Techniques to spy on competitor websites with WhatRuns
There is no doubt that our competitors use various digital marketing tools, plugins, or techniques to enhance the user experience and thus strengthen their online presence.
If we can know what content distributed networks (CDNs) or communication software our competitors are using, we can take advantage of them as well. Or, we can know where the "pitfalls" are, see where our competitors are failing, and not make the same mistakes.
WhatRuns is a browser extension that allows us to instantly find the technology used on any website we visit.
Just click on the extension icon and the tool displays all the technologies that support the website, categorized by relevant categories, including CMS, widgets, data analytics, web servers, programming languages, cached information, and much more.
Not only does WhatRuns provide valuable insights into a competitor's website, but it also notifies us when they deploy a new technology or abandon an existing one.
While WhatRuns isn't the best in its class, unlike most other tools, the extension takes up very little browser memory. It can provide highly accurate information, even identify the latest technologies and plugins, and most importantly, notify us within minutes as soon as any changes are detected.
All we have to do is add WhatRun to Chrome or Firefox and... Happy tracking!
There are a lot of similar tools out there
Builtwith用的比较多些
提升谷歌搜索排名：新兴关键词与Exploding Topics
Whenever we distill a set of relevant keywords, there are two main factors that can influence keyword selection – search volume and difficulty.
A common strategy adopted by many startups is to optimize content around low competition, i.e., using less difficult keywords and relatively large search volumes to bypass stiff competition and have a chance to boost search rankings on Google.
While this strategy is effective, it greatly limits our ability to create high-quality content.
- Don't think that only amazing content will be the first result in Google's search interface.
However, there is a way for us to find the top emerging topics in our field, allowing us to be among the first to post substantive content and significantly improve Google search rankings.
这个策略背后的工具是 Exploding Topics。
Developed by Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the site showcases topics in different categories, and we can see which topics are seeing a significant increase in real-time searches, but have not yet reached the upper limit.
The tool's powerful underlying algorithms cover millions of online searches, conversations, and mentions to predict search volumes over the next 15 years to help us spot emerging trends.
Many of these emerging topics contain unique, untapped keywords that are expected to be overly competitive soon.
This means that we have the opportunity to be the first to write about the topic before the track gets too crowded.
- Remember to check the content for plagiarism to avoid the penalty of duplicate content.
Plus, we can use this buffer time to get some backlinks from authoritative sources and get a spot in the top ten search results when someone searches for our target keyword.
Don't ignore its huge impact on SEO, Exploding Topics is a goldmine of insights that reveal various trends in the world that are likely to open up new paths for our business.
Gifyu.com
We usually use Giphy to upload GIFs on Indiegogo or Kickstarter pages.
But the problem with Giphy is that it comes with a trackable pixel that we need to remove first. And, if we click on the gif, it will redirect us to the Giphy.com.
This isn't a good fit because we want to keep potential customers on our page.
is another powerful tool!
It's a Gif sending and uploading tool that is fast, has no trackable pixels, and also uploads full-size GIFs.
We can also use Gifyu to host files on our computer or in a URL. The tool supports multiple image uploads and accepts PNG, JPG, GIF, and BMP image files up to 100MB.
Hexomatic
If data is needed to make better, more efficient decisions for marketing campaigns, it's the perfect solution.
It's a good friend that doesn't need to "knock code" and can be used for growth strategies and automated tasks such as data collection.
We can scrape and use information about products, listings, and pricing, which will help market and position our business in a smarter way.
In addition, with Hexomatic, we can further optimize the process of collecting and storing new data and use it for automated sequences. Whether it's needing any specific document, getting search engine optimization data, or performing the various queries needed in the marketing process of your business, it's incredibly helpful. Finally, we can tailor all of these automated processes to our own requirements and needs.
Taskeo project management solution
Whether you're running one project at a time, or working on several projects at once, a good project management tool is paramount.
With this app, we can organize the team's tasks, manage the workload and control deadlines.
If you're looking for an easy-to-use tool for any size business.
With its extensive and feature-rich toolkit, we can control everything from daily to-dos, to project milestones, budgets, workloads, and more.
Taskeo helps us visualize task flows, workflows, and projects. It's a simple but effective way to give teams a clear picture of the project priorities and order of work for a task. Most project management tools, including Taskeo, offer visualizations to help us get a clear picture of what's going on.
Content Studio
When it comes to an all-in-one solution for marketing needs, it's our go-to platform.
Content studio can provide comprehensive insights to help small businesses and agencies market their business properly in order to get the results they want.
In addition to scheduling and posting on social media in bulk, it also allows us to discover trending content and plan for it in our editorial and social calendars.
We can create an evergreen ad for the most popular blog posts, ensuring that no traffic is lost on social media.
Content studio's media library, built-in Canva post design, trending hashtag suggestions, social inbox, and more have made it easy to manage our work.
On top of that, it also has a robust competitor analysis that allows us to develop a better social media strategy for our brands.
The social platforms it supports include Medium, WordPress, YouTube, Dailymotion, GMB, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram, among others.
