Today, I’m going to share with you two very powerful (and free) tools to use for not just Twitter, but all of your major social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and more!

I’ll keep this very short and sweet, so stay with me a bit

The first social media tool is Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a social media distribution application. In simple words, you can type your message once and it goes to every social media site you have associated with your Ping.fm account. The beauty here is you can associate nearly every major social network with this application, allowing you to spend more time focusing on the message you’re sending out rather than worrying about getting that message into all of your social networks.

The second social media tool is HootSuite

HootSuite, like Ping.fm allows you to associate your social networking profiles, but here’s the part that makes HootSuite shine over all others: not only can you associate multiple Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and even Ping.fm accounts, but you can schedule your status updates for weeks or even months out in advance and the built in reporting is simply amazing.

The conclusion of the matter is this: social media can be very powerful, but it can also be extremely time consuming. By leveraging these two social media tools, you can get more content out to more places in far less time!

Reply with your questions or comments about Ping.fm and HootSuite.

There have been lots of posts about submitting articles, but here are the top 50 by rank (Alexa and Google PR). Don’t submit your article to just one site – just like you would just submit your videos to YouTube, or your website to Google only.

Are you looking to put your article submissions on autopilot?

Big thanks to VREToolbar for this fantastic compilation!

Are you looking to put your article submissions on autopilot?

Since email marketing has become an integral part of any small business marketing strategy, you do want to follow some simple advice to ensure your email marketing is received well, provides values and increases your revenues!

Plan Early & Send Early

When it comes to email campaigns, you may not realize this, but the sooner you get on your clients’ and/or customers’ minds, the better off you are. You better believe your competition is planning and sending out early campaigns. If you plan your campaigns in advance, you will be better prepared to change course if need be.

Be Consistent in Your Frequency

As you know the rule of thumb is 7 times exposed before a prospect becomes a customer. That guideline is certainly still viable and valid. If you only take the time to send 2 or 3 messages in your email marketing campaign, then you are leaving money on the table, no doubt about it. Keep your frequency going, use similar, if not the same template with different content.

Use Calls to Action and Incentives

People like getting stuff, and in their core, they like taking action, when they perceive true value. If you don’t provide an incentive or call to action, you will NEVER be able to tap that intrinsic desire to get something or take action. There are limitless possibilities for incentives and calls to action – they can simply be value add services and offerings, or limited time offers, contests and giveaways.

For Goodness Sakes, Use HTML

The only time this would not apply, is if the majority of your email list has opted out of HTML emails, or rather chosen plain text for their delivery method. But why, you ask? HTML is far prettier than plain text or even rich text and people like pretty! You also have more control over how your email marketing content is delivered. NOTE: always provide a link to the “hosted” HTML version of your email marketing piece, so users that want to see your HTML without compromising their email client can experience the full HTML email effect.

Send Holiday & Special Occasion Emails

People all have egos, if you stroke them at least 7 times a year, you stand a far greater chance of them receiving your messages, reading them in their entirety and also interacting with your organization. People like to know that others care about them, so make sure these emails are geared toward the client and NOT your offers. Of course, include a call to action, just like with every email, but keep your promotional copy to the bare minimum on these emails.

If you keep these email marketing tips in mind, you stand to blow your competition out of the water moving forward.

In order to tap any particular niche, you’re going to need to know something about it.

It helps is you can pick a niche related to something you like, as that will drive you to learn more and you will enjoy it. Picking your niche can be rough, but make sure you know it.

When you present your opportunity to your target audience, they want to know you have your head on right and aren’t just trying to scam them for money. Since the typical internet user today is being bombarded with marketing messages at all waking hours, you need to make sure you hit on the pain for your niche.

What should you know about your niche?

1. Who the top competitors are
2. What products and services are being sold
3. How much volume is in your niche
4. Where are the trends headed in your niche

If you don’t have any idea about this information, be sure to go back to square one and research your niche. Document your findings and reposition your product or service to dominate that niche.

If you are like most internet entrepreneurs, you need to be writing articles about your niche. When you write articles, post them to a niche blog and at the very least to

If this is your first time publishing articles, go setup a free blog at www.wordpress.com (or you can setup your own fully customizable wordpress blog) and setup your free account with the article site mentioned above. Also, get an account with www.elance.com if you don’t already have a source for your article production. Then you’re off – make a goal to do 10 new articles about your niche!

Now to the secrets… it’s more of a system really.

1. Put your main article ideas on paper
2. Write out some points to hit on in each article
3. Get bids for writing your articles
4. Publish your articles

What’s so Secret?

Two things… first off, the way in which to structure your articles – subject title and points – will save you a lot of time when putting your first 10 articles together. Second, you will have a systematic way of getting your articles produced without breaking your brow or your wallet.

Article marketing is a very successful business marketing strategy. You should employ this system more than just the initial 10 recommended, but shoot for thousands over the course of two years.

Why Should I Submit Articles

If you’re still asking this question, then I need you to think outside the box for a minute. Article marketing serves two purposes, really it can serve more, but for business intent there are two main reasons you would employ this strategy.

