A lot of people would like to know how their competitors are making their websites pay. They would give anything to be able to imitate the content on those sites and create a niche for their product. Do they all succeed? Well yes and no.
Why “Yes” and “No”? Yes because imitating someone who is successful can provide you with a framework for operation. No, because, no one really reveals what goes on behind the scenes for you to imitate. That is their trade secret.
Since it is not possible to know his trade secrets, you should intelligently en-cash on your rivals “open” marketing gimmicks.
See what kind of content he has onsite. Does he make an effort to educate his customers? Does he inform his customers of what they can expect to find on his site? Does he tell them the merits of his product vis a vis that of his competitors? Does he offer them incentives to remain loyal to him? Is he keeping track of the browsing habits of his customers and does he make sure that he has sufficient information on the pages that his customers frequently visit? Is he relying on his offline customers to come online or does he strive to get his online customers to become his permanent offline customers or both? What kind of traffic does he aim to attract? What is the geographical and demographic distribution of his visitors?
You can cull out all this information and more, if you study his website in earnest and use the different tools available on the Internet to review these sites. Those are the gimmicks you can imitate. You can go a step further and provide your readers with more informative and educative content in areas that your rival has omitted to provide. You can optimize your content for keywords that your rival has not taken into consideration. The pictures, images and text on your site can be based on research of reading habits of customers.
So why wait till you are able to invent the wheel again. Use your competitors wheel to roll out your website!
