You may think spying on your competition sounds a little dirty, but if you’re a savvy marketer, it’s something you’ll want to do. While I don’t advocate copying your competitors’ products, marketing tactics or copy, you can still learn a lot from your competitors and be inspired by them to come up with ideas of your own. So here are 5 places you can easily keep an eye on them:

1. Newsletter
Sign up for your competitors’ mailing lists. Things to take note of:

• newsletter frequency (weekly, monthly, daily)
• subject lines (Do they focus on what’s new in store? Do they pitch special offers?)
• newsletter content (Is it entertaining? How long is the newsletter? Is it informative? Is it just full of promotions?)
• newsletter format (Is it colorful? Is it bulleted? Does it use a lot of images? How did they design their calls to action?)
• special offers and promotions (What promotions are they running? BOGOs? A percentage based discount? Free shipping?)

If the competitors are running a certain kind of promotion over and over, that could indicate that it’s been successful. If they’re doing subject lines that lead with discounts, that could indicate that those types of subjects are getting a better open rate for them.

2. Social Media
Follow the competition on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Pay attention to the content they generate and how fans of their brands interact with them. Are people complaining about the competition on Twitter? If so it might be a good opportunity to woo their customers away.

Is the competition making hilarious Youtube videos and scoring truckloads of views? Maybe it’s time to produce a funny video of your own.

How does the competition use social media? Do they entertain? Do they inform? Do they delve into behind the scenes? How do their customers react to their posts? Do their customers seem engaged by their content? Do their follow/fan counts go up or down?

3. Google’s Link Search
See who’s giving your competitors links. Plug link:competitorurl.com into Google and search away. (You would enter your competitor’s url of course.) This should give you some ideas on how to get links to your own website. Are they in certain directories? Are they linked by coupon websites? Are they linked on Squidoo lenses or blogs? Take note of where they’ve received links and then try to get those types of links for your own site.

4. Press page
If the competition has a press page, take note of where they’ve received press. Chances are the same publications will give you press, so you may as well add them to your press list. Make sure you check out each press outlet to see if it’s truly a match for your brand. For example, if you and the competition both sell jewelry but your competitor got into Cat Fancy because she has a cat necklace in her collection, that doesn’t mean you’ll get into Cat Fancy too, unless you also have cat themed jewelry.

Take note of which items your competitor got press for. This might tell you what’s hot right now, but it will also give you insight into the particular taste of the publications that gave the competition press.

5. Website
Notice what’s new on your competitors’ websites. What new products are they pushing? Do they have any promotional specials or sales going on? Notice what they have on clearance that they’re trying to get rid of, this could be an indicator of an item that didn’t sell well.

Some sites will flat-out say what items are their best sellers, and you can use this information to look for clues about pricing, product design or sales copy. Some sites won’t tell you what their best sellers are by may feature their best sellers in a splash image on their home page.

Bonus spy tactic: You can put the names of your competitors into Google Alerts and get an alert every time they’re mentioned online. Doing this may result in an overwhelming amount of information so you may want to do this sparingly.

A final word of warning: Don’t assume your competitors have it all figured out. While it’s fine to see what they’re up to, don’t base major business decisions solely on the competition’s playbook. The competition isn’t always right. Thus, they should be A source of ideas, not THE source of ideas.