Archive for March, 2010
Best Cool Web Tools of 2009, Part 2
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Part 1 of the best cool web tools for 2009 presented tools for sharing presentations online, consolidating social networking accounts, generating word-of-mouth referrals and using social media for research. This post includes tools for social search, social media monitoring, Twitter management, competitive research, real-time chat, job hunting, video sharing, time management and more.
Social Media Tools
An extremely cool tool. What Website Grader does for website SEO analysis, HowSociable? does for a brand’s presence in social media: it evaluates a variety of sites to produce a combined “social media presence” score. Even better, it allows you to drill into the social media mentions of a brand behind the metrics.
A real-time social media monitoring platform for PR, marketing, and brand pros. Get real-time alerts, trending and analysis for news, blogs, twitter and more.
Protecting your brand online is critical. This tool lets you instantly search more than 350 social media sites for your brand as a user name, so you can reserve it and keep it out of the hands of competitors, name squatters or potential detractors.
An inexpensive utility that helps efficiently create Twitter lists, find relevant people to follow, identify inactive Twitter followers and more.
CloudProfile: Social Media Optimization for Small Business by Mashable
Mashable reviews CloudProfile, a social profile / SEO / social media monitoring tool for small businesses. Sounds interesting, but is it worth $50 per month?
The Internet more positive about PPC than SEO by Searchcowboys
A review of whatdoestheinternetthink, a social sentiment tool. Enter any term and this tool will show you percentages of positive, negative and “don’t care” social media sentiment regarding the topic or brand.
Own Your Domain Name & Aggregate All of Your Social Accounts with Chi.mp by How-To Geek
A review of Chi.mp, a free service that enables you to register a personal/unique domain name, domain name, then blog, create photo albums, and aggregate all of your social accounts in one place.
Real-Time Chat Tools
A widget that lets you install real-time chat capabilities on any web page.
Olark Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners by TechCrunch
TechCrunch review of Olark, a live chat widget alternative to Meebo.
Enhanced Search Tools
5 Ways to Add a Search Sidebar to Google SERPs by Search Engine Journal
Ann Smarty reviews WebMynd, Unified Search and three other tools that extend the search capabilities of Google in various ways to produce more relevant and/or comprehensive results.
Search Engine LeapFish Merges Real-Time Data And Social Content by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Review of LeapFish, a meta-search engine that combines traditional and real-time results from social media and news sites.
A real-time search tool for discovering current opinion and news coverage of hot topics.
Another real-time search tool.
Google Squared – A Simple Tutorial by SEM Nook
A quick tutorial on how to use Google Squared to get customized, focused search results.
A downloadable tool that helps instantly find sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.
A powerful people search tool for finding online information about individuals.
A human-powered recommendation engine that provides guidance on a wide range of topics and questions, from which computer you should buy to which vegetables are the most nutritious.
Other Cool Web Tools
A tool that allows you to capture and upload video, images, text, files, even an area of your desktop to the web.
An online video distribution and analytics service to promote video content, somewhat along the lines of TubeMogul.
9 new marketing tools you need by iMedia Connection
Doug Schumacher reviews nine cool apps and plugins for marketers, including Skitch (for web page markup), OmniGraffle (diagramming), ColorZilla (online color management for design) and Hootsuite (Twitter management dashboard).
Find Competitor’s Top Performing Keywords & Use Them To Your Advantage by PPC Hero
Tips on how to use Compete.com to find your competitors’ top keywords, site traffic patterns, unique visitors and other information.
A tool that lets you create funky animated movies from a text file.
A tool for creating website favicons, similar to the DeGraeve favicon tool or the Dynamic Drive FavIcon generator.
A URL shortener that enables you to combine multiple URLs into one shortened link for collaboration or sharing.
Job hunting? Indeed instantly searches job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages for jobs based on title/keywords and location.
100+ Resources for Getting Things Done by Readaloo
A fabulous list of time management apps for calendars, task lists, collaboration, organization, taking notes, bookmarking, mind-mapping and more.
Link Building: Let’s get it started!
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Guest post by Emily Thompson
Getting links to your site is essential in SEO. The search engines view each link to your website like a vote- and while not all links are created equal, they are all counted! Perhaps you, like many small businesses, have decided to tackle building your own links. It’s important to know that link building can often take a lot of time, and be fairly arduous. However, the benefits are huge!
Let’s take a look at just how important links for your ranking in the search engines. This chart, courtesy of SEOmoz, 2009*, really helps hit it home. Based on a survey of some of the top SEO experts in the world, link popularity, or the number of backlinks a specific page has, and keyword anchor text from those external links, make up a large portion of your rank.
