Do you think it’s a bit weird to be tracking your competitors’ every move? Following them around so you know every video they watch or forum they post to may be going to extremes. Having a good idea of what they are up to in their business, however, is simply good sense. If you want to succeed in any kind of business, you have to show people that you are superior to your competition. If your product or offer really is superior to those of your competitors, you’re more than halfway there. Once you are very familiar with your competitors, you can form a plan to do better than them. We will now look at how you can watch your competitors.

You may want to try Google Alerts. You can set up a Google Alert for every organization and individual you want to keep track of. You can tailor Google Alerts to deliver at specific times.

You can find out any news or discussions on the subject hourly or daily or even per month. Google Alerts can even be told to either give you the information via email or you can choose an RSS feed if you choose. Google Alerts is totally free. You may have even utilized it to keep an eye on your favorite celebrities. Searches with Twitter. I bet you didn’t know that Twitter has a search engine all their own. As I’m writing this article, Twitter is just behind Google as the top search engine. You will be able to use this search function to get a good look at your competition. Much like the regular Twitter you can use this search engine to keep track of your target market and your competitors within it. One great thing you can do that you can’t do with the regular Twitter is get all your search results on one screen. If you didn’t have this, you’d waste much of your time trying to find your competition and trying to determine what’s hot within your niche.

If you can try and keep up with developments on foreign media and entertainments sites, it’s pretty easy to do online and it doesn’t matter what country you are in. You can access BBC Iplayer abroad or use a Hulu proxy, the technology exists to keep in touch with all these media sites which can keep you up to date with the competition.

Google Finance is one of the best ways to track the financial practices of your competitors. 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. Anyone who has a corporation, though, and is competing on that level, can find many uses for this tool.

Keeping track of your competition is something that needs to be done by everyone. Sure, you can do everything you can to expand your business. If you want to convince people to choose you over your competition, you need to know what your competition is up to. The more you know about your competition the better prepared you will be to build your own business.

Plus, you’ll be better prepared to let your prospects know that you’re superior to your competition. Studying your completion just seems like a business no-brainer.