How do you check out how many sites are competing , or potentially competing with you for a particular niche?
Search engines. Just search for some keywords that you find relevant to your niche and see which sites and ads come up. nadavs
I just try to find keywords and products with some or a lot of adwords, but little or no "reviews" on the first page. Or I do work my system and knock them off there, but it's easier if you're alone.
I searched some keywords to see which one are giving me the best spot in google or which one are giving my competitors a better rank than me . Sometimes when I don't have that much time , I use the Competition Spy tool from WA .
Some people see SE as the be all and end all, but I beat hundreds of sites in my niche yet they out do me by 10,000's of uniques a day - mainly because they have been around for 10 years longer.
I like to use the SE's. My next 2 favorite methods are using a few plugins that will show keyword density, backlinks, alexa ranking, and whois just to mention a few. Those plugins are for FF one is SEOQuake and the other SEO For FireFox. I am not sure if they have plugins for IE because the only time I use IE is to check out page design. Both plugins were free last I checked.
Competition... To truely check it out you need to look at everyone in your niche - what they are doing, how they are doing it and how well they are doing it etc. Checking out your competition depends on a lot of factors, like what niche your in, what promotion you are doing, where you are promoting etc. If your promoting a CB product on adwords, just search for related phases to the product your promoting then check out who is promoting the same stuff as you, then use keywordspy.com to find out what other keywords they are using, then search them to find more competitiors. But that's just adwords, really depends a lot on what your promoting and how your promoting it. Daniel