly harder.

Today we will share with you 8 ways to boost your marketing power and help you in becoming a successful marketing guru.

Study your demographics

Determine who your prospective customers are. This is a key step, as it will determine the whole process. Once you know to whom you are selling, everything else is easier.

Determine a need

Once you have your target audience zeroed in, determine what is their greatest need that your product can address.

Fulfill the need

How will your product or service help your audience fulfill their need? Be honest about this, as you don’t want to make a promise you can’t keep. There’s nothing worse than disappointed customer. Not only you lost him or her, but imagine all the damage you will suffer when they start talking. Definitely something you must avoid at all cost.

Be creative

In 99 times out of 100, creativity is the key. This can’t be overstressed. People are used to just throw money at the problem until they bury it. Instead, most of the times it only needs some lateral thinking to save you a lot of aggravation, not to mention dollars.

Allow feedback

Feedback is one of the most crucial aspects of any good campaign. Rarely will you nail it in the first go. That is why it is important to listen to what your customers are saying and take their advices on how to improve. Companies that don’t do this will soon be forgotten.

Improve

Select improvements based on feedback you have received and your financial possibilities. Sometimes you just can’t afford to make all the improvements you want to, so just concentrate on the ones you can. Make sure you have communicated this to your audience.

Rethink

Sometimes, simple improvements just won’t do and you have to rethink your whole concept. While this is painful, it may be necessary. Don’t be afraid to do it.

Rinse and repeat

Repeat the cycle. If you feel you have made any mistakes in the process, make sure you correct them this time.