It is common business practice never to aid your competitor. Having your competition gain the upper hand is one thing. Handing it to them would be another. Some people claim that helping out your competitors would be tantamount to signing your own enterprise's death warrant. You're paving the way for your business? downfall.

This isn't true? not always, at least.

In online marketing, there is a way by which you could benefit from extending aid to your competition. Amazingly, you could even manage to grab some of his website's page rank, as well as steal his traffic. And you could do these without being antagonistic at all. It'll all be accomplished while helping him sell a product or two.

What is this strategy?

It's called testimonials.

Every internet marketer is faced with the gargantuan task of having to overcome the lack of consumer confidence. It is the World Wide Web, after all. The anonymity in these virtual halls makes it difficult for any online businessman to win the trust of his prospective customers. Yes, the online businessman may pay thousands of dollars for a truly engaging and convincing sales page, but as often is the case, these words are not enough to win a sale. Why? Because these words will still be associated with the online businessman, and people do not expect him to badmouth his own products. That he will talk favorably about his offers is a given.

But what if a third party would share some favorable words about the online businessman and the product he is offering? Surely, his statement would bear more weight than the sales pitch of the businessman himself, right? After all, the third party has no stakes on the success of the campaign.

Such is the importance of testimonials for most sales pages. They greatly contribute to the conversion rate the sales copy would manage to pull off, essentially because of their seemingly objective nature.

Almost every online businessman ? your competitors included ? will be on the lookout for people who will be willing to provide for them some generously written testimonials. To gather these, online marketers even go to the extent of giving away free samples of their products for review purposes.

Now, here's the trick.

One of the incentives to encourage favorable testimonials is the mention of the testimonial giver's link on the sales page itself. There are many benefits to this.

? If your link can be found in your competitor's sales page, then chances are, you will be targeting the same market. Since the people who will be reading your competitor's sales page are already there, we could assume that they are highly targeted leads. Once they see your link, there is a great chance that they'd get transported to your own sales page, which would only work wonders for you.

? If your competitor's sales page has a higher page rank (PR), having your link in the said copy would provide a boost to your own website's PR.

? In any event, it is an additional back link for your website which would only increase your link popularity.

Yes, by giving a favorable testimonial for your competitor's campaign, you'd be helping him bag more sales. But then again, internet marketing is not really a dog-eat-dog kind of business. His success can make the industry very healthy. And the fact that your link will be prominently displayed on his sales page could only mean that you could share his success, eventually.

So, the next time someone asks you for a testimonial, take some time to prepare for him a good one. You'll gain immediate results for your own business. And who knows? Someday, he might even return the favor with a testimonial of his own.

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