You need to know who are your competitors in your market are, like related products, and services. Look at your target markets blogs and websites and see how much traffic they are getting and if they are getting allot of traffic, then see what they are writing about, what’s getting people attention, and then take the idea and module it. Have a look at the SEO optimization of their content too. So knowing who your market is, is very important. Here are a few examples…

Look at the top Internet Marketers websites, blogs, and see how they provide content, and the quality of the content that they provide for their subscribers. Who is your competition? Or Knowing Your Market example:

• Who are the major players?
• What do they sell and how.
• Who is buying Google adwords?
• Who has the top rankings?
• Who links to your competition?

Forum Marketing:
warrior forum – Where all the top Internet Marketers hang out, some great content in here.

Blog Marketing: – Find blogs in your market
blogcatalog.com is a great place to look for blogs in the same market as you
Technorati.com – It’s a like a blog search engine

Article Marketing:
Ezine Articles – By far the best one for submitting your articles on the web.

Distribute articles, and gain traffic from doing do. Put your BIO with your website address to drive traffic

Video Marketing:
YouTube – the largest video site as well as Google video.

Find videos in your market that you can see what kind of video they are doing in their business, so that you can piggy back them with your business. and see how they structure there content, and products

Press Releases:
I don’t use press releases but prweb.com is the best and larges press release site on the web.

Competitive analyses:
Be careful and keep an eye out for how long the Google Adwords ads run for month after month to see which ones are still there and which ones are gone if you are promoting a product see if people in your market are promoting it via Google Adwords, and check that the ad is still there, if the ad is still there after a couple of month, that means that they are making a profit with what they are promoting.

Go to places like clickbank.com which is all information products, and CJ.com are for physical products like Xbox and so on.

EBay is another great research tool to see the market place, and check what people are buying on eBay. And selling

Traffic Research:
Go to an internet marketer’s blog and so how much traffic they get:

Alexa – Owned by Amazon and you get to see how much traffic they get to their website.

compete.com – is a place where you can get better accurate date for your competitors, but to gain access to the information there is a fee. But is worthwhile for their great service.

Link Detective:
If you go to Google and type in link:www.whatever.com you will see most of the websites that they link to or people linking to them. It’s a good review of who is linking who. Ninja style

Google Alerts:
Is brilliant just put in a keyword like your name and as soon as Google indexes that word into a webpage or blog or basically the web, Google will alert you with new information. Keep up to date with what people are talking about, or what software (what people are saying about it) new information on that topic, is being indexed by Google. (must have tool and it’s FREE)

Google Trends:
Is a great place to find a topic that is rising, that people are searching for on the web, and you can see when that keyword or niche is at its peak for make money now until it drops off to happen again throughout the year? This is a great indicator to know when a niche topic is making money now.
You can also check witch countries where the most searches are coming from. Google Trends

So there you have it a good few ideas to research and knowing your market and competitors and save hours of time just doing one of these steps.

Talk soon Daniel Howard