Before we go into how to (ethically) spy on your competition, you first need to know why would you need these Sherlock Holmes skills in the first place. Why do you need to spy on your competition?

Well, to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to rank well for your keywords for one. Spying on your competition allows you to see why your competitors rank better for certain keywords than you. Why they have a higher PR than you. Why they get more traffic than you. Why they do overall better than you – and how to fix that.

Now that you know why would you want to use the spying techniques, let’s see what all will you achieve by doing this.

You will be able to…

• find the ‘top dogs’ in your niche and what they website URL is
• find your top x keywords that you aren’t using but you should be!
• finding where these top dogs are getting their backlinks and getting some of that for yourself!
• grab some of those top positions as well!

Question is, do we have tools good enough to offer us all of these so we can beat the competition? The answer is: yes, we have! And the good news is, although some have to be purchased, others are for free and you can do all your analysis with the main 3 tools I’m going to describe you here:

The easiest tool of all, of course, is Google.com (or your language equivalent of it). All you need is type in your keywords with ‘exact match’ (in “text”) and you will get on the first page the main competitors for those keywords.

So getting that was quite easy right?

Now on to the next step, finding the top keywords they are using. One of the best – and free – ways to do it is by using the Google Keyword Tool . The only difference is that instead of keywords, you will select here ‘website content’ and then grab the first link from your Google search result and enter the URL there. Now you will see the main keywords that competitor is using. Write them down, and then go on to the next. Rinse and repeat.

Next step is finding the backlinks to their site. Good news is, this tool is also free: the Yahoo Site Explorer. Go to the site, enter your competitor URL and press Explore URL. You will not only see how many pages they are indexed but also who is linking to them! Pretty powerful stuff if you ask me.

Technically all you need to get started are really these 3 free tools. Most of the times this is what I am using.

If I want to make a heaver market research though, I will grab one of the paid tools that really pays for itself 100 times over: SpyFu.com . This website has some free features as well, which I use a lot, but sometimes they are not enough and you might have to resort to buy it in full to unlock its full power.