How to get access to your competitors earnings and traffic stats

I would assume everyone reading this has at some point wished they had access to their competitors traffic and earnings stats. There are many reasons to want to know this – just this week I wanted to see the traffic a site in position 1 in Google was getting, so I could decide whether I wanted to invest time and money in overtaking him. I knew roughly that it would cost me £2000 to take his first place position from him and I needed to know if it was worth doing.

This method takes some planning and a little work, but the beauty of it is you only need to do most of this once, then you can repeatedly use the method over and over with only 5 minutes work each time.

This method does involve some lying and bending the truth, but if its good for the people running our country then I have no problems doing it too…

Of course if you email from your own business email address and ask for your competitors stats then he is going to tell you to go away (or something to those words!).

So firstly we need to set ourselves up as a 3rd party. I like to pretend to be a website broker, but a solicitor or marketing company works great also. You can take shortcuts, but every shortcut you take increases the chance of the plan failing. Bear in mind my point above in that you only need to do the hard work once, so in my opinion it is worth doing properly.

Firstly you should set up a quick website like this one. Use domain privacy! If you don’t then you are doomed to failure from the start. Moniker and Godaddy both offer domain privacy services. Once your website looks official, you need to create email addresses/phone numbers. I assume you know how to set up an email address at your domain, so lets look at phone numbers. Its extremely easy to set up a landline phone number that redirects to you via Skype, or you can use a company like Mail Boxes Etc to field incoming calls. Don’t just list a mobile phone number – it won’t look professional enough and will give the game away.

Don’t worry about the address – you will need to list one but you won’t need to receive anything in the post so you can use a made up one if you like.

Once this is done its time to make first contact with our victims. The trick here is make the victim think a large payday is around the corner. Its no secret why scams like the “you’ve won 65 millions” emails keep circulating – as soon as people see £ signs all rational thinking goes out of the window. I like to open with something like this (italics are my notes):

Hello,

My name is Sarah Jones (female names get a higher response rate!) and I work for fake company. We are currently looking to buy sites in your niche on behalf of one of the top 5 worldwide sportswear companies (Make them think you are acting on behalf of a major company, we need to get them thinking “big payday”).

I have been looking at your site today and I see you are ranking top 5 in Google for Blue Widgets (this should be a genuine thing they rank for, so they know it is a human writing an email and not spam). I also loved your article on Green Widgets – this is perfectly aligned with a new product launch our client intends to carry out this summer. (again, write about something on their site so they think you have spent time examining it.)

Would you be interested in selling whatever.com? We have already acquired several static sites in your niche but we are particularly interested in a blog such as yours. (Again, get them thinking there is big money in this).

If this is something you would like to consider, we would need a few preliminary statistics from you – primarily your number of uniques/pageviews and earnings figures. At this stage we would only require stats from the last month – we can then show them to our client and if they are happy we can sign NDA’s, reveal our clients identity and begin negotiations. My direct office line is listed below if you wish to speak to me regarding this.

Regards,

fake name
fake website
fake phone number

In reality, if I am considering entering a niche all I need is the last months stats. They will be happy to send these as they think it is just the beginnings of negotations. Unless the niche is Christmas decorations or Fireworks 1 months stats are more than enough! Don’t get greedy – the more you ask for, the more likely you will be uncovered. Of course once they give you something they can’t take it back – feel free to keep asking for more and more information in further emails until you have everything you require.

Heres some stats I picked up from a site ranking in number 1 for a keyword I am about to compete for. I’ve had this blog post written since last Wednesday, I was just waiting on these numbers coming in to publish it. I will always try and illustrate my posts with real life examples, or at least as close as I can get.

So now I have a good clear view of what the number 1 ranking site is getting in traffic. I also have full access to the exact traffic from all of his keywords. This is extremely important – I can see he got 200 visitors on Saturday but if I intend to compete largely on one keyword its useless to me if 180 of those came from long tail searches. In this site 85% of traffic is coming from a single phrase – which is absolutely perfect for my purpose. I’ve just shown the last weeks traffic above since his traffic has been consistent for the last month anyway.

Now lets take a look at a sample of the earnings: (click image to enlarge)

Again I’ve just taken a pic of a small selection to show as an example. This site is making on average $100 a day in yearly subscriptions. It takes in $36,500 a year in income – this is almost all profit since there is no physical product being shipped.

Even worst case if I outrank him on his main keyword only, 85% of his traffic and earnings is going to diverted straight to my bank account – over $30,000 per year.

I was extremely surprised at how much he was earning. He is converting traffic at a much higher rate than I thought he could.

There would have been longer ways to test this – you can use an Adwords campaign to test conversion rates, and you can use Adwords Estimator, Compete or Semrush to estimate traffic. But these are all only estimates – absolutely nothing beats factual data direct from the source.

With all the information I have to hand now, I realise if I buy the exact match domain from Sedo for £1000 and spend £2000 (estimate) on backlinks and content I am going to create a cash cow that takes 5 minutes work per week and gives me thousands of dollars a month in pure profit.

I liken this plan to looking at second hand cars – you will go see many, but a lot of them will have something wrong with them. Some sites might have their traffic spread across too many keywords, some might not be earning in the range you thought, or some might simply have poor traffic in comparison to what you anticipated. But the beauty is that once you are set up to extract information in this manner, you can send dozens of information requests extremely quickly – you only need to get one goldmine like I have shown above to make this worthwhile.

One final tip – I would concentrate on niches where you either already own an exact match domain, or you know that there is one available for sale. In this economy pretty much every domain that is parked is for sale – if there is no site on the .net, .org, .com or .co.uk you are good to go

I hope some of the people reading this can put it to good use. What do you think? Acceptable? Unethical? Good idea? Or am I going to hell?