1. Authority – providing you with an internet presence and expert status
2. Traffic – providing your business landing pages with high quality traffic

You want both in virtually every industry – so get crackin!

Landing pages are a wonderful marketing strategy – one that can be used by every vertical and in every situation. Here’s the low down on this killer marketing strategy!

What is a landing page?

First, let’s get clarity on landing pages. Landing pages are no more than simple HTML web pages – synonymous with squeeze pages and capture pages. The purpose of a landing page is to acquire visitors’ emails (and possibly other demographics).

Why use landing pages?

There are two main reasons:

1. When you advertise your business, you want to have some accountability for each of your advertising partners. Are they delivering a return? Do you even know? Landing pages are an excellent way to monetize your advertising campaigns. Because you can track each campaign with a unique landing page, for a very minimal cost, you have absolute figures without relying on some third party to monitor your advertising stats.
2. You want to appeal to your target ed audience as much as possible, so by setting up a landing page for each campaign you are able to co-brand your landing pages with the same look and feel of the referring publisher site, or simply cater to or leverage the language used in your ads. You will be able to test your landing pages as well to achieve optimal results.

Why build a list?

If you setup your pages properly, and consistently drive traffic to them, you will find your list growing steadily. But why have a list at all? Let’s start simple – would you prefer to end out an email once a month to 300 people who “might” be interested in what you do or sell, or, send out that email to 3000 prospects that put THEMSELVES on your list?

So now this is common sense, right?

How do I get them on my list?

Glad you asked! There are a ton of tools out there to help with your email marketing efforts and really, that’s another subject for another time. Basically, you would setup an account, create a form and copy/paste it onto your landing page – that simple, seriously.

Here’s two list building automation resources we recommend:

When should I use landing pages?

Excellent question! All the time! Every marketing campaign you send out and every marketing strategy you put together should always loop around to a landing page, if possible.

In your radio ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/radio.
In your magazine ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/mag.
In your television ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/tv.

I think you get the point… If you are trying to determine your ROI for each of your media placements, then be sure to use simple, affordable landing pages to segment your leads and track each campaign independently.

When visitors come to a website, the last thing they want in their experience is annoying fly-in subscription forms, pop-ups, pop-under (grr) and warnings in their browser if they happen to have blocker software. While these advertising strategies still work, they are not optimal for the user experience.

Harris Fellman and Richard Osterude just released the coolest advertising script that used to be only available to deep pocket customers. You’ve probably seen some peel away ads before, but wondered, “how in the world did they do that?”

“Your new software is not only incredibly effective in drawing
in almost everyone’s attention, but it also ads a true value
to your site as it pleasures the eyes like magic.”

That’s what Marcus had to say about it! Magic is definitely a fitting description.

Peel Away Ads…

• improve conversion rates
• peak visitors interest
• just got updated, so you can get the latest version, as of right now!

Well now you can do that very same thing on not one, but all of your internet properties for just one low fee! Stop giving your visitors a headache with antiquated adverting strategies, instead capture their natural curiosity in an elegant and user friendly fashion, using peel aways.

Go download it before they realize their mistake and raise the price: Peel Away Ads

Incorporate this marketing & advertising strategy into all of your online ventures! The uses are endless, let your imagination and passion run wild as you load up yet another bullet to the revolver that is your marketing strategy. They are especially useful for landing pages and a nice alternative for forum and blog advertising.

Building a business online can be a rough task. With so many business “experts” pulling you in a hundred directions with their advice, it’s nice to come back to “core” concepts and refocus your online marketing efforts.

I’m going to share with you the 5 fundamental thoughts I have when it comes to building business online. This is not hype or pie in the sky, but rather a clear mindset for planning your business marketing strategy, especially when it comes to the marketing online.

Build Your Email Marketing List

The more emails you have on your list the more profit potential you have in your business. This is a huge void for most small businesses. If you don’t have a tool in place to manage your list, get one ASAP. Make sure your site has a form to get new subscribers.

Automate Your Marketing Processes Online

You can use great tools like this business marketing automation tool, or even have your own custom application built. Processes include, client account setup, account management, subscription management, email marketing, customer incentives, affiliate management, credit/points management, shopping cart, online payments, recurring payments, etc… the list of processed that can be automated online is just ridiculous, I’ll leave it there for the sake of brevity.

Leverage Social Media & Web 2.0

You can use videos, audios, pdfs, social groups and profiles, contests, giveaways or even a referral process with rewards. Social Media and Web 2.0 are not synonymous with Social Networking Sites, but rather embody the concept of virtual, word of mouth marketing. This is one of the most powerful, yet least understood marketing strategies of them all! No one is going to have all of the answers, be very WARY of those claiming to have the “final answer”, as it were.

Think subscriptions

Subscriptions, and more specifically, automated subscriptions is the best move a business can make. If you only sell products in your business, you may have internal sources for recurring revenue. Just spend some time thinking about what is valuable to your clients and how to turn that into a monthly subscription.