Social Blade
Want to gain a deeper understanding of user growth and trends?
Try it, it's the leader in digital media journalism and the best authoritative tool that can help us track user statistics on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Twitter with one click!
Install to keep track of all the important statistics.
Segment
is an extension for data analysis that provides us with additional data and off-site data.
As a result, we can track attribution and behavioral performance separately, such as "scroll down", "page redirect", "search intent", and "page views", rather than directly getting an aggregated piece of data.
This tool can track the path of users before they finally convert and analyze them. It's open-source and free!
SocialBee.io
is a social media marketing tool that allows us to post content to all our social media profiles with one click. It is an easy-to-use social media management tool that helps businesses get the most out of their social profiles.
Do you want to publish fresh content on a regular basis? By using SocialBee, we will save a lot of time because we can easily automate the process.
Not only can we enjoy a user-friendly interface, but we can also categorize the content like a top social media expert.
This way, our audience can enjoy the best mix of content.
Key Benefits of SocialBee:
- SocialBee allows us to recycle evergreen content.
- We can easily import content from various sources and edit it in different formats.
- We can publish and customize content for the following platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Instagram，Pinterest和Google My Business。
- We can generate our own release plans based on the best practices for each platform.
- SocialBee's collaboration features help our team collaborate efficiently.
Venngage
Don't know much about design, but want to create killer infographics for your content?
Infographics are the most user-friendly online infographic maker.
This tool allows us to create infographics from thousands of professionally designed templates, with hundreds of icons, charts, templates, fonts, and colors to customize our design as we like.
5 Best Features of Venngage:
- Brand Kit – Save and apply our own style
- Get free access to thousands of icons, charts, and maps
- Team Collaboration – Add and manage team members to our account to make communication and editing seamless.
- Upload up to 500 images of yourself
- Advanced photo editor
- Photo gallery with access to thousands of stock photos
Citable Extension
It's a very useful tool to collect quotes, notes, and other data in spreadsheets, making it easier for us to do our research!
The main benefits of this tool include:
- Collect and save information on Autopilot
- Automatically save page titles, URLs, and dates
- The information we save can be easily accessed with the click of a button
- Add tags to organize your notes and speed up your analysis
- You don't need to save bookmarks
- Export information to create a bibliography
- Print the saved note
Woobox.com
is an app that runs a lot of social media campaigns, sweepstakes, quizzes, lead forms, or any other interactive content.
The platform allows us to track our visitors, statistics, and traffic through a campaign dashboard.
It only takes two steps to set it up: upload the file and click the LIVE button!
Mailtracker extension
As email tracking technology evolves, we like it more and more. The tool shows when, where, how many times a message was opened, and to whom it was forwarded.
Calendly.com
Remember how you struggled to match schedules and schedule meetings?
Sending emails back and forth until you finally agree on the "meet someday" thing?
If you need to schedule regular meetings with clients or partners, it's a tool to find and schedule free time.
We can select preferred and blackout dates, available times, meeting lengths, and a few events per day, and then share the link.
The time they choose will be automatically added to our calendar!
Increase website conversions with Poptin
Increasing website conversions can be a painful endeavor. There are a lot of things we need to consider – such as improving website speed, providing a better user experience, and so on.
But all of this is difficult to achieve, costly, and requires a lot of resources. On the other hand, using popups is one of the fastest ways to increase your conversion rate.
The pop-up is triggered by the user's actions and appears at the right time. The sole goal of popups is to help us convert more people into customers and email subscribers.
By utilizing pop-ups, we can convert twice as many people with eye-catching design, great copy, and great quotes.
However, the biggest problem lies in how to create these pop-ups. Without specific tools, designing and developing popups manually can be very difficult (and expensive).
Luckily, tools like this allow us to create beautiful popups in a very short period of time, increasing conversions.
EESEL: Organize all your documents and tools
I often switch between various productivity tools, but Eesel's customizability and simplicity are second to none.
Our documents and digital marketing tools can be automatically categorized, and each time a new browser tab is opened, we can display it with a cleaner overlay.
Previously, I mainly accessed the "Source/Medium" tab from the Google Analytics homepage. So every time I go through a few steps before opening it successfully.
Now I can simply click on the Google Analytics icon on Eesel, bypass these complicated operations, and select "Source/Medium" from the most frequently visited tab to open the page I want right away. It's very convenient!
We can also add any tools we like to use, remove the ones we hardly use, and personalize our Eesel interface.
It also allows searching based on the title and content of the document, so we don't have to go through folders every time.
Not only that, but it's free and easy to install, with no registration or integration with other tools.
Use Google search like a pro
Google is very good at finding what we're looking for.
But there are some lesser-known tricks, or what we might call "operators". These operators can help us display the most relevant results, making our Google searches very effective.
Let's take a look at some of the most popular operators!
When searching for exact words or phrases, a common strategy is to enclose them in quotation marks.
Let's say "tech editor" – this is a classic PR search! Just by putting quotation marks, we can exclude all irrelevant results that could affect the SERPs.
Let's say we want to find all the technical editors in a particular medium. In this case, we can use the "site:domain" operator to let Google search only within a given domain.
