How to up your game

Looking to better understand your competitors this year? Of course you are! Well here are some great search tips, thanks to my friend Mary Ellen Bates (https://www.batesinfo.com).

1. One way to ascertain what channels or media a company is using to market a particular brand is to go to the brand's web site and click the link “for more information." There will often be a list of boxes to check, indicating how you heard about the brand. As a competitor, this is a handy check-list of how your competition is reaching the market now.

1. Use the "search this site" link on your competition’s web site to look for Powerpoint presentations, speeches and white papers that may not be linked to other pages on the site. Use the search terms: ppt, doc or powerpoint.

1. Use the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) to see how your competition’s web site has changed over time. Just copy and paste their URL in the “Browse History" box; the Wayback Machine will come back with a list of links to copies of the web page, often dating back several years. Click on any of the dates to see what the web page looked like on that date. This is a particularly useful tool if you want to get information on executives who no longer work for the company, or dig up information on a subsidiary that was later spun off or closed down.

1. Use a web page change tracker to monitor your competitor's web site. Services that do this include WatchThatPage.com, TrackEngine.com, InfoMinder.com, and Web Site Watcher.

1. Identify the newspapers in the city where your competitor is headquartered, and cities where it has any major subsidiaries. Journalists are great sources of information on companies on their beat. To identify the web sites of newspapers in your competitor's hometown, use The Ultimate Collection of News Links, OnlineNewspapers.com, AILEENA, NewsLink.org, or Newspapers.com.

Let me know if you have any more great tips. I am happy to share them around to our fellow readers in a future posting.

Suggested tip: Set aside 10 minutes this week to choose just one of the ideas above and give it a go. The idea is not to get bogged down and overwhelmed by your competition, but to be inspired to up your game in ways that you hadn’t thought of before.