26 Free Buzz Building Monitoring Tools

The marketing pilgrim had a great post a while back that I thought was worth sharing with you buzz building fiends!

You can use these tools to monitor the buzz factor and the reputation of your business - as well as your competitor’s.

*Tip - Don’t use all of these tools. You’ll go crazy. And use the ones based on your level of expertise. Some are for advanced marketers. 

You can find the list here: 26 Free Buzz Monitoring Tools

buzz monitoring, good karma

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Make Your Site Famous This Year

Want to start off the another year of your business with a bang? Then get working on the things that will make your site famous.

1. Build a blog. The best thing that I ever did for my flagship site (GirlShrink) was to build a blog (AskGirlShrink) for it. The blog funnels new and fresh traffic to the site, because of the regularly added content. While blogs were optional a few year ago - I would say they are mandatory now.
Educational resources: Problogger, Johnchow, Build a Better Blog

2. Write Articles. Buy any internet marketing guru’s product promising you a bigger list or more traffic and they will all have writing articles or creating content as one of the most important things you can do generate qualified traffic to your site.
Educational Resources: BoostIncomeArticles, Ezinearticles

3. Create a product. While many of you may be building sites and blogs in order to promote affiliate products, think about putting that same amount of energy into creating and promoting your own product where you get to keep 100% of the profits! While also establishing yourself as an expert at whatever it is you do.
Educational resources: Infoproductdashboard, Infoproductguy, DanKennedy

4. Get Networking. In it’s infancy, networking sites were for teenagers and others starting a new band! Now, entrepreneurs have tons of social networking tools and sites at their fingertips that there is no exuse for no one to have ever heard of you. You just need to hit the right sites for your niche - and you could really hit a goldmine of free traffic! Start with sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo’s Mash. And get started promoting your blog articles with tools such as technorati, digg, stumbleupon, and newsvine.
Educational Resources: FridayTrafficReport,  InstigatorBlog

article marketing, blogging, infoproducts, social networking

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What Is Credibility Marketing?

A friend of mine asked me recently, while we were in Starbucks:) - “Just what the heck is credibility marketing anyway?” I think if I were to describe it honestly, it would be the purposeful acts and actions you take to build the credibility of yourself and your brand. Credibility builders are things that create “trust” between the client or customer and you.

Seals
You probably don’t even pay much attention to this, but when you go to a retail website to purchase something, you are subconsciously relieved when you see trusted seals such as the UPS logo, Fedex, Mastercard or Visa, BBB (Better Business Bureau), TRUSTe, HackerSafe etc. This is because these companies (among others) have spent zillions:) of dollars building their credibility - so much so that if you add their logo to your own site, you get to piggyback off of their trust factor. Just make sure you are adding a logo that you actually use and are affiliated with, because if you fake it and someone finds you out — that defeats the point of credibility right?

Associations
If you align yourself with the “right” associations and organizations in your field, that will go a long way in helping you build your credibility as a “trusted professional”. This will work in building credibility with colleagues as well as the public. Even if your customers don’t know what the organization actually does in respects to your profession, that’s okay - because once they see that you are even affiliated with some sort of larger entity, they tend to trust you more. Whether they recognize the organization or not. Of course ones that they know are better. Google your niche’s name plus the word association (ex. marketing + association) and see what results you come up with. While there is a fee to join most organizations, it’s worth it to piggyback off of the credibility they offer and they actually may have information, workshops, and conferences that you could use!

Information
What kind of content are you putting out in the world about you and your business. Do you sound like you know what you are talking about? Do you have a pulse on what your potential customers and clients want from your industry? Have you published a LOT of articles, white papers, reports, ebooks, etc. on topics in your field? It is key when you are looking to build credibility in your field that you appear knowledgeable and professional. Don’t put out crap! Put out good content and put it out often.

credibility, marketing, platform building

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Add A Bonus To Your Product Offer

I know a few of my clients who have basically stopped in their tracks when it comes to getting their infoproducts ready for sale, and it was because they put all the energy and hard work into their product and had nothing left to offer as an incentive or “bonus” to get prospects to take action.

If that sounds like where you are — I am telling you now — don’t let that stop you. Blogger Thomas Sinfield has a great post (Never Pay For An Ebook Ever Again) which contains a list he compiled of over 80 free ebooks. So take a look, find one that will serve as a great companion to your product, and add it as a giveaway. (Make sure to check that the ebook has free distribution rights, although most will.)

bonuses, infoproducts

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Who Are The Specialists In Your Niche?

As the year closes out, and you are designing a revitalized business plan, marketing plan, content strategy etc. for your business next year - have you considered the competition? Do you know who the specialists in your niche are?

Use the time off you have over the holidays - and catch up on your competitor stalking:)

1. Sign up for your competitor’s newsletters and whatever other free goodies they may have. Be sure to use an alias — because there is nothing more annoying than when I see that a competitor has signed up for my info with no intentions of ever doing business with me. Blaa!

