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Andrew from Mixery.com was kind enough to share a video of Seth Godin Tribes he (his friend) was able to record. It is a bit on the longer side of 70+ minutes, but I would highly recommend watching and analyzing what Seth is trying to describe in creating a tribe of people and ideas. Powerful message especially from a marketing point of view.

Mixergy has more videos and MP3s for startups.

Since humans picked up the very first stick and rock to help make their lives easier, we haven’t stopped. The same goes for tools online. Learning how and where to find those tools along with using them help make our lives much easier is vital for productivity. Here are my Top 10 Web Marketer Tools (in no particular order):

1. SEO Quake Toolbar

The SEO Quake toolbar is a FireFox extension that allows you to quickly and easily see quick stats about every web page you visit. As I am browsing from site to site I can simply look at my toolbar and know roughly how much traffic, authority, backlinks, age, keywords and indexed pages a site has. This is invaluable information when you are doing research on clients or competition. With a few clicks you can see much more detailed information until you are blue in the face. Here is where you can get the SEO Quake Toolbar.

2. COcomment

COcomment is another great tool to allow you to track the online conversations you have had. Every time you leave a comment on a fellow website or blog it records that and feeds it into your COcomment inbox. If anyone replies to that comment in the future you can see that to continue your conversation. I use this every day, and it helps to build your trust on other websites as a member and participator, even if you only visit to update your conversation. This is a bigger time saver and an absolute must for maintaining an online presence in all different communities.

3. Google Alerts

I have touched on this before and won’t exhaust the topic, but if you are trying to become an authority on a subject there is no better way to stay up to date than with Google Alerts. You can play with the settings to receive alerts by email one a day, hour, as they happen and so on. This is a great tool for brand management and to see what others are saying about your subject, company or yourself.

4. Ping.fm

Ping.fm allows you to send messages to all of your various Twitters, Facebook, Myspace and just about every other major social networking site. I have it set up through my Gmail that allows me to send a message automatically to my Ping.fm dashboard and it simultaneously updates all of my social networking platforms. Huge, HUGE, time saver. Never again do you have to log in and out of 20 different sites to update all your friends and followers. It’s great.

5. All in One SEO Plugin

All in One SEO Plugin is for self-hosted Wordpress sites. So, if you have a blog and use Wordpress, you need this plugin. This plugin allows you to quickly optimize your post title, description and keywords. When you do this on a subject like Halloween Marketing Ideas, when someone searches for that keyword term it shows up in the search engine instead of your normal blog title. It looks better to the eye, meets the searcher criteria, allows search engines to categorize better and helps overall in SEO.

6. Auto Social Poster (ASP)

ASP is really a neat tool to automate the initial boost of your post in the search engines in a given term. What ASP does is allows you to automatically bookmark your newest posts to sites like Delicious, Scuttle sites, Flurl, and many, many more. You can create as many different accounts to all the sites you would like, and it will randomly select as many or few sites to post to. This gives each of your newest posts an automatic backlinks from dozens of social bookmarking sites. If you are writing on a trend type subject, this one plugin alone can help to drive hundreds of visitors.

7. G-Lock Blog Finder

G-Lock Blog Finder program allows you to search for keyword terms similar to yours in order to build good backlinks. If you have a blog about apartments and want to build that blog as an authority on apartments you can use this program to help find those apartment blogs. If you are leaving and participating on their site in a useful manner and have similar content, it should be easy to attract like audience to your own blog. This not only builds your reputation but helps to create more trickle traffic from similar sites.

8. FoxyProxy

The FoxyProxy plugin for FireFox allows you to view the web semi-anonymously by routing your web viewing through a proxy. This helps to reduce your footprint on the web and lets you stay one up on the competition. You can pick and choose how you want your settings and what sites should and shouldn’t be routed through a proxy. Once again, a very useful and free tool that can be used in many different ways.

9. Aweber Newsletter

Building a Aweber newsletter list is a very valuable tool. If you have not jumped on board I would encourage you to do so as soon as you reasonably can. Permission based marketing is becoming a huge tool for marketers to utilize. If people like what you have to offer, setting them up to receive your newsletter is a great way to keep them in contact and make genuine offers you feel will help them. This doesn’t mean you can now spam everyone on your list but it does mean you now have an opportunity to point them in the right direction hopefully with an affiliate link or commission cut. Don’t lie, cheat or steal and you can make good money from this tool just by being responsible.

10. Bookmarking Demon (BMD)

BMD is a lot like the auto social poster plugin in how it helps to automate backlinks from bookmarking sites. These sites help to increase exposure for your content and hopefully some additional traffic as well. With this program you have the ability to bookmark and share your site, useful information or even your friend’s site. This would be the equivalent of an online shotgun with the idea of getting your site out to as many places as possible. This has the potential to be used in a spam-like manner but if used correctly can again help you to increase your digital footprint online.

Before you do anything online you should make yourself familiar with all the tools and possible consequences of using those tools. If used improperly some of these can get your site deindexed or ever banned, resulting in less traffic and authority. You also never want to spend money on any tools or programs that you will not utilize fully. Look up reviews and what others have to say about any one tool over another and proceed with caution. These are a few of the tools I use on a day-to-day basis, and I personally find them useful.

1. Go out of your way.

2. Make things easy for them to talk to you, then engage in discussion.

3. Direct and guide visitors to where they can go to ask a question, like that bright, shiny new email logo to the right

4. Sign up for all the social networking sites you can mange to get ahold of. Then add them to ping.fm to reduce the amount of time you spend using them.

5. Find people in your niche and comment, comment and comment (sincerely).

6. Print business cards and hand them out to people at any chance.

7. Write guest posts.

8. Create videos.

9. Start a contest.

10. Give things away and make it easy to share.

11. Offer and take free advice.

12. Be yourself!

13. Have fun!!

We have all seen those great word of mouth campaigns that pay off huge for the creator of whatever was being talked about. The latest of these was The Dark Knight starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger.

Everyone knows the cast was loaded with amazing actors but due to the untimely death of one of them, the film received a tremendous amount of publicity. The turn of events that took place shot the movie to a huge opening that will remain on the top 10 list for a very long time.

Advertising budget spent on a better product

I mention Dyson on here from time to time because I feel it went the route of product innovation vs. mass advertisement. Dyson’s sell themselves. It’s true. People are completely convinced paying a couple hundred dollars more for a Dyson is money well spent, even the people who only vacuum once a month. What is the cost break down per use at that rate I wonder?

Sacha Baron Cohen up to it again

Every time Sacha Baron Cohen starts a new project, we hear about it. He goes on crazy antics that get him thrown out of stadiums, pulls one over on celebrities, gets sued by college kids, you name it. The fact that his name is in the news only enables more and more people to learn about his upcoming projects.

Lines at Apple stores nationwide

We have all seen the news on the day or night before the launch of a new Apple product with lines that wrap around the block. Everyone gets so excited they can hardly wait one extra day to beat the madness or not be one of the first to own their shiny new ______.

Giving your product legs to walk with

The key is the ability to give your product or service legs to walk with. Some great ways to enable word of mouth to spread is to give people something to talk about. Tie your product in with a charity event or organization. Have an impromptu contest around some special occasion whether it’s a holiday or an internal celebration. Perhaps, allow a specialized coupon to leak to others. Remember when Starbucks offered friends and family of employees a free coffee and everyone forwarded the email on to everyone else in the world? I am sure it was all planned. Be creative and have fun, make people smile, think and share their experiences.