How to "Ethically" Spy on Your Competitor's Every Move

re you trying hard to keep an edge on your competitors, but they always seem to be one step ahead of you? You may be exposing yourself, and not even know it. The great news is that your competitors are probably doing the same thing.

For example, if you take one of the freelance type websites, you can see what others (and possibly your competitors) are up to just by going to Google.com and typing in "site:freelancewebsitenamegoeshere.com "keyword phrase"" (without the beginning and ending quotes). You will see all the projects that have that particular keyword phrase in the description, just at that site. You can then run that same query on the next freelance site you're monitoring.

There are several sites that you should monitor on an ongoing basis, including scriptlance DOT com, elance DOT com, and rentacoder DOT com, but there are actually a few others that can provide you with a tremendous amount of informaton.

There are also other ways in Google, where you can go, if you know your competitors website, and type in queries similar to that, basically, constraining it to one of these outsourcing sites.

So, "site:scriptlance.com" will constrain the search in Google to that one site and then, in quotation marks, type in their website URL, like competitorwebsite.com. Example: site:scriptlance.com "competitorwebsite..com." You will find all the projects that your competitors are putting out there. If you have any competitors in the industry, which I imagine every single one of us do, this is a great way to have insight into what is going on at their sites, what they have on horizon, and what they are building so you can counteract that, or address that, on your own site.

Conversely, you always want to protect your intellectual capital, and you want to protect any projects that you are currently doing for competitive reasons. There are many ways that you can put a project out there for bid, but protect your information where it won't be indexed in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any of the major search engines. If you don't do that you are opening yourself up to the same spying.

If you've not considered Outsourcing time-consuming tasks and special projects, its something that you should take note of. Finding reliable outsourced providers can decrease your fixed costs and free up your employees to allow more time to focus on more important, revenue-generating tasks such as marketing and promotion.

Outsourcing can provide a huge opportunity whereby you can find the very best providers, for a given task or project, and you'll typically pay much less than you would if hiring a local part-time employee. Best of all you don't have to worry about all the ongoing expenses that typically come with a traditional employee. Outsourced providers can be paid on a one-time basis for exactly the work that they complete. Its really a great way to manage the cash flow of your business and you'll get exactly what you want.

Remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of your small business, website, or eCommerce store and outsource today!