Competition

If you run your own hunting website, hunting blog, or hunting business, you need to perform a competitive analysis on a regular basis.  What I mean by a regular basis, you need to look at your competitors’ sites at least once a month, if not more.  You cannot afford to have your competitors launch new services/functionality and steal your users.

Some important things to look at when you analyze your competitors sites:

-Check your competitors features/functionalities (ie widgets, forums, etc).
-Analyze page structure, graphics and language of the site.  Cleanliness is the key on today’s web.
-Check your competitors keywords.
-Research their social media presence (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,etc).
-Follow their press releases for new launches.
-Keep an eye on their traffic via compete.com for spikes and valleys.  Take advantage of those valleys.
-Keep an eye out for what other hunters are saying in forums or message boards.
-Run searches on your competitors via Google, Bing, and Yahoo to see their page rankings.
-Set up a Google alerts to be notified when your competitors are mentioned on the web.

Monitoring your competitors online is key and will enhance your hunting business.