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I have learned that knowing what your competition is doing, as well as knowing what the top sites on the internet are doing, is by far the most powerful way to understand what marketing you should use.  Our competition is probably not going to come right out and tell us every marketing strategy that they are doing.  You probably wouldn’t tell your competition this information either, right?

If you had access to this information you could follow the path laid by the top sites in your industry.  You would have access to the marketing strategies that took them to the top.  Pretty important stuff, right?  You could do a lot with this information, right?  Some of you may have already seen this information, and didn’t realize what it was.  Some of you have probably never even heard of it. 

The strategy that I am referring to is Backward Links or Back-links.  Backward links are one of the biggest factors in your Search Engine Ranking. Back-links are one site having someone’s website on the Internet linking to theirs.  The Internet is a huge competition of sites competing for links from other sites.  Because of this, there have been multiple marketing strategies created to get other sites to link to you.  Below I will list the different strategies that are the most common.  I discuss the strategies further in other articles and in our Members Area.

Once you understand the different marketing strategies that a company can use, you can easily look at the list of backward links for that website and see which of the marketing strategies they have implemented.  To view a websites backward links, you can go to Yahoo’s search engine and type in:  link:www.something.com.  After you have done this, at the top you will notice Pages and Inbound links.  This will tell you the pages that the search engines have indexed and the number of sites online linking to them. 

Some of the sites in the list may be sub-pages of that site linking back to the home page.  You will ignore these and look for outside sites linking to this site.  A portion of the links may be from information sites that are linking to them to provide a source for their customers.  They may have an affiliate program where you can refer traffic to them and receive sales. Each site that has an affiliate link is a backward link.  You will also find blogs, news sites or ezines that are linking to various sites.

When looking through the list of backward links, ask yourself the question; If this site is linking to my competition, would they also link to me?  In a lot of circumstances if you have good information, a good affiliate program or a good product, people will link to you.  Over time, you will gain in popularity and people will be linking to you for no reason.

You can also look at your own Back links to see what links you have been given credit for from the Search Engines.

I also recommend that you look at the features and services that your competition is offering to see if there is anything you would like to offer your clients.  Some sites may offer features or services that you could offer that you didn’t think of.

By visiting “web.archive.org”, you can see a history of what a site has looked like over time and what changes they make throughout the year.  You will be able to see the changes made for sales, specials, holidays, etc. This could tell you what has worked or hasn’t worked for them in the past.