Keeping up to date with your competitors movements is easy with Google Alerts. They are easy to set up and information regarding your competitor can be emailed directly to your inbox.

I would advise against the email option. While in the beginning it is fun to receive all these emails and you may feel awfully popular they can get quite tedious. Often I sign up to newsletters or alerts with the best of intentions but in the end find they just clog up by email box full of ‘unread emails’. The pattern of ignoring these emails and watching your unread emails soon turns into an eyesore.

I find using the RSS feeds  a far more efficient way to work. A quick scan will show immediately if an item is ‘newsworthy’ or not. And if your feeling narcissistic just create an alert for your name, a great way to spend Saturday nights.

Until I discovered watchthatpage I thought the only way to keep up to date with changes to a competitor’s website was to visit and have a quick look to see if anything had changed. While in theory this sounds like an easy process the reality is that I was lucky to visit these websites once every couple of months.

With watchthatpage  you can register the websites that you wish to monitor and then receive an email as soon as any changes have been made to the site. It is fairly simple to add pages by just using the favorite’s function of your browser so no need to copy and paste URL’s. My only word of caution is beware of sites that incorporate a date field as it is likely that you will be receiving an email each day informing you that that day had changed. Other than that watchthatpage is a great way to contribute to your competitor intelligence efforts.