As of last week, small and medium size businesses have an affordable social media monitoring and management option. Alerti, a social media monitoring and management tool based in Paris, France, launched the English version of their service that has already garnered thousands of French-speaking users.

Alerti offers a streamlined content interface, integrated work-flow management, and direct social media profile administration that starts at less than $1 a day. You can also download the free iPhone app that controls the monitoring and work-flow functions. It will integrate with the social media administration in future releases.

“After a year of consistent growth in France, we are excited to launch our English language version. We’ve seen great response so far from small and medium size businesses who need integrated social media monitoring solutions that allows them to monitor, analyze and manage their online presence in an affordable way.”

– Séverine Faurax, Co-Founder and CEO of Alerti

Based on a search engine that continuously scans all types of online content, Alerti collects all search results into a single interface, providing analytical tools to measure community engagement. Streamlined work-flow integration empowers users to share alerts and content out to internal groups, customize graphs of data, and interact with social media communities straight from the Alerti interface.

Alerti is scalable as a business grows, offering a tiered month-to-month subscription structure with no long-term commitment required.

To try it out for free with a 3 month trial, go to Alerti and register using the “MN” Bonus Code.

Let us know what you think!

What is Personal Branding?

I was recently looking for books about personal branding in the Kindle store, and unfortunately many of them were spam. However, I did find one kernel of wheat in the Amazon chaff, called What Is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! by Murray Newlands and Jim Kukral, that stands apart from the everyday marketing books that marketing types and aspiring marketers might pick up off the shelf.

Newlands and Kukral seek to make a book that’s accessible to ordinary people who want to learn about personal branding without oversimplifying any key concepts. Many books deem this too difficult, and thus aim at only one audience. They are either too technical, which makes them inaccessible to aspiring marketers looking to make money online, or they’re too basic, so professional marketers don’t learn anything new.

Books that try to appeal to both often get stuck in the middle ground by having concepts that professional marketers already know, but are too advanced for beginning marketers to understand. Kukral and Newlands, on the other hand, appeal to both groups. They do not lowering their content to the lowest common denominator, but they keep What is Personal Branding? accessible with easy-to-understand textual illustrations of what they’re trying to convey. Consider the following passage by Newlands:

Three out of four recruiters will look up information about you online, and those who do will use that information to eliminate more than one in three candidates they are considering.

This tells people who don’t have their foot in the door yet to make sure their Facebook profile pic conveys a brand, probably a professional brand, suitable for the job they’re applying to. But it also speaks on a deeper level: You have a personal brand that affects people’s perceptions of you, and even small things like what people find about you online can have dire consequences. In addition, once you’re aware of this brand, Newlands says that you should shape it so that it benefits you:

Taking the responsibility and owning your own personal brand puts you in the driver’s seat, and you will find that your awareness, not only of your brand, but of the way your brand interacts with and affects your business and field overall can be a powerful thing.

Newlands initially sets up a feeling of powerlessness by placing the reader into the perspective of a potential employee who’s just gotten a background check from a potential employer. Here, he flips it by giving the reader a feeling of control, since they can be in control of their personal brand (by shaping it online) instead of letting their brand control them (by not getting a job because of what people find about you online). He reinforces this point again later on, so that the reader is thinking about it before going deeper into the book:

Owning your personal brand means owning your personal future. Personal branding not only allows you to harness what is your essence in the here and now, it gives you the base to build on it as you grow, change, and build for the future.

Throughout the book, Newlands and Kukral use shifts like these to solidify advanced marketing concepts that many professional marketers haven’t even thought about yet. To further distil their knowledge, Newlands and Kukral explain concepts by using metaphors and common situations that most readers have been in. This makes the book easier for beginners to relate to and easier for marketing veterans to quickly learn advanced concepts so that they can take their marketing career to the next level.

Steve Sims

Steve Sims graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011, and now works for a PR and marketing consulting firm in San Francisco.

Find out how to use site acceleration to boost your marketing campaign!

Most potential leads are lost within the first eight seconds of hitting your landing page. This means that, at most, you have eight seconds to capture someone’s attention. Eight seconds. This is after they’ve already seen your landing page’s header (assuming they found your page on a search engine) and have probably read your meta description or at least skimmed the first few sentences of your landing page and decided it’s relevant.

