Sly Strategies to Spy Like Jason Bourne in Your Online Business

Do you like feeling naive and out-of-the-loop?

Or do you like being in the know, up to date and aware of the information around you?

When you run an online business there’s a treasure trove of helpful information surrounding you.

The most potent information is provided by your competition, if you know where to look and how to identify the diamonds they’ve left out in the open.

In this post you’ll discover the exact tools and tactics you can use to spy on your competition to find these diamonds.

They’ve already done the hard work and now you’ll be able to piggy-back on their efforts to develop your own profitable strategies, catch up and then stay ahead of them.

You’ll feel like Jason Bourne felt when he discovered he could fight for the first time...suddenly aware of his deadly abilities...

Sales and landing pages are the best place to start your spying efforts because an optimized sales and landing page is a huge factor in what makes a successful business, so this is where you’ll find your competition’s best attempts to convert visitors to customers.

Maybe they are doing things you’ve never thought of, or attacking similar problems from an angle you’ve never considered.

The best way to increase conversions and sales is to be relentless in your effort to improve the performance of these pages for your own business.

You should be testing new headlines, offers and page design as often as you can.

This requires a lot of creativity and audience understanding, which can be a large barrier, so when you analyze your competition’s pages you should also be gathering ideas to test for your own website.

How to Sift Through a Landing Page to Find Diamonds

When you analyze their sales/landing pages for the first time you should be looking for the following:

The Steps

1. Capture the Page - I like to use Full Page Screen Capture and Skitch (Windows & Mac) to capture everything. Jing is also a good tool.
2. Offers and CTA - Here I’ll look at opt-in offers. Are they offering a free report, a free consultation or something else? What copy are they using to try and get the visitor to take action and what does the visitor have to do? If there’s anything I haven’t seen before I’ll make a note of it in a word document.
3. Headlines and Subheadlines - Then I’ll copy all the headlines and subheadlines into the same document and try to figure out what emotions are they invoking, what problems they are trying to solve and what features and benefits they are highlighting.
4. Deeper dive into the small copy - Next I’ll read through the entire page and every bullet point. Here I’ll be looking for clues on what is true for my business and what is different. Are there any good stories or language they are using to paint a good picture? If yes, I’ll add it to the document.
5. Page Structure - What order are they presenting the information? Is it an above the fold landing page or an in depth, long-copy page. Do they start with a video or an opt-in form? When do they list the features compared to the benefits, are there testimonials, guarantees or bonuses? Anything notable will go into the document.

Advanced Tips

After you’ve done a preliminary investigation, it’s important to keep checking in. Maybe your competition is testing a new design, headlines or new offers.

If you have many competitors in your space it can get VERY time consuming to check them all manually and look for changes.

The following tools will alert you to any change on the pages you specify, so you’re automatically updated anytime your competitor changes anything:

90% of an iceberg lies beneath the surface. And like the iceberg, in many successful online businesses, much of the “magic” happens on the backend, after a visitor has converted.

To find out the secret sauce your competition is using behind the scenes you need to first opt-into their free newsletter (if they offer one), and then buy their products (if they offer them).

This will give you an insider’s look at their full funnel. You'll be able to see their content offers, pitches, funnel pages, frequency of emails and more, so pay attention to the following: 

I like to use the screen capture tools I listed above (Full Page Screen Capture, Skitch (Windows & Mac) or Jing).

How to Turn Your Subscribers Into Raving Fans

Everything in this technique is aimed at optimizing your funnel after you get a visitor to opt-in. Your goal then becomes transforming them into a customer/raving fan ASAP by engaging, entertaining and educating them. 

Upsell, Downsell, Almost Done and Confirmation Pages - Is your competition doing anything unique immediately after a confirmation you can also test? For example, at one point Social Triggers had an almost done page with a countdown timer and a nifty link that automatically searched the users Gmail account for the confirmation email to make signs ups as seamless as possible.

Followup Emails - Depending on your niche and competition it's possible you could never have to brainstorm ideas for onboarding emails, customer offers and how often to send newsletters ever again. All you have to is subscribe to a few of your competitor's email lists.

For example, I used the Gmail trick below to subscribe to Sujan Patel's newsletter and after a few months I had a ton of great information. Without even reading the emails I can see frequency, headline ideas, content topics and drip sequence order: 

Live chats & Interactive Webinars - If your competition offers them, sign up. It's a great opportunity to see what they're up to and ask any specific questions you’re curious to have answered (product roadmaps, audiences, etc.). You might be surprised at how much information you can gather.

When you understand the type of content that’s getting shared, liked, discussed and linked to in your industry, you have a massive opportunity.

The key to these opportunities is having your finger on the pulse of the successful content being generated in your industry so you don’t have to guess what’s working, you know.