So, we know this is important. Crucial, even. So what can you do to get started? Following some of these tips can help you begin, and make the process a little easier:
- Create a plan: Think about which area of your business you would like to focus on first. A particular product? A service? Your general industry? Whatever it is, look for related sites or opportunities. Sectioning out your plan is very beneficial and makes the task at hand feel more manageable.
- Build a comprehensive list of potential link partners: This is, perhaps, the most tedious part of link building. It takes hours of manual effort, including researching non-competitive related websites, utilizing tools like Yahoo Site Explorer, or SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer. You can use these to explore links to your competitors and attempt to contact them. Also grab the low hanging fruit- talk to current customers or clients, and see if they can link to you or write about you on their blog. The bigger you can get this list, the better. You will most likely get very few responses for every hundred contacts you attempt.
- Contact people personally: Again, this piece takes time, but it is absolutely worth it! If you come across as spammy, people are not likely to care what you have to say. Send genuine, thoughtful contact emails. If you’re interested in a link from a certain blog, actually read through it and take the time to comment honestly. Try to develop relationships as you do this- it can help you build online communities and really learn from each other.
- Get creative: Take advantage of every opportunity you have. Write articles, promote press releases, create content that people want to link to. Essentially, utilize every weapon in your arsenal. In addition, diversity can help you gain visibility and reach different audiences. Using different outlets helps you get traffic and interest, along with just a link.
There is a great aggregation of tools, articles and tips published recently on http://seo.site-reference.com. This comprehensive link building list really brings together many of the resources you should be utilizing when you’re ready to get moving with building links to your site. Make sure to learn as much as you can and make educated decisions about who to prospect and what tools to use. And remember- patience is a virtue! Take the time, get the results and don’t get discouraged!
*Source: SEOmoz (2009). Search Engine Ranking Factors. Retrieved March 11, 2010, from http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Author Bio: Emily Thompson is the Online Marketing Coordinator for Kutenda Internet Marketing Software (http://kutenda.com). Kutenda offers tools and resources for small businesses to succeed online and grow their business.
All You Need to Know About Twitter You Learned from Grandma
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in July 2009.
A traditional grandmother that is, not a tech-savvy one. If you have or know a mother, grandmother or great grandmother who grew up in the first part of the last century, chances are she’s passed along some folk wisdom about good old-fashioned manners. Sure, it can help to utilize the growing number of Twitter tools available as well, but if your Twitter grade isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, you may want to take some tips from grandma:
“The good Lord gave you two ears, but only one mouth.” In other words, to attract and keep followers, spend more time listening than talking. “Listening,” in Twitter terms, means answering questions, re-Tweeting interesting thoughts and links, and sending @ replies.
“Have something interesting to say.” No one really cares if you just got back from the gym, had a latte or are watching TV with your cat. They do care if you can help them solve a problem, learn something new, or at least have a laugh.
“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Twitter isn’t a place for arguments or feuds—unless you want to embarrass yourself and look like a jerk. There are many individuals that I admire in the online marketing space, like Paul Dunay, David Szetela, Ardath Albee and Ian Lurie. I’m happy to tweet or retweet their stuff occasionally. There are also, unfortunately, more than a few obnoxious boors in this space, but they aren’t worth mentioning.
“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear to be an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it.” It should be obvious, but remember that Twitter is a public space, so be careful what you say. Don’t tweet when you’re angry or in a chemically-altered state. And don’t ever do something as stupid as trying to take advantage of tragedy to send spammy sales messages, as Habitat recently did with the Iran election aftermath.
“If don’t ask for exactly what you want, you won’t get it.” Obviously, you’d never walk into a crowded restaurant, announce to no one in particular that you’re hungry for a cheeseburger, and hope that the person who’ll be waiting on your table happens to hear you. Twitter is a busy place. Not all of your followers will see everything you tweet. In fact, most of your followers will miss most of your tweets. So if you want something specific—an answer, a retweet, an opinion on something you’ve written—from someone specific, use an @ reply to ask for it.
“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’” Following from the item immediately above, others are more likely to do the things you ask if you ask politely, and more likely to continue doing them if you also thank them. Publicly. Which makes them look helpful. Of course, it’s also important to reciprocate.
“Clean up your place before inviting friends over.” In Twitter terms, this means making sure you’ve optimized all the elements of your Twitter presence: name (your real one), linked page (your website, blog, or for the really advanced: a customized Twitter landing page like @pistachio has), bio (make the most of the limited space), picture (preferably your real one, NEVER the Twitter default image), and background (yeah, mine needs work I know—shoemaker’s children kind of thing). Here’s an example of a nicely done Twitter background from @Tony_Mandarich.