Selling a product one off is great and all, but it’s much nicer to have the base of passive residual income flowing! Not only will you profit more, but if your exit strategy is to sell your business, then you’ll want some residual income flowing, to demand top dollar!

Get in the news

I sometimes feel sorry for retail establishments that have no news about, but most of the time it gets me excited! Why? Because I know I can help them generate returns with a well executed press distribution strategy. Anyone can submit a press release, but not everyone has the reporters calling them!

And of course, the most fruitful of all strategies…

Use Common Sense

I knew you’d get a kick out of that one.. what I mean by that is, know what you’re getting into and plan ahead so you can have a well rounded marketing strategy that encompasses these 5 core concepts.

If you are looking for some expert video training for getting your business online, take a look at Maverick Money Maker Series – I know you’ll be impressed!

Since Twitter API hit the scene, there’s been a huge influx of new Twitter tools on what seems like a daily basis!

It can be confusing at times, not knowing which tool to use and, more importantly, how to use it. I’ve tested nearly 50 Twitter tools that have had at least decent reviews, but I want to share the top 3.

First and most impressive, in my humble opinion, is HootSuite:
http://hootsuite.com/

For Twitter tools, this one is a stand up tool – it allows you to manage and distribute tweets across multiple twitter accounts. That’s just for starters – it also has a built in URL shortening service ow.ly (cute name too). Last but certainly not least, you can setup your tweets for timed distribution.

Since having niche twitter accounts is a great strategy for making money on twitter, you can really leverage this tool, together with the two below, to grow your online business or rise awareness for your cause fast!

Next, is Twollow:
http://twollow.com/

Twollow is a neat app, as it allows you to save hundreds of hours of searching for people tweeting about the things that interest you most. You can set the process up for each of your twitter accounts and assign niche phrases for the service to automatically follow. The more phrases, the better you results will be.

When it comes to following people, you want to spend your time communication with a list of followers that care about your content and with whom you can engage in conversation with. It may take you a week or so to find out just how powerful this tool is – but you can also take the shortcut can check your phrases against the twitter search (search.twitter.com) to see how many and what kind of results are coming up.

Lastly, we’ll look at TwitterFeed.
http://twitterfeed.com/

While at times this thing can be annoying, due to high frequency – you can setup twitter feed to post once an hour, or even better, 4 times a day (every 6 hours). This allows you to have relevant and valuable content flowing through your twitter accounts. Just like HootSuite, you can manage all of your twitter account under one Open ID login, which is very cool!

Imagine, having 10 twitter accounts for differing niches and keeping relevant content flowing through each of them, daily.. this tool is more for the twitter fanatic and it truly takes some common sense, otherwise you can fall into that spammer category real fast.

Five words of caution: Low Frequency, Nice Feed Content.

There are a ton more tools, as I mentioned I tested nearly 50 of them this past year. These are the cream of the crop to me. There are some honorable mentions though, and in no particular order, they are:

TweetLater – Great service for sending automated and timed direct messages and managing follower karma. http://tweetlater.com

TwitterCounter – A useful tool for doing some research into your new followers, competition and sharing your twitter profile on other websites with it’s embedded tools. http://twittercounter.com

Twellow – A twitter yellow page directory that allows you to seek out and follow people – it also has a great expanded profile feature when you confirm your twitter profile listing. http://twellow.com

I hope you got some value from these 6 tools and my brief review of them. I encourage you to test out new and emerging twitter tools as well, and post a comment with anything spectacular you find!

Copied with permission from: Joshua Jones

One of the best marketing strategies ever has been the use of websites to serve information and transact business or lead prospects and clients through a guided, and often automated, process.

Setting up a website, though, can be a daunting task for most.  Not so with Wordpress.

Wordpress is a blogging framework that gives you a real website with a database to store information. The framework allows you to scale your online presence and content on the fly, without having to be a webmaster or html expert.  The beauty of this framework is the fact that open source and free for use on any scale.

Because of how Wordpress is built, you can utilize this framework to setup a blog, website, landing page or any other web presence you can imagine.  It is a fully extensible platform allowing savvy developers to make massive applications in record time and amateurs to create money making websites on the fly.

Take a moment to visualize your website before you begin this process.  In terms of strategy – be sure to research your market and search trends before you get started.  See how you will deliver your content to your audience and plan ways to leverage that traffic (ie: newsletter signup, affiliate promotions, advertising, etc.).

Having a clear picture in advance makes this process a lot smoother!
Don’t forget to write your thoughts down.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Have your web hosting setup ahead of time.
2. Purchase your domain name.
3. Setup your MySQL database on your web hosting.
4. Get over to Wordpress and download the latest release.
5. Unpack the contents into your website root directory.
6. Run the installation.
7. Locate, download and unpack the theme you want to use.
8. Install the plugins you want to use.
9. Edit the settings for your site, theme and plugins.
10. Organize your categories, pages and links.
11. Start writing content!

There is a lot more we can fill into these steps and even some steps you need to have done beforehand.