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A Guest Post by Lior Levin

Like most people new to Internet marketing, when I first started out, I made the mistake of believing that the Google keyword tool was the only accurate source of information and whatever Googleâs tools said had to be treated as gospel. Boy, was I wrong! Not only are there plenty of other tools out there, they are actually a lot more accurate with their numbers because they are impartial.

Googleâs goal is to make money, which they do from advertisers, so they care little about Internet marketers trying to make a living and their tools tend to reflect this bias. However, Iâm here to tell you about a secret weapon no Internet marketer worth his salt should be without and that is SpyFu.com.

Competitive Data and Keyword Research

SpyFu is a comprehensive, online keyword research tool that also offers SEO and PPC tools to allow you to spy on your competition. This online tool will allow to uncover vast amounts of data on your competition, including their daily PPC budget, their keywords, bid prices, how many clicks they get per day and much more. All you have to do is enter the domain name of the site you want to analyze and you are then presented with a plethora of information.

SpyFu allows you to also view the top organic rankings, the best performing ads and the SEO rankings for any of your competitors. It also features a list of the Top 100 Adsense keywords in terms of CPC.

You can also work backwards, by analyzing a specific keyword. You will be offered such information as the number of advertisers bidding on that particular keyword, the price range being paid per click and even the ads and links to the landing pages of the advertisers in question.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

One of the things I like most about SpyFu is that the information they provide is straightforward, with no secret formulas. You can see the complete history of a keyword, from how often a certain domain used a keyword in their campaign, to the highest and lowest CPC. It also allows provides information on when the ad copy was changed, which I find extremely useful. If Iâm targeting a similar keyword, then I can always analyze the ad copy to see which approach delivered the best results.

The competitive data SpyFu provides is invaluable and I use it for almost every project I work on. After all, to beat the competition you have to know the competition and you would be surprised how much facts and figures can reveal about a competitors marketing strategy. I also save a lot of time by analyzing my competitorâs landing pages and ad copy. For example, if a certain ad has been in use for a while and hasnât been changed, you can be sure that it is performing well. You can then use the ad copy in question as inspiration when crafting your own PPC ads.

However, SpyFu does have its limitations and I have found it to be somewhat inaccurate when it comes to the daily PPC budget of a competitor. While this information might not be important to you if you donât do PPC, it is critical to any PPC-based campaign. After all, the budget you set plays a critical role in the ranking of your ad.

Despite its few limitations, I still find SpyFu to be one of the most effective market research tools available online. It certainly delivers much more realistic figures in terms of CPC, search volume and number of advertisers, offering a more accurate overview of a certain market or niche.

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This outstanding review was written by Lior Levin who is a consultant to 123 neon signs, and also works with an online task management startup.
You can find Lior on Twitter as Liors

Thank you, Lior. You’re welcome back here anytime.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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A Guest Post by Lior Levin

The Internet has put more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, at the same time, given us more to remember. As great as the digital age has been, itâs also been a nightmare for organization, giving us more mental clutter than we ever thought possible.

Fortunately, developers are finding new ways to use the Web to help people stay organized. In every area from finance to news, new Web-based tools are cropping up to help you stay organized and avoid information overload.

Though they target different challenges, their goals are are all the same: Filter out the information that one doesnât need and ensure that the info you do need is available and easily accessible.

That is something all these tools do very well.

Contacts: Gist

Being on the Web means that we have an ever-increasing contact list and those contacts have an also-increasing number of means of contact. Between email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and more, it can be hard to keep track of who we know, where they are and what they are up to.

Gist, however, makes it easy, by syncing up with your various accounts, it unifies your contact list into one easily-digested list that is sorted by importance and includes all means of contact.

Finances: Mint

As great as online banking is, most of us have multiple accounts and our finances spread across more and more companies. Fortunately, Mint makes it easy to view all of these accounts in one place, by accessing your various banking, loans and credit accounts and then displaying the information in one place, making it easier than ever to get a clear picture of your finances.

Best of all, since Gist automatically categorizes your purchases, you can easily see where your money is going and where you can save money.

Files: Dropbox

If you use more than one computer, the frustration of having to more files from one machine to another are well-known. Though flash drives and email can help, they are clunky and slow solutions. Fortunately, Dropbox can help.

Dropbox automatically synchronizes files between computers, without you having to do anything. It just runs in the background and when a file is changed on one computer, the other machines on the account get the update almost instantly. Also great for collaboration and backup.

Social Networks: Tweetdeck (Chrome App)

If you are like most people, you have at least a few different social networking profiles spread across several different sites. Keeping track of them all can be a huge pain. Fortunately, Tweetdeckâs new Chrome Application, which is a Web-based HTML5 app, lets you follow your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare accounts and more all from one multi-column pane.

Best of all, with merged columns you can get all of your private communications (IE: Twitter DMs and Facebook messages) in one stream, regardless of where they came from.

Documents: Google Docs

Though Google Docs is best known as a tool for editing and creating files on the Web, through features like easy sharing, folders and document upload, it is also a way to organize and access your critical files anywhere you need them.

While it isnât ideal for all document types, most simple documents can be easily used with Google Docs, making it a natural way to keep your files handy, no matter where you are.

Incoming Links: Zite

Between our Twitter streams, RSS feeds and other sites we follow, many of us have far more links in our inbox than we could ever read. Zite, which is currently in closed beta, calls itself âYour Personal Web Filterâ and it goes through all of that to find the stories most important and most interesting for you.

Most interesting of all, Zite learns from your behavior and is always honing its approach to what you find interesting, making it a tool that gets better the more you use it.

Task List: Producteev

Busy people have a lot of deadlines but keeping track of those deadlines can be a real pain. Though calendars can help, especially with meetings and appointments, there are many tasks that just arenât right for calendars like laundry or sending out birthday cards.

Producteev helps organize those tasks and, through integration with email, IM and an iPhone app, makes it easy to ad tasks and receive updates on them. is also great for managers who need to assign tasks and deadlines to a team as it has a built-in function for group management as well.

In the end, the Web has both done more to make our lives more cluttered and more to simplify it than any innovation before. We have more information being thrown at us than we ever thought possible and more ways to sort, organize and parse it than we did just a few years ago.

When itâs all said and done, the Web is just a tool and weâll get out of it exactly what we put into it. If we let it drive us to insanity, it can do so. But if we make it a tool to organize and streamline our lives, it can do that just as easily.

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This outstanding review was written by Lior Levin who is a consultant to iAdvize, a live chat support software company. You can find Lior on Twitter as Liors

Thank you, Lior. You’re welcome back here anytime.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

I’m a proud affiliate of