Wouldn't it be great if you could find out who your competitors are? Wouldn't it be helpful to know how many sites are linked to them? Or how much traffic their sites are getting?

Well, you CAN!

Thanks to an incredibly handy little program called Alexa, you can easily get this information... free of charge!

Alexa is a free web navigation service that works with your browser to provide you with essential information about each web site you visit... each company you consider making a purchase from... and all of your competitors!

We have been using this powerful program religiously for almost a year now but it was not until a recent survey that we were sadly disappointed... not half as many people as we thought were using this incredibly powerful marketing tool and if you are doing business on the Internet it is critical you implement Alexa right away!

This technology provides a new approach to a major problem that people have when surfing the Internet -- finding the information you want quickly and easily can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

You see, Alexa is the first Internet software to actually learn from people!

Available to Netscape and Internet Explorer users, Alexa harnesses the collective wisdom and experience of the entire Internet community... learning and improving over time through the participation of its users. It allows you to surf smarter and more efficiently by adding human intelligence to Web navigation.

How does it work? Well, when you download Alexa, a small toolbar will appear on the side of your browser that looks like this:

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The Alexa toolbar contains a host of useful information about whatever site you happen to be visiting. Here are all of the killer features that really makes Alexa an incredibly powerful marketing tool...

• Traffic: The traffic rating feature tells you how much traffic the site you are viewing receives, based on the number of page turns made on the site by Alexa users. This feature is useful for a couple of reasons. First, if you are interested in purchasing advertising on a particular site, you can use this feature to see how much traffic the site generates...and determine from that how much you are willing to pay to advertise there. Second, you can use this feature to determine which pages at a competitor's site are most popular. This allows you the opportunity to ensure that a similar page is incorporated into your own site (But do NOT copy!).

Not only does this determine the amount of traffic that your competitors are currently receiving but it also gives you a great idea of what websites you really want linking to yours! This gives you the ability to weed out the "Somebodies" from the "Nobodies" just by browsing to their website! When you know how much traffic your potential linking partners are getting to their website you can now prioritize who you put the real effort into negotiating with!

Alexa's uses a "5 Star" ranking system to show how much traffic each website receives. If a website has 2 or more stars this is generally a very good indication of a higher traffic website and someone you would want to establish as a linking partner. The Alexa system is not perfect but it gives you a very good idea of what kind of traffic websites are receiving AND gives you the ability to compare each website against the next... to say the least there is no other system comparable to that of Alexa when it comes to determining the popularity and traffic of a particular website!

Important Note: If you are little confused or not quite sure what a "linking partner" or an "affiliate" is, it is simply this... a website that contains a link on their bsite directing visitors to your website! The easiest way to find linking partners or potential affiliates? I suggest looking in the search engines for websites that could potentially drive targeted traffic to your website. Just simply ask yourself "What type of website have the visitors that I need?", pick out the keywords that apply to those websites and query the search engines. The begin visiting the websites that the search engines return with the Alexa program and voila... you have now established your potential linking partners!

• Reviews: Written by surfers like yourself, the reviews allow you to see how other people have felt about the product or service you are interested in. This is a great way to learn what customers think about your competitor's products or services! You can then use this information to make improvements on your own product or service.

• Contact Info: For each site you visit, Alexa provides you with the site owner's address and phone number, a map and directions, and a related City Guide. You will even learn the date that the site first went online. This means that you'll always know who is behind the sites you visit -- and you will know how to get in touch with them.This feature alone makes Alexa the perfect tool for locating potential joint ventures or linking partners!

• Site Stats: This feature provides you with popularity and speed ratings, the number of links pointing to a particular site, and third party ratings and reviews. You are also given the option of voting on the site you are viewing. Again, this is the kind of critical information you need when choosing partners for a joint venture... or when checking up on your competition!

• Related Links: As you surf, Alexa suggests links that are relevant to the page you are viewing. Alexa uses crawling, archiving, categorizing and data mining techniques to build the Related Links list for millions of URLs. The day-to-day use of Related Links helps to build and refine the data by analyzing the requested URLs to determine high-level trends. This information is then used to establish relationships between web sites. From this, the top ten Related Links for each URL are chosen.

Alexa re-crawls the Web on a regular basis and rebuilds the data, pulling in new sites and refining relationships between existing sites. New sites with strong relationships to a site will automatically appear in the Related Links list, displacing any sites with weaker relationships. At times, the Related Links are questionable... but this should not be a surprise when you consider some of the bizarre results you get with search engines.

Overall, the Related Links feature is great for doing quick searches without having to waste time clicking back and forth between the search engines. And if you are using a search engine, this feature can help you even more by suggesting links that will take you directly to the same query in other search engines. This means that you do not need to type in the address of the other search engines or repeat your query.

Here are some other useful features that Alexa offers...not as important as the ones above but definitely helpful:

• News: Provides you with related news, stock quotes, financial information, key competitors, and company overviews for publicly held companies. This feature makes spying on your competitors extremely easy!

• Reference: Allows you to get answers you need instantly using Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, the Merriam Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus, and Britannica's Web Guide.

• Search: Gives you fast access to the search engine of your choice. Enter a search using HotBot, Yahoo!, AskJeeves, Excite, Infoseek, Dogpile or Altavista, click "go", and Alexa will take you straight to the information you need. Yellow Page & White Page searches are also available.

• Help: Provides a detailed help file, including fully searchable Alexa FAQs and technical support.

• One page report: Alexa's data for any given URL is available for viewing as a one-page report. The one page report provides a compact, printable report of all the information available from the Alexa service about a particular URL.

• About the data: Explains the data and how it is derived. You can use this page to view all of the information that Alexa has for a particular URL and obtain explanations of what the data means.

You also have the option of editing or removing your site information using the Alexa Site Information editor. This means that you can easily add or change customer service contact numbers...or personal contact information...to best suit your business needs.

Of course, at this point, many of you may have concerns about privacy issues. Relax!

Each Alexa user is assigned an anonymous ID number...and from that point forward, all of the Alexa users are known only by their anonymous ID numbers. Alexa has no way of correlating your user ID number with your e-mail address or other personal information that might identify you. Alexa simply does NOT create profiles of users.

Installing Alexa is very easy! Anyone using Netscape or Internet Explorer as their web browser can take advantage of this great free tool! To get your copy of Alexa for your PC please go to http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi?p=Dest_W_b_40_T1 now!

As Internet users move from one site to the next, they make valuable decisions about what they find worthwhile and what they don't. Alexa anonymously tracks these decisions so that everyone in the Internet community can benefit from them.

This makes Alexa an incredibly powerful marketing tool! It allows you to track the successes and failures of your competition... information that you can use to give your business an edge and boost your sales!

Alexa also provides information that makes finding joint ventures and linking partners exceptionally easy. Top related links are right at your fingertips along with details about traffic and how to contact the site owners.

Can you believe this service is FREE?! Take advantage of this cutting edge marketing tool today. This competitive intelligence could soon have you scooping up your competitors' share of the market!

And remember: The more people use Alexa, the more we ALL benefit!