Maybe the thought of spying on your competition all the time seems bizarre to you. You may not be able to keep track of every e-mail they send or blog post they make. Having a good idea of what they are up to in their business,however,is simply good sense. If you want to make money online or off you need to be able to prove that you are better than your competitors. The best way to do that is to actually be better than your competitors. But if you want to offer something better than your competitors,it helps if you are aware of their methods. To keep up with what your competition is doing,you can use the following tactics. The internet is certainly a different kind of place to market,advertise and generally do business. It is the possibility for sudden change in some of the operating rules that can really throw you for a loop. What has been working for months or even years can suddenly change radically or even just disappear. You are reading about these methods in this article including aspects of source,but you still need to,or should,give some thought to how they fit in overall. When you analyze anything new for possible inclusion in your marketing arsenal,you need to be completely objective. Measure and calculated risk is what we all do in our business,and it is the careless risk-taking that we urge you to avoid. Some think that Twitter is just for talking to other individuals. And that’s what it can be used for,you just have to stick to the one forty character limit. Twitter is also useful in that it will let you know what’s really hot in the subject you’re dealing with. This will detail the desires of those in your target audience. You will also know what they’re not looking for. You will also get the inside scoop on who they accept and who they don’t,as well as why this is. You can also follow the tweets of your competition so that you can see what they’re promoting and how. It is a great way to have fun while you are doing work. BoardTracker is a program that tracks what’s being talked about in message boards. You can utilize the software to locate anyone posting about your competition. The software comes with 37,000 forums preprogrammed into it so the moment a post about your competitors is detected,you’ll be notified via email. You may want to track whole threads,or you may just want the software to find singular posts. You can even track yourself with this type of software. This is great for keeping up with your great image. If you want to learn about your competitors’ financial activities,you should go to Google Finance. You would use this mainly for looking into a company of some size. Financial information that has been filed by businesses can be found on this site. If any blog posts,news stories or press releases regarding the company are available,you’ll find them here as well. This resource won’t help you much if your niche is mostly made up of individual business owners or smaller companies. It can be very useful,however,if you are running a larger operation and have to research your competition. There are many ways that you’re able to find out what your competitors are up to. You can often find them with search engines. You can also locate them with feed readers. You can’t just do it all on your own and expect to get everything,on the other hand. This is why some people use software programs to help them make sure that no detail gets unexamined. You can track those competing against you in many ways. You have to use these means to find out everything they’re doing. This is a great way to stay abreast or ahead of the competition.