Last summer I was hired by psychologist who provides helpful information on his website for people with family problems. We were trying to monetize site which already has over 3000 unique visitors per day. By adding a web store to sell books he wrote in past 15 years he reached about 10-15 daily customers right away. Client was more than happy because it was a good money (each book cost $40).

We decided that $400 - $600 is not enough from 3000 people per day. We rejected to use Google AdSense, affiliate programs, ad space sale. Instead of finding sponsors we began to visit competitor websites to find what they sell and offer for people who got family problems. From one competitor we got idea to create subscription service providing extra information, email notifications, ability to receive unpublished chapters from the books, daily tips to keep family strong, etc. Our calculations wasn’t wrong and we got 1 new subscribers each day (out of 3000 daily visitors), if it will stay the same in the future… total income will be over $45 000 after first year and almost $135 000 between July 2008 and July 2009.

Checking another website we found that competitor offers live phone support for visitors charging their credit card $150/hour. The same thing we did on our website and now my client charge callers $200/hour because his name is bigger. Moreover, the same competitor gave us a hint to create a page with office, location, hotels, airport, driving directions to meet our client in person. This step increased amount of clients, especially rich clients who fly from all parts of the United States to get professional support from psychologist.

In the case I described above I made myself and and my client richer only because we worked to check strengths and strategies of our competitors. By finding key success factors we applied this to our website and reached significant increase in profit.

Media scanning is also an important factor to find how competitors advertise product, where they keep ads, how much they spend, and who they target.

Online media scanning even more important because it is good to know who link your competitors, their search engine rankings, keyword destiny, share of voice, and traffic they receive.

How to check competitor online presence:

•  Find who link your competitor. It is possible using backlink checking tool like LinkVendor Domain Popularity or by typing link:domain.com on Yahoo (Yahoo provide the best information about who link a website).
• Sign up with Google AdWords and check how your much competitors bid on targeted keywords and key phrases. Use “share of voice” function to check percentage of clicks each competitor receives.
• With Technorati it is possible to find how strong competitors in blogosphere and how many bloggers write a posts describing their products and services.
• The last thing which might help is Google Pagerank and Alexa Rank status.