People who write for websites are usually the same people who do the day-to-day WordPress work on the site, simply because advanced technical knowledge is not needed to run most websites. As a result, the people who tweak the site after the initial design are not always technically adept, and even more frequently have a stronger background in writing than in marketing. Especially after Google’s Panda update, webmasters try to write as much text as possible as long as it’s over 500 words and spend less energy on making sure that people actually can use their site simply because they don’t have the time to anymore.

This means that the people writing a website’s content often don’t think about how their audience will react to other aspects of their site, especially technical ones like load time. With an increasing emphasis on rich content like videos and images, a lot of websites take so long to load that potential leads get frustrated and leave, even though they’re already interested in the site and have clicked on an appealing headline in a search engine.

That’s why my company provides a content delivery network. MaxCDN makes sites load faster by hosting the website on multiple, supercharged servers, instead of having it hosted on just one server. This means that people who would be geographically far away from a traditional server won’t have to wait long for the site to load (as an added bonus, this gives you free SEO since Google ranks sites that load faster higher on its search results). Furthermore, MaxCDN hosts video content on separate superfast servers so that the video doesn’t slow down your site’s load time for Google.

With site acceleration, you can boost your SEO so you have more potential leads and increase conversion rate so that more people buy your product!

David Henzel

This is a guest post by David Henzel. David is the Vice President of Marketing at NetDNA, a company dedicated to helping people increase eCommerce revenue.

Unlike big companies, small businesses don’t have hefty amounts of money for their marketing campaigns. They always prefer the least expensive marketing strategies. According to studies, almost 80% of small businesses struggle with their marketing campaigns. The most popular and the least expensive marketing campaigns these days are electronic and mobile marketing. Let us discuss the pros and cons of both marketing strategies.

Electronic marketing

Electronic marketing is quite a broad term and encompasses all the methods of marketing via internet, which include email, article, videos and search engine marketing etc. The most popularly used marketing method by small businesses is email marketing. This method not only enables small business owners to market their products and offers but also allows them to reach out to new as well as old customers.

Email marketing is very cost effective as it is almost free of cost and can be utilized by any kind of business. The only thing you spend on email marketing is your time and energy. If you have hired a person to do your marketing then you are just paying a nominal salary to your employee as this is not a technical task and does not require any major marketing skills either.

In electronic marketing, social media marketing is another popular method. This method is also free of cost as social media groups like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are totally free. Social networking portals hold immense potential in marketing as millions of people log on to these sites daily. Other than that, you can also develop your company’s website on cheap rates and optimize it for a better ranking on search engines.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing also holds great potential for small businesses as the number of smartphone users is increasing day by day. With this mode of marketing, you will have to deal with the stigma of spam. On the bright side though, receivers might not mind getting a message about the products or offers in which they can save money.

In mobile marketing also, you will need to adopt different techniques which can lure customers rather than bother them. One of the biggest advantages of mobile marketing is that you can catch people while they are on the go. The chances of a receiver considering your deal is high as he is already out.

Now the question remains as to which technique is better for your business? Seriously, the answer is up to you! The owners of the business can assess their business better than all others. Choice is yours – you can also opt for both techniques or just go with the one, which suits you the best.

Author Bio:

Sasha Gibbs is a B2B wholesale trade and B2B marketing expert. She writes frequently on the topics related to Drop Shipping, distributors, wholesalers and trade suppliers.

Website names are pretty easy to remember. With the advent of social media, people can even find sites that their friends “share” without typing anything into the URL bar.

Most serious sites today are designed to be found on search engines in a process that is called “search engine optimization.” According to Evolution in DesignZ, an SEO-oriented website design firm, “The point of search engine optimization is to get your website ranked [on search engines] for specific keywords. These keywords should be the products or services you offer, or a topic of discussion on your website.”

So why do I need to optimize my site for search engines?

Numbers

Three quarters of the average website’s users found them on a search engine. Right now, Google has a near-monopoly on searches using most languages using the Latin alphabet, though Chinese has baidu and Cryllic has Yandex.

Getting your site highly ranked on Google can make your traffic explode without having to buy a single advertisement. It’s possible to do this yourself if you have a good PR team that can garner lots of comments and blog posts linking back to your site.

However, a better option for most companies is to hire an SEO firm. They can fix up your site (onsite SEO), build backlinks (offsite SEO), and in the process spread the word about you and your product in the blogosphere. That’s why when you hire a website design company, you should make sure they know how to design a site that’s both good for human readers and shows up highly on Google searches.

