Starting any business requires extensive research. Whether you have a grocery store or an internet marketing business,it’s important to know what your competition is up to. A lot can be learned from people who have built businesses before. You can learn what to do and what not to do. You will not only learn a lot about your choice of business,but you will also be able to understand what you want to do with it better. So now you know that you need to research your competition. What’s the best way to do it? What’s the ideal way to find out how your competitors are conducting business? If you really want to do this,there are a few implements that are good for this. The internet is certainly a different kind of place to market,advertise and generally do business. It is the possibility for sudden change in some of the operating rules that can really throw you for a loop. All the old-timers can tell you stories about things that have been stable for many years will become totally different or even gone. You can test the methods you are reading here,and source can be tested for sure but make sure you look at it in a strategic or long-term way. Usually some methods can be related in some way to other things that may eventually become issues,overall. Still,though,we generally think it is more important to not have fear but rather be cautious with your business. Google Alerts is one option you can use. Set up a Google Alert for each person or company that you want to track. You can choose who often you get these Google Alerts. You can get news and articles by the hour,by the day or even by the month. Not only that,but you can either choose email delivery or you can choose RSS feed. Google Alerts is totally free. Some use it to stalk their favorite celebs. A program called BoardTracker will let you know what sort of conversations are going on in the forums these days. You can tell the software to locate any posts that have to do with your competition. The software is preprogrammed with over thirty thousand forums so any posts that are relevant to your competitors will get flagged and you’ll be told about it in your email box. The software can be tailored to find complete threads about your competitors or you can use it to find individual postings. The software can even be used to track your activities. This is great for keeping up with your great image. You might think that Wikipedia is ideal for research reasons. Wikipedia is terrific for high school students who need to turn in a paper in the morning. At the same time,if you get enough attention there is probably a Wikipedia page devoted to you. Why not look through Wikipedia for information on your competitors? Or you can use Wikipedia to find information on your subject matter. Wikipedia is edited all the time by people so it’s no telling if the information you find is credible or not. Tread carefully! There are quite a few methods you can use to track your competition. You can often find out quite a bit by simply looking them up in a search engine. Anyone seeking more complete information can use some of the tools we’ve discussed here,as well as others. Your goal should be to learn as much as possible without devoting too much time to the process. You want to leave yourself some time to build your own business. Of course,it won’t matter how great your business is if your competitors consistently outperform you. There’s no doubt that knowledge is power when it comes to your competition!