Who Are Your Competition? Where Are They?

Continuing on from the last post, (knowing what changes are made to competitors, suppliers and customers' sites)…what if you really don't know who all the potential competition is in your trading area?

For example, let's use New York City. What if you wanted to open up a kosher restaurant? Go into this change detection site and see if they are monitoring other sites of interest to you.

I typed in "kosher restaurants" and bam!….there was a humongous list of all the kosher restaurants in the boroughs of New York, some with web sites, most without. This is what it looked like:

New York State Kosher Restaurants

You are provided with the directory of kosher restaurants in NYC; but note that there are 161 other users monitoring this page. Why so many? Not only competitors, but customers will be smart enough to see what is changing and who is blogging too.

This is a free way for them to know what you are up to as well. In fact, if you tell your own customer database to use this site to monitor your site and blog, you will now have an instant additional way of keeping in contact with them…at least they'll KNOW what is new at your site and restaurant. They will also appreciate your telling them about this helpful site/tool in other areas of their life too. When they get an alert that your site copy or content has changed, it will not only inform them, but remind them to check out the newest at your site and restaurant…another very subtle form of FREE 'advertising'.

What do you think? Care to share your 2 cents? I'd appreciate your feedback and comments below.