Reputation

Google ranks sites based on how many sites link back to them and how good those sites are. This is called their “PageRank”. Although it’s an often over-stated metric, it can give you a ballpark estimate of how valuable outgoing links from your site are, which you can then use to trade with other sites so that they show up higher on search engines.

Post by Murray Newlands, with help from Ronnie Chatterjee of Evolution in DesignZ.

An online entrepreneur in San Francisco, California takes a break from moving boxes to admire the Transamerica Pyramid from his Montgomery Street office window one last time. His lease is two weeks overdue and his landlord gave him till the end of the day to move out. But it didn’t have to be this way.
Six months ago, Justin created a website to help people make money at home. Once he got enough readers, he began basic content monetization. He thought AdSense would be enough.
After using exclusively AdSense, Justin realized that he wasn’t getting the revenue he needed to keep his investors in on the project. As an additional content monetization method, Justin began using PPA banner ad affiliate networks. The result is disastrous for his site.
First off, he had to use a lot of the space he used for AdSense for affiliate network banners. Plus, a lot of affiliates insist that he use noisy banner ads that are almost impossible to close and block his entire page. Within two weeks, he lost around 20% of his readership, but his deal with the affiliate network forced him to use them for content monetization for at least 60 days. His site never recovers.
Two months ago, he tried INTENTclick, which provides text content monetization without disrupting banner ads, for additional content monetization. The result was phenomenal. His revenues increased by 30% after the first month and he began recouping his lost readership. But it came too late. His investors had already pulled out and his site wasn’t profitable enough on its own to keep running.
Justin turns his attention back to the box he’s packing and takes a deep, heavy sigh. In retrospect, it all seems so simple: INTENTclick doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t disrupt other forms of content monetization. It’s the only form of content monetization that converts into pure profits. If only he hadn’t waited so long to try it, he might still be in business.

Note: I work for INTENTclick.

The World Media Awards and Event will take place on October 26^th at the PayPal building in San Francisco.

Through a series of practical workshops hosted by some of the world’s leading publishing experts, attendees will learn how to use the latest technologies and techniques to maximize their publishing potential.

The purpose of the event it to celebrate the best in blogging and media creation as well as to exchange publishing best practices.

Tickets to attend the event are already on sale for $50 and entries to the Media Awards are $45. The first 100 bloggers to blog about the event will receive a free ticket and/or entry to the awards for posting about the event. Space is limited to 500 attendees. Contact event organizer Murray Newlands for full information or see www.themediaawards.com.

The event is for authors, bloggers, media creators, media owners, PR practitioners and businesses.

The event founder Murray Newlands said:

“I love blogging and wanted to create an event to celebrate the best in blogging and media. I meet lots of publishers and want to be able to create an environment where they can exchange knowledge and creativity.”

“We are pleased to have eBay as lead sponsors of the event. eBay is keen to support the publishing community.”

The eBay partner network is increasingly reaching out to support bloggers. Other sponsors include GrowMap, VigLink and Trancos.

Media partners include Adrants, Bloggeries, FeedBlitz, MediaVision, The Affiliate Marketing Awards, Web Traffic Control, My Blog Guest and Read Write Web.

World Media Award judges include Steve Hall, Sarah Austin, Chang Kim, Julie Wohlberg, Pierre Zarokian, Ivka Adam, Cheryl Contee, Krystyl Baldwin, Adrian Harris, Jeremy Wright, Rob Bloggeries, Dave Duarte, Tanya Alvarez and Dana Oshiro.

Follow the buzz on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #wmads on Twitter.

For more information visit www.themediaawards.com

Murray Newlands is author of How to Make a Blog Book and Online Marketing; a User Guide. He is also founder of the Affiliate Marketing Awards. Born in the UK, he now spends his time in San Francisco and New York. Murray works for Audience Mindshare and consults for Trancos Ins as well as being an advisor for VigLink.

This is a guest post by Sidney Angelos.

The concept of Cloud Computing might have evolved from those nebulous cloud-like regions found in many technology white papers and other displays of how a business planned on offering its products and services. Essentially, the term is referring to the fact that ones business can secure Internet technology in the form of highly scalable processing power, virtually unlimited data storage and retrieval, and access to a number of application servers providing computational services in an on demand fashion.

