Creating a home business online and internet marketing means going through the proper steps to achieve success. At Adlandpro I have been teaching people these basics for many years. In lesson 7 of this internet marketing course I talk about how to "spy" on your competition using just a couple of tools and urging you to follow the plan and take the time NOW rather than face failure.

1. Internet Marketing
Course
by
Bogdan Fiedur
Adlandpro.com

2. Lesson 7
Research your
competition

4. 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.

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

6. 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?

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

9. 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.

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

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

12. 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

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

14. 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.

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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+

22. Would you like to join our community?
Kudos to Mark Dewey for this great graphic