“Birds of a feather flock together.” Other than using the block feature, you have no control over who follows you on Twitter—but you have absolute control over who you choose to follow back, and the entire Twittersphere can see your list. Granted, it’s generally good Twitter etiquette to follow back when someone follows you, but it isn’t always necessary, particularly when a person doesn’t use his or her real name and real picture, or doesn’t provide any real value. Spammers, scammers and strippers abound on Twitter, and they are all best to avoid when following.
Who knew grandma was a Twitter expert? She may be more hip than you think.
How to Avoid Social Media Mistakes
Monday, March 15th, 2010Despite the widespread adoption of social media in the marketing mix, many companies still use this medium less than effectively. This is perhaps not surprising given that, according to recent research by Business.com, 40% of b2b marketers have been using social media as a marketing tool for less than a year, and 60% spend less than 20% of their time on it. This lack of experience can lead to several common, but avoidable mistakes.
One of the most common mistakes is expecting instant results. While the current tough economy is forcing marketers to do more with less and focus on productivity, social media isn’t like advertising: it requires a sustained commitment over time to build an online reputation as a helpful, knowledgeable resource, the kind of company your prospective customers will want to do business with. Giving short shrift to social media activities now, because it may not have an immediate impact on the bottom line, is short sighted. B2b companies that build a social media presence now will be best positioned for growth once the economy rebounds.
An even bigger mistake is ignoring the synergies between different forms and types of social media. Media sharing sites, social networking profiles, blogs and online reputation management tools are all part of a larger strategy of web presence optimization, maximizing your online presence through various forms of media and most importantly, interlinking these points of presence to maximize your company’s visibility in search.
For more guidance on maximizing the impact social media marketing can have for your organization, see 8 Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing on the HubSpot blog. Avoiding these mistakes will help improve your organization’s online presence and website traffic now, and position it well to thrive once the economy turns around.
How Trade Magazines Can Take Advantage of Content Marketing
Friday, March 12th, 2010Recently I asked the question: will content marketing kill trade publications? Gordon Plutsky seems to answer in the affirmative, contending that marketers need to set up their own content distribution channels, bypassing the trade media. Ted Bahr, on the other hand, not only won’t concede the death of trade magazines but isn’t willing even to give up on print versions of them.
Personally, I believe that trade pubs can continue to play an important role in the distribution of industry-specific, niche content to focused groups of readers due to several advantages they have over other channels. Mind you, I’ve never worked for a trade publisher and am not telling them how to run their businesses, these are just observations based on nearly 20 years of media buying and 25 years of business experience.
Conversation Aggregation. Publishers no longer have a monopoly on content creation, but they can potentially create integrations with bloggers, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, LinkedIn groups and other places where their industry is being discussed and provide a centralized portal for vendor, user and independently created material. They need to go beyond content aggregation to conversation aggregation, facilitating not only publishing but also interactivity.
Research. As independent third-parties, trade publishers are in a unique position to conduct industry research. If buyers are asked whether they have a more positive opinion of vendor A or vendor B, they are far more likely to answer honestly to an independent source than to a vendor.
Ratings and Rankings. Expecting a vendor to objectively rate its products against those of competitors is like asking a mom to honestly evaluate her kid’s artwork against the rest of the class. Not possible. Bloggers could do this independently, but few have the resources to do a thorough job. Only trade publishers (and industry analysts, but that’s another business model) have both the resources and independent perspective to do a credible job in this area.
Events (Online or Offline). Again, publishers are in a unique position to bring together a wide range of participants from both the vendor and buyer sides for online or live events focused on education, networking and yes, marketing.
Republishing – Providing a Forum for Thought Leadership Content. Many marketers have figured out that David Meerman Scott was right in The New Rules of Marketing and PR
And finally, a recommendation: start charging subscribers for print publications. You can offer incentives, such as publishing longer, more in-depth feature articles only in print, or first in print then later online, or in print and in a premium, fee-based area of your website (which paid print subscribers could be given free access to), but charge a print subscription fee. Advertisers are far more likely to see value in buying print media that 5,000 readers are willing to pay for (and hence may actually read) than for 25,000 “free qualified” subscriptions most of which will end up, unread, in landfills. If readers aren’t willing to pay for print, that’s a strong signal—and one ad buyers are unlikely to ignore.
With some refocusing of their business and content models, trade publications have the opportunity to continue to have a central place in the dissemination of industry-specific content. At least that’s my take. What do you think?