These concepts, however can be just as nebulous as those cloud-like images. For a better understanding just a little time, focused help and perhaps a tutorial or two should clarify various aspects of what cloud computing is all about. The following list includes links to their source material online as well as a brief description about the particular aspect of cloud, or grid computing the article focuses on.

Ideally, one making their way through this list should acquire the vocabulary to have intelligent conversations with others about cloud computing. Of course, this articles limitations will prevent the reader from gaining complete knowledge on the subject. As such, once the basics are understood, seeking advanced insight can help one in the decision making process surrounding using the cloud to provide online services for their business.

<5 Aspects of Cloud Computing Everyone Should Know

1. a href=”http://ruby.about.com/od/cloudcomputing/a/dvandervort.htm” title=”What Is Cloud Computing?”>What Is Cloud Computing?: Dave Vandervort, Architect-Client Hardware/Software for Xerox Innovation Group, provides some excellent clarification of what is and is not true cloud computing in this article. Also well explained in usable layman’s terms are the cloud computing concepts of the differences between Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service. The differences, while subtle, are important and can make a valuable difference when discussing ones needs from the cloud.
2. Getting Started with Cloud Computing: Cheat sheets can actually be good things. When one is considering moving their business services into the cloud, remembering the various terms, acronyms, and related technological jargon can be tough. Clicking through on this link, one should find a Scribd embed of the reference card, but there is also a prominent link for pdf download.
3. AWS Products & Services:One of the major players in the cloud computing industry, Amazon’s various offering links can be found on this page, but each section is a brief description about what those services will do for ones business. Even if not ready to secure these services, there is a lot of education available here.
4. Google App Engine: Even if building apps is beyond the scope of the current cloud computing considerations, having a clearer understanding of how the cloud works with Google can be attained by perusing through this page. The App Engine offers fast development and deployment; simple administration, and effortless scalability.
5. Microsoft’s Windows Azure: If one is a fan of Windows and the various offerings of Microsoft, the Windows Azure Cloud Computing solutions may be of interest. This page is the starting point for learning about the various services available on the Microsoft platform. There are videos on the page with deeper explanations as well as multiple links taking one deeper into their platform.

There are no shortage of resources when it comes to a self education in the area of Cloud Computing. Even if one decides to pursue their presence in the cloud with the help of a third party cloud management company, taking the time to better understand the terms, challenges and benefits will help in communicating more efficiently about their cloud objectives.

This guest post is by Sidney Angelos, a writer for a All Things CRM, a blog which covers CRM trends and social media for customer relationship management.

This is a guest post by Kaila West.

Customer relationship management, or CRM, applications can get rather costly for some of the highest level, professional versions. Think in the range of $2,500 per application and up depending on factors like numbers of users, location of users, and volume of customers and their data required for the business to manage.

For those with less budget than will allow for buy-in to such systems, there is a lower cost solution available. Search engine giant, Google, has developed its own cloud computing platform known as the Google Apps Engine. These applications are conveniently located in their Apps Marketplace and have the added benefit of plugging into the business account of other various Google powered applications. Google Apps which may be familiar are the business branded version of Gmail, the Google Docs suite of word processing and spreadsheet functionality, Calendar, and a host of other free apps.

By creating the App Engine and Marketplace, Google has made it easy for developers to produce relevant business applications they can sell. These applications provide for the business to maintain single user sign on accounts. This means once a company has signed up for a Google Apps account, users can be added for appropriate personnel within the business.

If the company has need for, say, a CRM application, their administrator can peruse the list of CRM apps available within the Marketplace and easily integrate that app into their existing suite, at the ready for all users on the system.

Following is a brief list of some stand out CRM applications available for integration into the business’ existing Apps infrastructure. Administrators will also be happy to learn that both user accounts and application details are easily maintained within their control panels.

