ISpionage Vs. KeywordSpy

As you may or may not know by now, every big Smart affiliate researches a niche throughly before they enter into it.

One of the best ways to do this is to "spy" on your competition. The mindset here is that if someone else is running an ad consistently, they either A. Have a ton of money and don't mind wasting it or B. Are making a profit.

Most of the time, it's easy to "Spot the not" and see exactly who is a good marketer and who isn't.

The way you do this is right click on the title of someone's ad. Click copy link location. Paste it into the URL bar, delete everything up to their url and you get their landing page url without having to click. Remember, never click an ad unless you intend to buy or are an actual interested customer. Let's keep ad prices low for everyone...

After you find a few of the best websites in that niche, you can use one of two great tools to essentially spy on your competition.

These two tools are KeywordSpy and ISpionage.

Granted, there are others, but these are the two I am going to be comparing today.

Basic Overview:

KeywordSpy and Ispionage are websites that help you to "spy" on your competition by helping you to find what basic keywords your competition is using.

These services should never be used as a "get a list from them and throw it into google" type of service. Instead they should be used for getting ideas for keywords that you might never think of. Once you have the idea, you should use your creative knowledge to expand the keyword list to create your unique advantage and dominate the market.

Advantages:
There are advantages to both KeywordSpy and ISpionage. ISpionage is a newer program, but in my book it takes the cake in terms of value. I'll explain the advantage to going with ISpionage below.

Advantages to Using ISpionage:

• The first major advantage to using ISpionage is that they get keywords from all three major search engines while KeywordSpy only (seemingly) monitors Google. I've made tens of thousands from yahoo (probably over $100,000 actually) so leaving them out is a huge mistake.
• Secondly, ISpionage updates it's data daily, while keyword spy seems to update on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. In this business two week old data might actually hurt you more than it will help you. The top affiliates are always changing and refining campaigns so you'll need something that is up to date.
• Lastly, ISpionage has "Projects" where you can monitor certain keywords or websites over a period of time. Pretty neat.

As you can see, out of the two, I use ISpionage more. There are some unique benefits to KeywordSpy that may still get you wanting to use them instead. Here are the conditions for when you want to use KeywordSpy:

• If ISpionage returns no data, or you want more results, you can check keywordSpy.
• If you're a clickbank affiliate (as your main source of income), KeywordSpy is the one to use. They're way more tailored to clickbank affiliates in that you can look up top CB affiliates and see where they are running.
• Sometimes I have found my lists to be slightly larger than my Ispionage lists but never anything that is mind altering goodness.

So all that being said, there is no best, just which is best for you.

If you're a Clickbank affiliate mostly, use KeywordSpy. If you're a general PPC Affiliate, use ISpionage.

As a last reminder, I'd again like to remind you that these keyword lists are generally a bit inaccurate and should not be used as a "list generator." Instead it should be considered market research and used to expand upon your own keyword list.

Enjoy!:)