Charles Darwin has taught us that competition is part of nature. In fact, it’s an integral part of evolution, and drives all of us to come up with creative ways to survive, or even dominate. The same is, of course, true in the context of business. You have to always be aware of what your rivals are doing in order to plot your next move and measure your own success. There are many competitor-analysis tools out there, but there’s one that’s tailor-fit for blogs and other online business, and it’s called Competitous.

Dashboard

It’s a relatively simple, free online tool that allows collaboration and analysis. First you create a project, then specify your company/website, your competitors, and add team members as you go along. The basic dashboard looks like this:

Clippings

The clippings are news items that either mention your brand or your rivals. You can rate each clipping anywhere between Very Positive to Very Negative, depending on the sentiment of the article. Any team member can add to this, and you can subscribe to these clippings via RSS feed. A bookmarklet is also available to make things easier.

Comparison Matrix

To compare your site or product’s features vs the competition, it’s also possible to create a comparison matrix, which is essentially an AJAX-based table of items that you can put checkmarks on or not. Its simple and intuitive, and gives a bird’s eye view of how you square up against others.

Traffic Graph

Using Alexa traffic data, Competitous plots your sites daily traffic rank trend against your competitors, in the same graph, using different colored lines. It’s not the most detailed or accurate comparison out there, but it has its uses.

People

You can invite other people to collaborate with you on a certain project by inviting them thru email. Whoever creates the project is assumed to be the project manager, and therefore has sole authority to remove existing users from the project. However, all members can invite new users or cancel their own invites.

All these features are rudimentary, but very useful if you’d like to organize your competitive analysis in one place, and share it with others. If you’d like a more advanced tool, the same company behind Competitous has launched RivalMap, and I’m sure I’ll also be looking at that in the near future.

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