For example, the combination of "site: Mashable.com" + "tech editor" will ensure that Google only gives a list of technical editors for Mashable.com pages.
We can easily swap the domain name for another media outlet and search for profiles of other journalists in the same technical field.
Alternatively, we could take a different strategy and search not by journalist profile, but by topic, while still narrowing it down to the same domain.
Type "site: mashable.com gadgets" into the search bar, and Google will display all the articles about "gadgets" on Mashable.com. A quick glance at them will reveal their authors.
Pro tip: Be sure to filter by time to see only the most recent articles.
The niche in which journalists work turns out to be very volatile. So it's quite possible that a tech editor from 5 years ago is now a market trend analyst, or who knows, maybe a lifestyle guru!
Sometimes, we may need to look for articles with some exact words in the title – I guess we're not the only ones we need to do, otherwise Google wouldn't have assigned a separate search directive to speed up that particular search.
Simply combine "intitle" with the keyword we want to search for in the search bar, and you can search for all articles that contain that keyword in the title.
In the example below, I didn't define a single site to narrow down my search, so the results spanned hundreds of different domains!
There's another cool combination – we can search for journalists based on their LinkedIn profile information.
Type "site: LinkedIn.com intitle:[publication name] + "[position]" and Google will display a set of LinkedIn profiles with the corresponding media name and location.
When you use a different operator "related:domain", Google will show all websites that are similar to that domain.
In answering my question below, Google has done a great job of identifying TechCrunch, TNW, Wired, and dozens of other top media outlets that publish technology-oriented content, just like Engadget.
We've only scratched the surface today, but Google also has a ton of more advanced search operators that, if quickly tweaked in various combinations, can significantly narrow down the search, allowing us to quickly extract the most relevant results from the vast amount of information.
Read more and dive into multi-level Google searches!
Remember, mastering Google search is half the job of a PR campaign!
SparkToro
As we all know, market research can be very difficult.
Traditional forms and interviews often produce very few responses, leaving aside the issue of selection bias in reported data, which is almost always unavoidable.
Still, in order to do great marketing, we need to understand our audience – how much time they spend online, what they watch, and who they listen to or follow.
Only in this way can we build a customer image that is most in line with the potential buyer.
Founded by Moz Rand Fishkin, SparkToro is at its core a vast database of different profiles and their behaviors, aggregated by scraping billions of websites and social accounts online.
By typing the target audience (e.g. "architects") into the search bar, we will learn about the popular podcasts that architects listen to, the websites they often visit, the keywords they use in their social bios. Even the hashtags they label their posts, everything is at their fingertips.
We can even dig down and search for a specific geographic location.
Digify.com – Information Security Guardian
Looking for an effective way to share confidential information with other companies or partners? With Digify, we can protect, track, and most importantly ...... Watermark your document.
Imagine Google Docs – but with the addition of a file self-destruct feature.
Imagine cloud files – but with special permissions for print and download capabilities.
For all those who are obsessed with data security, it also allows us to track the access of documents with location and IP address details.
writeon.io
When we are unable to copy text from a particular website....this tool shines.
What if I told you that with this digital marketing tool we can not only copy, but also edit texts, save and share them with colleagues...
open-startups.xyz
open-startups is a movement started by Buffer where startups run and openly share their stats such as metrics such as revenue, users, and traffic.
It's a success story where we can openly look at other companies' data and use it, "be a part of that growth."
HARO paid keywords
HARO is a great platform to help us quickly find sources and journalists.
We receive three emails per day related to pre-defined interests.
To get the right, targeted keyword notifications, there are three different packages available depending on intent and budget.
Toast – Safari & Chrome 扩展程序
If you're a research geek, you often have 125 tabs open at the same time... Then tracking and following is difficult.
Or, are you using 2 or more browser windows, working on multiple projects at the same time?
is a session management tool, very lightweight and easy to use, which allows us to organize tabs into sessions to save all tabs.
By using Toast, we can:
- Save and open all tabs with one click
- Name the session and see the full list
- Open or open a link URL in bulk
- Add a new tab from an open window
- Update or copy the label
- Make workflows more efficient
- Save RAM on your computer's memory
- Keep your personal and work life clean and organized
It's a great tool. My computer doesn't have a lot of memory, but I really like to open a lot of tabs... So, I was able to save them and use the browser normally.
Wispform.com
With us, we can create beautiful interactive forms and questionnaires in a matter of minutes.
It's a simple tool for building ideas, surveys, and quizzes.
The alternative to this tool is that for just $10/mo, you get access to all the premium features.
Manually add subscribers to ManyChat
ManyChat recently introduced a new feature that allows us to manually add subscribers to include in our email or SMS marketing campaigns.
To access the feature, click on "Create A New Contact" in the top right corner of the ManyChat interface and fill in the prospect's phone number or email address, as well as their first and last name.
Needless to say, before adding a prospect to our subscriber list, we first need to seek permission from the prospect.
Otherwise, our spam tactics can damage brand reputation and damage trust among potential customers.