9 Top Google CRM Apps

• Insightly: Insightly is the most popular Google Apps CRM and Project Management package. Track leads, proposals, opportunities, projects and manage files, all through an easy to use interface. Link to Google App page.
• Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM offers businesses a complete customer relationship life-cycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management. Link to Google App page.
• Capsule CRM: Capsule is a simple, flexible CRM for small businesses and sales teams. Capsule makes it easy to keep track of your customers and other contacts, your sales opportunities and follow-ups. Link to Google Apps page.
• Applane: Applane CRM is an enterprise CRM that supports complete sales cycle and customer relationship. It has very efficient user interface with context menu and many advanced features. It is hosted on GAE. Link to Google Apps page.
• eStreamDesk Helpdesk: eStreamDesk is a flexible helpdesk and ticketing platform that enables support staff to easily manage many requests from multiple services and e-mail addresses. Link to Google Apps page.
• Timetonote: Simple, Fast and Elegant CRM. Collaborate and share contacts, notes, tasks, projects and more with your co-workers. Features include: Google Contacts + Gmail + Calendar integration, Affordable, Secure: your data on Google’s infrastructure & SSL. Link to Google Apps page.
• Assistly: Assistly makes it easy for teams and Whole Companies to support customers right from the helpdesk. Tame overflowing inboxes and support customers via email, phone, chat, web, Facebook and Twitter. Link to Google Apps page.
• BatchBook Social CRM:BatchBook is a lightweight but powerful CRM that allows you to easily organize contacts, monitor social networks and track leads and deals. BatchBook allows you to keep track of your business, personal, and social networking contacts and share them with the rest of your team. You can create a flexible, easy-to-use contact database from scratch, or import your contacts from an existing system. Link to Google Apps page.
• PipelineDeals: PipelineDeals provides you with the easiest way to manage your sales pipeline. Sales teams use PipelineDeals to manage deal flow, track leads, run reports and close more deals. Link to Google Apps page.

This guest post is by Kaila West, a writer for a CRM Social Media, a social CRM blog which covers the art of using social media for customer relationship management.

So you love using your new Android OS smart phone and want to get it loaded up with the very best in social media applications? You’ve come to the right place. The following list of 10 Android apps for social media usage combines the top five free applications with the top five that people have been willing to pay for.

Many of the lists you’ll find on the Internet may claim to be a best of or top # of whatever, but usually those lists are somewhat subjective. If you are a reviewer who only really uses the iPhone, you may be somewhat indifferent to apps that are based on the Android OS.

Likewise, if you are an ardent fan of a specific application then you might tend to want to feature it as one of the best. The challenge is that it may well be only one of YOUR favorites.

Today’s list of top ten apps comes straight from the most popular list of downloads directly from the Android Market. Fair and balanced; impartial but with commentary. Doesn’t really get much better than this.

Most Popular Premium Android Social Apps

1. Tapatalk: In the top 3 social apps in the Android Market, but also in the top 5 in the Apple app store. Surely that many users cannot be wrong about this application which gives access to a number of online forum applications.
2. Plume Premium for Twitter: The premium version, priced at only $2.74 removes the advertising which is included in their free download. Still highly rated at over 4 stars, the premium version is very popular in the Android social arena.
3. Tweetcaster: Another very popular twitter application with over 4 stars, and some unique features recently released. “Zip It” allows you to remove annoying tweets or twitter trends from you time line without requiring you to unfollow the twitter users.
4. Twidroyd: Obviously Twitter is an important social media service, and this Android app is yet another of the most popular paid apps providing you access to your twitter stream. Twidroyd’s unique approach is that as a paid user you get the very latest features before any of the free app users do.
5. Text Message Away Message: You use your email’s auto responder when you are on vacation from work, so why not use a similar technology to automatically send responses to the text messages you get on your Android based phone? Like the idea? This is the app for you.

Most Popular FREE Android Social Apps

1. Facebook: with over 600K reviews, the Android app for accessing your Facebook account is one of the most popular and used applications downloaded from the Android market. If you need to keep up with everything being hurled at your wall, this is your application of choice.
2. Twitter: Developed by the folks at Twitter.com, this Android app is simple, clean and gives you straight forward access to your Twitter stream.
3. MySpace Mobile: Still active with your MySpace account? It’s okay. There must be a lot of you since this app is in the top 5 with over 90K positive reviews.
4. Tango Video Calls: As more Android based phones are manufactured with front facing cameras, the preponderance of video calls is only going to increase. As that happens, look for this app to rise in the rankings.
5. Bump: If you’re one of those handshake-a-phobes, this is most definitely the app you’ll be using more of in the future. By providing phone to nearby phone transferring capability, Bump allows you to share everything from photos and music to Paypal payments.

What are your favorite Android apps? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

This is a guest post by Brian Tanner, a freelance writer for HP which has been making technology products to help people and companies address their problems and challenges, and realize their possibilities, aspirations and dreams. On their website you can find a variety of products such as scanners or toner.