2. Take a look at your competitor’s info in Alexa. While this isn’t necessarily an accurate look at stats (only computers with the alexa browser toolbar installed are tracked), it does give you a gage of traffic and importance.

3. Google their name and any variations of it. Or better yet, add their name as one of your “google alerts“, and you will be able to see on a daily basis what blogs, sites, etc. have picked up their content and/or have written something about them. This gives you a great idea of just how “good” and “respected” the person’s content is.

Also - by using this technique you can check on how popular your own content is and the best way to distribute it. I personally was able to see through adding an alert on my name (girlshrink) which national publications were mentioning me and that ezine articles was the best distribution method for my own articles. More people were picking them up via that site.

ezine articles, Google, internet marketing, research

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Steps To Getting Known As The Expert

I am on a quest - and that is to get everyone MORE than their 15 minutes of fame in their respective niches. And the key to getting your moment in the sun and running with it - is to position yourself as the go-to expert in your field.

I talk about this all the time, in fact I found this cool post by Suzanne Falter-Barnes: 13 Steps To Getting Known As An Expert, which really hits a lot of great points.

I’ll talk a lot more about this here as well as in a new coaching program that I am developing for all future “buzz builders”.

credibility, Get Noticed, National Publicity, visibility

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Do You Own A Spiritual Business?

There is a really cool trend going on in business today - and it is the birth of the conscious business owner. This is especially true for women — probably because many of us are nurturers by nature and really don’t identify with the “killer” instinct that many other business owners have. (Okay, I’ll say it - men!)

In fact, many spiritual business owners are proving that theory to be “myth”. Many business owners, online especially, are showing that the definition of a truly successful business owner is one that is creating wealth, but not at the expense of his/her conscious, values, interests, belief system, etc.

With every online shark out here on the web, there is another kinder and gentler business owner in all sorts of niches ready to do business with you and still be genuine to who they are and what they believe. Whether that be activist, philanthropist, environmentally conscious, etc.

A few that I like include the Conscious Business Coach, Christine Klosser and the Horse Whisperer for business, Kendall Summerhawk. Both are very good at what they do - but not at the expense of their integrity and creativity.

*Feel free to add to those two if you know of some more spiritually in-tune business owners on the web.

authenticity, conscious business

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Caution When Editing WWSGD Wordpress Plugin

Many bloggers are using the great plugin developed by Richard K Miller, What Would Seth Godin Do. This plugin basically ads a little message before or after your newest post encouraging your new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

The buzz factor of this plugin is that:
1. With cookies enabled, you can control how many times a visitor sees this message. So that after a certain amount of visits - they no longer see the message. I think the default is 3 - but I would recommend at least 7. That’s the average of how long someone needs to be exposed to any marketing message before they take action.

2. You can customize the message. But this is where the CAUTION comes in. Do NOT use a text editor such as TextPad, TextEdit etc. to construct or even copy and paste a message into the options box for WWSGD. If you do, it actually injects some unwanted to spaces/characters in the code that renders the plugin useless and you have to go in and edit the code to get it working again. (Which is what I had to do.)

So edit your message directly within the options text box for the plugin. And of course, if you want to see how it looks and if its working before you mess with your blog - you can always try it in your wordpress testing environment first.

*If you messed up this plugin already, follow these instructions for how to fix it, which I followed and worked like a charm:)

list building, seth godin, wordpress plugin

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RSS Feed Troubleshooting

My RSS feed hasn’t been working properly for a long time now. Now it does, so please subscribe:) It took me so long to fix it because one of my problems is and has been outsourcing. I know that. So having said that — Feedburner has a great tool called “feedmedic”which takes a look at your feed and diagnoses whatever problems or potential problems it has.

It told me what to check for step by step. And of course the very last thing was what the problem was. I had to go into my template’s html source code and eliminate some spaces at the end of the page. That’s it. And the problem was solved.

That’s why it makes sense to use feedburner in order to “watch over” and publicize your blog. I first used it because so many other bloggers use it. Now — I see the whole point! It works:)

RSS Feed, troubleshooting

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Using Wordpress Locally On Your Computer

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been locked out of my blog for about a week. Yikes! That’s because I was trying to fix a few things, and was experimenting and basically locked myself out of my admin section. So I did what we all do…Go to the Wordpress Forums! Which turned out be the solution - once I figured out how to do what they told me to do. Needless to say, I’ll be picking up a copy of WordPress For Dummies!

Anyhoo, I’ve decided in order to avoid catastrophes like this from occurring again, that I will now work on my blog locally on my own server - on my computer. Now while that sounds like old news to some of you techie pros - and science-fiction to some of you newbies - it is a big deal for me as well, but one that I think will be worth the effort.

I found a great instructional post on it at Ben Bleikamp’s blog - so I’ll be tackling it tonight. Hey, there’s no good TV on with the writer’s strike and all. This is a great time to try something like this. He claims it is sooooo easy. So, I’ll try it out and let you know how it goes.

*Ben’s instructions are for Mac users, so if you own a PC and you’ve already done this, please post instructions for all the PC users in the comments section.

macs, wordpress

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