Linktree offers a no-cost tool that will tell you, site by site, who is linking to your competitors but is NOT linking to you. Simply enter the URLs of at least five competitors, enter your URL, and voila! Out pops a list of those websites that are excluding you from the linking party, plus links to the pages where your competitors' links appear. You can then use your common sense or other competitive recon tools to decide whether or not it's worth your time to approach those sites, hat in hand, requesting that your site be added to their link collections. This service is different from other link popularity comparison tools because it allows you to exclude your own site and thereby easily create a list of target prospects that aren't linking to you.
NetPeriscope is a competitive intelligence application service provider for online retailers. For a monthly fee, merchants can track competitor sites in real time. NetPeriscope's products monitor content changes and track individual products by SKU, ISBN, manufacturer or part number on competitors' sites. Merchants can run queries against competitor sites on product availability, delivery options, and can commission a trend analysis (over a period of time) to study discounting, availability or shipping patterns. Very sophisticated and very interesting CI product. Contact the company for pricing.
NewsNow is an online UK-based media monitoring service that finds specific news, according to your parameters, from thousands of online sites. NewsNow monitors breaking news in more than 15 languages, from thousands of Internet online publications, newswires, magazines, press releases and other online news sources. The service provides online press monitoring, competitive intelligence, market intelligence, sales lead generation and Web and Intranet content. NewsNow delivers alerts via email within minutes of publication, to your website or Intranet, 24 hours a day, from over 15,820+ sources, and has a searchable 30-day archive. In addition to news resources, information is also gleaned from webzines, newsletters and blogs, based on keywords you specify, to give you a complete intelligence picture. You have to call them to get the price for the service, but you can sign up for a free 14-day trial on the site.
Edited by Bill Dedman, a Boston Globe correspondent, Power Reporting is a great online journalistic or competitive intelligence resource tool. Here you will find a neatly organized grid of links to every possible reporter's resource online. The grid is grouped under headings such as Beat by Beat, Companies, People Finders, Reference Shelf, Training and What's New. For example, look under the heading of "Company Research" and you will find dozens of sites that you can use to get the inside scoop on your competitors. The wide range of topics you can find here makes it an attractive alternative to a general Web search engine when doing competitive intelligence research.
SuperPages.com (formerly InfoSpace) is an indispensable tool for finding people, addresses and phone numbers. Match a phone number to a name with a reverse lookup. Find all the residents of a particular address or street with an address lookup. Match an email to a name with an email lookup. Locate a person with a public records search. You can also use InfoSpace as a metasearch engine, and the white and yellow pages are second to none.
TracerLock combines news monitoring, research and competitive intelligence gathering into one
handy little service. First, it scans hundreds of news sites, newsgroups and search engines for
the keywords of your choice, and alerts you as soon as articles, comments or new site listings
are published containing those keywords. You can also submit your own list of URLs for it to monitor
(for example, your competitors' sites), and TracerLock will let you know when new pages
containing your designated keywords are published.
You can download the TracerLock
toolbar, which will automatically highlight your designated keywords on any Web page that
you happen to be looking at. While the "lite" version of the toolbar is gratis, if do you
sign on for the full TracerLock service (which starts at $4[US] per month), the toolbar
will integrate with your account so that you can add any URL to your "monitor" list with the
click of a button. A 30-day no-cost trial is available at the site. If you like the idea of
spying on your competition (and who doesn't?) you might also like
TVEyes.com, where you can set up a no-cost account and
monitor 40+ TV and radio stations for up to three keywords. Notification of
any mentions arrives instantly in the form of email, IM or text message.