In this section I’m going to show you exactly what tools and techniques to use so you can be in tune with what’s working in your industry. These valuable insights will allow you to create content with a much better chance of going viral:

IFTTT - If This Then That

IFTTT is a free automation tool allowing you to create “recipes” to perform certain actions when a specific trigger is fired. 

There are tons of useful recipes you can create with this tool. Here's 38 IFTTT recipes helpful for small business owners

One of my favorites for spying on the competition is a recipe to aggregate any new post your competitors publish into a Google Doc. You can set it up for all of your competitor’s sites, and anytime you need inspiration or a real time market overview you can open a constantly refreshing library of post ideas. Discover how to create this recipe step-by-step in IFTTT when you share this post.

Content Sharing Sites

Search for a competitor's website on content sharing sites like Reddit and Pinterest. I like this because you get to see HOW people are sharing and interacting with content and what they’re saying about it.

It also allows you to see what sub-communities are sharing the content, which can give audience insights you might not have thought about.

Here's how to search on Reddit and Pinterest:

For example: https://www.pinterest.com/source/thrivethemes.com would show you all the content on Pintrest regarding ThriveThemes.

Find What's Already Working

Buzzsumo and Social Crawlytics are fairly similar tools. You search by the topic or keyword you’re interested in writing about and the tools analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor, as well as finding the key influencers to promote your own content.  You can also search a specific competitor’s website to see which of their content has done the best.

These tools make researching and validating post ideas a breeze.​

There’s also a backlink option (note: Ahrefs and Majestic also have this functionality) to see who else is linking to the popular blog posts, which is great for outreach link building (you’ll learn about this powerful strategy in the next section).

Spy on Your Competitor’s Outreach for the Easiest Links, Mentions & Endorsements You’ll Ever Get

To boost your popularity you need to be talked about.

Doing this for your online business means building links from other powerful websites, being endorsed by influencers or just being mentioned on social media.

There’s an easy way to find these opportunities by using your competition as a guide.

The idea here is to find sites who have already linked to businesses like yours in other articles they’ve published or who are already promoting and mentioning similar businesses or posts in their social media accounts. Here’s a twitter example:

A quick mention on social media never hurts, but what if you could:

If they’ve already linked to your competitor or mentioned similar content to what you offer, the likelihood they’d be interested in your helpful resources is strong and an easy sell. In this section I’ll be showing you tools you can use to find these easy link building opportunities.

The free way to do this is to set up Google Alerts around topics of blog posts you’ve written, your competitor’s company name, their website URLs and even the names of the executives or founders. Every time anything is mentioned or published on the internet around your alerts, you will be notified.

Then it’s as simple as checking out the notification yourself, and deciding if it would be a good fit for your business.

Use the gmail trick I outlined in spy technique two to filter these alerts so you don’t clutter your inbox.

The links you’ll find will fall into 1 of 5 categories:

All of the categories (except Comments) will require some type of outreach. Here’s a good template you can modify for Resource Link outreach and this post details how to write effective outreach emails, in general.

Google Alerts will provide you real time notifications, but if you want a deeper dive into your competitor's outreach success you can use more powerful tools like: Ahrefs or Majestic Site Explorer.

These allow you to examine a website's backlink profile to find out everyone who has ever linked to them and to which specific post. This is great information to have if you’re trying to 80/20 your link building efforts because you know exactly who’s going to be receptive to your outreach and it makes it much simpler.

Something like: “hey, I see you have X listed as a great tool for Y. My tool also does Y and it might make a great addition to your post/resource list” could be all you need to build some powerful links back to your own site.

These tools also allow you to compile broken and lost link reports from your competitors. You need these to take advantage of a powerful technique called Broken Link Building, which involves finding links that don’t work anymore and are related to an article you’ve written. You'd then contact the website owner with an email like this as a quick and easy way to provide value and build links back to your site to increase SEO, traffic and popularity.

Be a Smart Spy

Your competition is a great place to quickly gather intel and creative ideas without having to start from scratch. However, it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex and spend all your time spying instead of innovating and working on your business.

It’s also possible your competition has no idea what they’re doing, which is why it’s important to use these techniques for ideas to test and not as the capital-T-Truth on what works.

Research, get ideas, implement, and then test and modify accordingly.

How do you channel your inner Jason Bourne when you’re spying on the competition? Share your tactics in the comments!

Coming Soon...More Advanced Tactics

This is going to be a multi-part post. This has been updated once, but there's still more information you can uncover about your competition.

However, these are the building blocks and If you do not understand these then other tactics and tools to spy will be less effective.

Use this opportunity to take action with these strategies so you're ready for the next post update. If you want to be notified when part 3 is published, enter your name and email below: