Vic Strizheus’s Secret Weapon for Finding Where Competitors Buy Traffic

Vic Strizheus opens the last lesson of Traffic Mastery by admitting something he says he doesn’t usually share: the exact tool he uses to find new traffic sources before anyone else has bothered to look. He pulls up a live screen, types in a competitor’s website, and within a minute has a full picture of where that competitor’s visitors are coming from, down to the specific site names and monthly visitor counts. Nothing about it is theoretical. He runs the search on camera and narrates what shows up as it loads.

How do you find out where a competitor’s traffic actually comes from?

my personal secret weapon to uncovering new traffic sources

That’s how he introduces Compete.com, and the demonstration backs it up. He opens ClickBank’s marketplace, filters to a niche, and picks the top-selling product in it, a weight loss offer pulling in roughly 1.8 million visitors in its best recorded month. He pastes the site’s URL into Compete.com and pulls up its incoming traffic report: a full breakdown of every site sending that competitor visitors, complete with how many each one delivered the previous month.

What do you actually do with a list like that?

This is where the lesson turns from interesting to actionable. If a site is sending a competitor real volume, month after month, that traffic is very likely converting, otherwise the competitor wouldn’t keep buying it. So instead of guessing where to advertise, you go straight to the sites already proven to send buyers to someone in your exact niche. He walks through the same process on Empower Network’s own site, checking where its traffic came from historically, and even spots a smaller advertising network, ClickSense, in the referral list, then clicks straight through to it to check the numbers.

He doesn’t stop at one layer either. Once he’s found a referring site, he checks that site’s own incoming traffic too, tracing the chain back another step to see if there’s an even earlier source worth going straight to, cutting out a middleman along the way if one exists. It’s less a single lookup than a habit of following the trail as far as it actually leads.

He’s also transparent that this whole approach only works on traffic that’s already proven itself. He isn’t guessing which sites might convert, he’s reading a record of what’s already been paid for repeatedly by someone with a real budget on the line.

A short version of the process he demonstrates:

• Find a top competitor’s URL from a marketplace like ClickBank, in whatever niche you’re in.
• Run it through Compete.com’s incoming traffic report to see every site sending them visitors.
• Prioritize sites on a visible upward growth trend rather than ones that peaked years ago.
• Go directly to those sites, or the ad network behind them, and buy placement there yourself.

Why does Vic Strizheus recommend the costlier plan over the cheap one?

He’s upfront that Compete.com isn’t cheap, and he doesn’t dress that up. As Vic Strizheus puts it, “I pay $650 a month for this”, and he says he’d happily pay more given what it returns for his business. He specifically steers you away from the cheaper entry-level plan, since it strips out the incoming and outgoing traffic reports, the exact feature that makes the whole tool worth using in the first place. Paying more for the plan that actually includes the traffic intelligence beats paying less for one that doesn’t.

He’s also candid about who this is and isn’t for. If the cost doesn’t make sense for your business yet, he tells you plainly not to stress about it, just to know the resource exists for when you’re ready to use it. As he puts it in this same session, “if you want to play like a pro you gotta pay”, and Compete.com is one of the clearest examples of that trade-off: a real cost for a real edge over marketers still guessing at where to advertise next.

What makes this closing lesson land is that it isn’t abstract advice to go research your competition. It’s a specific site, a specific search box, and a specific list of names you can go buy traffic from this afternoon, once you’re ready for the tool that surfaces them.

The full session shows the entire Compete.com walkthrough on screen, start to finish. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

all right so I'll get straight to the chase here right here what you see on the screen compete.com okay is my personal secret weapon to uncovering new traffic sources to pursue to explore to test you name it okay on the ongoing basis now I will just walk you through this in this video and just show you how it works okay and you know what there is there's a lot of different stuff out there you can go after me you can google it you know you can you can go to quantcast.com you can go to and get you know all kinds of keyword you know research tools and spy intelligence thing is and and whatever whatever whatever right but listen I'll just tell you what I personally use okay I don't use a ton of software I use compete.com almost religiously okay it's not cheap this is not for everybody but that's what I use you and I'm gonna show you what I use again I'm not gonna tell you one thing and you know and do something different I will literally show you what I do you know to uncover how do I uncover new traffic sources now that's of course in addition to you know to just common sense type stuff what I already covered in the last video you know like when I'm on a particular website and I and the site is kind of targeted to what I have to promote right I'll just see if there is an advertisement link or advertise with us type opportunity on that particular site so you know I can strike a relationship with a site owner right there right why not I use a lot of the networks you know what I already showed you in this in this you know in the traffic getting mastery or traffic mastery course I use all of that stuff okay I use all the networks and everything that I showed you thus far okay I personally use in my business okay I would not tell you I would not teach you anything from just theory I I will not show you anything that's something I just heard about, you know.

So just kind of keep that in mind, all right? And when it comes to traffic intelligence, I use Compete.com exclusively, you know. And so I'm just going to show you. I think it will be fair for you to at least know what it is, okay?

And maybe when you get to the point to where you're ready for getting your Compete.com account, you can check it out, you know. So what is Compete.com? Well, Compete.com, you can actually go to their site and you can check it out. It's a pretty nifty little site here.

When we go start my free trial, I believe they offer like a free trial for like a day. Of course, you can watch this video here to get a little bit of information about what they do. Basically, there is a way. Using Compete.com, I can put in any kind of website.

Okay? And I can research. I can see where that website is getting the traffic from. I can see where that website is sending traffic to.

I can see, you know, what keywords they are bidding on to get their traffic. I can see all kinds of stuff, okay, which I'm going to show you in a moment here, okay? And that's enough for me to uncover some of the, you know, some of the, you know, new traffic methods and start exploring them, start testing them out. And all that good stuff.

Now, let me give you a couple tips here, okay? So, when you go to select your plan, obviously, as you can see, this thing is not cheap. But you know what? I would have gladly paid, you know, even more than $649 a month, which is my plan right now.

Because this, I mean, for the return that it brings me to my business, I mean, it's unmatched. I mean, I pay $650 a month for this. And I'm happy to do that, you know, because of this. This stuff that it allows me to do in my business.

Now, of course, you know, $650 a month is a good car payment. You know, heck, it might be a house payment for some people, right? So, you might say, Vic, you're crazy. So, that's why I'm telling you this is not for everybody.

But you need to know about this, you know, when you get to the point to where you are ready for something like this. Then, you know, you can come and check it out, right? Now, you're going to say, well, why can't I just do, you know, a $200 a month plan? Well, I wouldn't recommend this one because you don't have…

Incoming and outgoing traffic intelligence included in the intro package, okay? If you're going to go for it, go for the advanced because this is going to give you what you really need, which is incoming and outgoing traffic, custom dashboards, visitor demographics, all that good stuff, okay? Paid organic keywords. That's really what you need.

Now, here's something cool. You can actually start a free trial for 24 hours, okay? So, you can actually enter your credit card in here. And they will not charge your credit card for the first 24 hours.

So, if you want to go like a hog, if you want to go crazy with it for the first 24 hours and then just cancel your account real quick, I would not recommend you do that. I don't think it's fair, you know, for the company. I don't think it's, you know, like I wouldn't want to do… I wouldn't want, you know, somebody to do that for my company, you know, for my products.

You know, get a free trial and just kind of take advantage of me like that. You know, I don't think it's fair. You know, so, again, you do what you think is right for you. You know, I would say if you cannot afford $650 a month, don't worry about it.

You know, come back to it when you're ready. But at least you know that's there. At least you can, you know, you know where to come to, okay? All right, so, let's go back here.

I'm going to go ahead and log into my account here really quickly. And we are going to… I'm going to show you how this thing works. Okay, so this is a dashboard.

Now, I'm going to make it very, very easy for you, okay? Let's go and let's hop over to ClickBank. ClickBank has a giant marketplace, okay, of people, you know, all kinds of categories and things that we can look into. Okay, I'll just keep it, you know, very generic, okay?

Let's say that I'm promoting, you know, whatever. Let's say I'm into health and wellness, okay? It's a giant niche. Let's just go there, health and wellness.

And I'm going to, you know, say if I have a product, okay, that I'm promoting in this particular niche. And keep in mind, this can be for any niche, okay? But I will just hop over here to ClickBank, and I want to know what my competitors are up to, okay? And so, if you have a product in, you know, health and wellness niche, a good kind of, a good place to go to check out some of your competitors would be ClickBank Marketplace, okay?

Because there's a bunch of, there's like, let's see how many. There's 232. Actually, there is 2,312 products, as you can see here, okay? Selling on ClickBank, just in the health and wellness niche alone, okay?

So, I'm going to sort them by popularity, all right? So, this product right here is selling for $47, and they are number one, okay? The Venus Factor, okay? So, it seems to me that it has to do something with women.

But I want to know, okay, if I have a similar product, for example, right? So, this is their website. Hello, the following presentation does not apply to men and is only… So, only for women, blah, blah, blah, okay?

