Taking an aggressive stance to your competition is not the most productive way of running a business. However, there are times when some people just get a little too cocky and need knocking down a peg or two. If you want to put an annoying competitor in his or her place then these tips are for you.

A poster at the ihelpyou forum has an idea for a site but before he launches he wants to determine the competition for his chosen keywords. Dan Thies, a “Super Moderator” at ihelpyou, offers some fantastic advice that applies to those analyzing business model viability or hunting for some less competitive keywords to optimize for.

In the Form S-1 that Google filed with the SEC this afternoon, the search engine names the companies with whom it has the most competition with. Calling the competition “formidable,” Google gave names to the search engines it thinks will give Google the most competition.

There are many players in the battle for search engine supremacy. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the biggest, with each company seeking a dominant position in an industry that is considered to be one of the fastest growing ever.

Today’s Search Engine Strategies session titled “the Future of Search” brought representatives from Google, Yahoo, AOL and AskJeeves into the same panel.

It’s getting harder and harder to differentiate yourself from the competition these days. Especially when your competition is global, offer additional value through their stellar service, and look and sound similarly wonderful to your offering. Not to mention that the new buzz words – adding value’ and trusted advisor’ – are universal, making it even harder to distinguish what you bring to the party as being superior.

Due to a rising concern among affiliates that Froogle’s causing a drop in sales, Brittany called members of the affiliate industry to get their take.

In order to be successful online, you must provide your customers many quick and easy ways to pay for your goods and services. It is not enough to ask folks to send a money order or check to your house or place of business. You must go further.

I’m sick and tired of getting hundreds (sometimes thousands) of Joint Venture proposals per week, all claiming the same thing…

Do you know what your competition is up to? Are they gaining on you? Preparing to launch a new product? Planning an expansion? Facing bankruptcy?

Greetings from North East Scotland! I enjoy your emails very much as SEO is important to us. Would there be any chance of you reviewing our site from a SE rankings perspective? We have difficulties competing on terms against free translation providers (like Babelfish and freetranslation who have huge link pops) and would like help in overcoming this.

When Microsoft launches its 64-bit version of SQL Server at the end of April, the database will cost the same as the 32-bit version, perform better, and be part of the company’s bid to oust Oracle and IBM’s DB/2 on high-end systems.

You will always have competitors. You cannot control their activity. But you can minimize their impact on your business. Here are 3 ways you can position yourself to generate sales with little or no competition.

Perhaps you’ve seen this quote:

Strategic alliances are today commonplace among large corporations. The advantages allow these companies to successfully compete in the global marketplace. Powerful synergies are the outcropping of these alliances. Smaller companies can derive the same advantages through alliance relationships. In this article, I will focus on what I call Synergistic Partnering Alliances where competitors can realize great value by building relationships of integrity with one another.

I’m about to let you in on a secret

There’s a simple, always effective, works in any situation way that you can sell more of your product, destroy any competition you have, and literally siphon profits from others in your market.

It’s no secret that you should keep your customers close. But, you may not have heard that you should keep your competition even closer. You may have heard you should legally spy on your competition, but that’s different than keeping them close.

Freelance writing is an unstable occupation sometimes. We already have to struggle with dividing our time between marketing our skills, writing queries, and seeking out new clientele. Sometimes there’s not enough time; sometimes there’s not enough money.

C. ANTI – COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES

Any Competition Law in developing countries should, in my view, excplicitly include strict prohibitions of the following practices (further details can be found in Porter’s book – “Competitive Strategy”).

A. THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPETITION

The aims of competition (anti-trust) laws are to ensure that consumers pay the lowest possible price (=the most efficient price) coupled with the highest quality of the goods and services which they consume. This, according to current economic theories, can be achieved only through effective competition. Competition not only reduces particular prices of specific goods and services – it also tends to have a deflationary effect by reducing the general price level. It pits consumers against producers, producers against other producers (in the battle to win the heart of consumers) and even consumers against consumers (for example in the healthcare sector in the USA). This everlasting conflict does the miracle of increasing quality with lower prices. Think about the vast improvement on both scores in electrical appliances. The VCR and PC of yesteryear cost thrice as much and provided one third the functions at one tenth the speed.

You might be tempted to say: “What’s wrong with a little competition?” Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s healthy. It’s when your need to compete, and be superior to someone else, gets in the way of the best possible outcome for both of you – that’s when competition becomes a liability. I’m talking about the kind of person who always needs to be “one up” on other people.