What I'm going to do is I'm going to go here, and I'm going to copy their website URL without the www, okay? Just copy the site url.com. I'm going to come back to compete.com, and I'm going to paste it in here, okay? Now, check it out, check it out, check it out, check it out.

It's going to take a minute or so, maybe a little bit less than a minute, but it's going to gather. It's going to go out there, and it's going to gather everything that… It knows about venusfactor.com, okay? So, check this out.

It shows me how many visitors they're getting, okay, per month. 689,000. See how they're kind of on a growth trend of over a million visitors? 1.8 million visitors, okay, in March of 2014, okay?

1.7 million visitors in, you know, April of 2014, okay? See? That's a big… That's a big…

That's a big… That's a big, big jump, all right? So, kind of gives me that, okay? That's cool.

It gives me, you know, the unique visitors, all right? Page views, visits, all this stuff is good, okay? Now, check it out. We are here.

Search referrals, okay? See this? These are the keywords that this site is advertising on, okay? And these are the keywords that brings traffic to this website, okay?

I can click on full report, and here… If I was to do a pay-per-click campaign or something like that, right, I know exact keywords that they are bidding on to get their traffic. Make sense? How powerful is this?

Seriously, like, how powerful is this, okay? That's awesome, isn't it? Now, there's a bunch of stuff you can do on here. I'm not going to give you a tutorial on Compete.com, but here's what I'm going to show you.

I'm going to go to incoming traffic, okay, right here, incoming traffic, and what it's going to do is it will give me… It will show me every single website that is sending traffic to venusfactor.com, okay? How crazy is that? Literally, by looking at this, I can see, you know, how many visitors they're getting from which site, okay?

Facebook, you can see here, you know, 311,000 last month, okay? ClickBank, so this is their affiliate, probably affiliate network, 234,000 visitors, okay? Tips.com. So if I was in a similar niche promoting similar product, I can go here, I can see Tips.com sends them 107,000 visitors just last month alone, guess what I'm going to do?

I can go to tips.cm, okay, and I can buy some advertisements from tips.cm, can't I, okay? Because that's where my competitor is getting their traffic from, right? And if they got 107,000 visitors from, you know, tips.cm, guess what? Do you think that traffic is probably converting?

Well, you know, logic tells me if it wasn't converting, do you think that would pay to get 100,000 visitors from that site? Probably not. Does that make sense? You see where I'm getting at right here, my friend?

So literally, I'm cutting down my research, I'm cutting down a lot of the unknowns and a lot of the kind of hidden factors, and I just go straight and see where they're getting their traffic, where my competitor are getting traffic, U.S. Magazine, right? 84,000. So if I wanted to advertise, you know, something similar, I'm going to go to U.S.

Magazine, right? 84,000. I'm going to go there and get in front of similar groups of people. I know exactly where to go.

And because they are getting a bunch of traffic from those places, it's probably converting, otherwise they would not be getting traffic from those places, okay? And I would just go and advertise. So literally, boom, go to those sites, right? I mean, this is crazy, okay, right here.

All these sites, and I can just go to those sites, and I can see where they're getting their traffic at. Now, for example, we can go and, you know, that's right here, woman101.info, okay? I can click on this site. And what it's going to do is it will pull all kinds of data about that site for me, okay?

So I'll just give it a second here because it's doing all its competitive, you know, intelligence in the background here. And I can see where this site is getting their traffic from, okay? So this is woman101.info now, and, you know, as you can see here, this site doesn't get a whole bunch of traffic, I mean, like 41,000 visitors a month, okay? But this can be very, very, very super-targeted.

And then I can see where they're getting their traffic from and that kind of stuff. I mean, you can really dig deep into this, right, and you can see where they're sending their traffic, you know? So let's take a look at another one here, okay? Let's go back to ClickBank here, and let's pick another category, okay?

Hopefully you can see how powerful this thing is, okay? What do you want to pick? You want to pick games. Let's say you, you know, you're selling games, right?

And this is the, you know, Dynasty WoW. Now I'm going to tell you, I'm not a big game freak, so I don't know, you know, too much about games. I guess that's not my territory per se, but, you know, let's see what this is going to come up, okay? What this is going to show us.

Let's paste this site in here, give it a few seconds here to gather its, do its trick behind the scenes. Give it a few seconds here, all right? And it's going to come back, and it's going to show us their traffic sources, so 15,000, eh, nah, nah, that's something that's not, that's probably going to be a bad example here, okay? Let's take a look at this.

Let's take a look at, let's take a look at Empower, Empower Network, okay? And we're going to enter it in here, EmpowerNetwork.com, which is a network marketing company, okay? We can see their kind of growth trending, you know, where they're going, all right? Over here, how they're, how they're performing.

They're performing with traffic, so last month they had 221,000, so it looks like their best month was like 1.6 million, 1.7 million was their best month in 2012, okay? And these are unique visitors, and now it's, you know, 221,000 and so forth, okay? Anyway, so if I want to know where their traffic is coming from, okay, I can go here, and I can see, you know, of course it gives you all kinds of demographics, you know, age, all right? Okay?

Income for, for families, right, gender, male, female, all that stuff, okay? Now incoming traffic, see that? It tells me where their traffic is coming from, okay, Google, you know, Facebook, Clicksense, 30,000 visitors, okay, Internet Traffic Formula, ha, look at that, we just did a launch, you know, through them for Internet Traffic Formula, you know, brought in 23,000 visitors just to, you know. Just to their site alone from just our launch, still up there, okay, that's cool.

So but, but you see where I'm coming from though, right? Clicksense, okay, so let's click, click on Clicksense right here, okay, and, and take a look at what that's gonna lead us to, okay? What I'm looking for is I'm looking for specific websites that I can go to, okay, to get traffic. Now I want the website to hopefully be on a growth, upwards growth trend, okay?

So for traffic. So kind of like this right here, see how, how they kind of had their ups and downs over the years, right, 2012, and then they're kind of on the upwards scale, with 156,000 visitors last month, okay, perfect. So I can either go to clicksense.com, okay, and let's just go there, see what the site is gonna look like, okay, right here, okay. So.

Okay. So I can advertise directly on clicksense.com, okay, I can go advertise, manage my pay to click, okay, advertising, boom, I can buy a net right here. See how simple it is? See how easy that was, right?

Now if I did not have this, right, if I did not have this information right here, I may or may not have found clicksense.com, does that make sense? So but now I know that there is, you know, people like Empower Network got like over, whatever the number was, I forgot, you know, you know, a few, you know, tens of thousands of visitors from clicksense.com, I can go here and I can check them out, right? I can see for $134, okay, I can get $100,000 ad credits. Now I have no idea what all this stuff means right now yet, but I'm gonna check them out, right?

I might, what I'm looking for is an ability for me to just run an ad, right, look at that, more than 2.5 million registrations. I'm gonna look at that ad, I'm gonna look at that ad and look at all the ads that are registered members worldwide that are eager to see what you have to offer, okay? More than 50 million ad views per month and with several advertising options available for you, where sure you're gonna find the right campaign, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay? So but again, you get the point, right?

This is how you can use compete.com, right, to gather your intelligence. Now I can also click on, right, clicksense and we can see their incoming traffic. okay we can see where their traffic is coming from and then we can dig deeper and we can check out some of these sites as well okay so you know maybe we can go to this site i'm not going to do that right now but you get the point right uh and maybe because their traffic is coming from some of these sites i will check out some of these sites as well all right maybe i can bypass click sense.com you know period if you know they're acting as a middleman and they're getting their traffic from all of these sites maybe i can just go directly to these guys right here all right and and see if maybe i can get a better deal or something like that make sense now i can also check out their outgoing traffic right here and see where they're sending their traffic to okay so they're sending their traffic to you know all of these sites right here okay so i can check i can check all those sites out as well does that make sense so my friend that's you know bottom in the nutshell that's what i use to gather my traffic intelligence um almost on a daily basis okay i i just i just check them out um i dig a lot through some of these sites to find you know sites to test for traffic i test new things all the time uh new ideas new strategies new traffic sources um and it works phenomenally well for me personally okay i hope you enjoyed this module i hope it opens your eyes now again i just don't just you know don't don't say vic you know i was hoping you're gonna give me something for a dollar man listen if you want to play like a pro you gotta pay okay and if you cannot afford compete.com right now don't worry about it don't stress over it all right it's gonna be okay you will get to the point to where you will you know you will get you'll be able to get to compete.com and and and you know and i want you to be aware of it okay i want you to know what's available to you as a marketer okay not very many people know this not very many people you know and and that's a good thing that it's 650 bucks a month instead of 65 bucks per month because it was for 65 dollars per month everybody and their dog would be using it right and then it would create you know it would not work as well as it does right now so it's actually a good thing that not everybody can afford it but don't stress it listen you will get to the point to where you will be ready for it and then when you're ready for it you know where to go okay again i'm just i just wanted to share with you you know just wanted to include this module i know this is advanced type material but i wanted you to know where i personally get my traffic ideas and and uncover new traffic stuff you know on the ongoing basis all righty thank you for watching i look forward to seeing you in the next module