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This is the second day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

Guest posts are a great way to introduce yourself or your product to a new audience. I believe any time someone asks if you are willing to do a guest post, you should jump at the chance. Yesterday, I did a guest post for Eric on Marketing.fm. If you would like to hear me talk about Social Network management you can head on over and check it out. Here is an excerpt:

The folks over at Ping.fm designed a site where you have the ability to update your status on dozens of different social networking sites. I use Gmail for just about everything and Ping.fm allows you to add its updater to your Google Chat list. So anytime I want to update my status, I click on the chat and type is my update. A second later I get a response that my status have been updated. If I were to log in to all the different accounts I have and manually update my status it would probably take 10-15 minutes (given I don’t get sidetracked being on those sites)…

This is the first day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

As black Friday and the mad shopping spree from Thanksgiving to Christmas approaches, stores are getting desperate. The more desperate they get, the better deals you will find. Already, I have seen sites posting stores like Best Buy and JC Penny’s with Black Friday sales coupons. You can always visit BlackFriday.info to find the best collection of coupons. Here is what Mercury News had to say:

“Consumers may need some encouragement to get into the holiday spirit this year,” said Scott Marden, director of market research for Vertis Communication, which offers marketing services to retailers. “No interest, no payments, layaway offers, door-busters, one-stop shopping, and rebate incentives will all be welcomed by most consumers” along with gift-with-purchase deals and buy-one-get-one-free offers.

The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy, which are owned by the Gap, are pushing hard to get consumers in the door this weekend. The company e-mailed coupons for 30 percent off to 5 million customers with an additional bonus: The Gap will give 5 percent of what you spend to a favorite nonprofit. The coupon is good through Sunday.

There’s also the soft sell: The Gap’s holiday campaign features current hot television stars such as “Cam Gigandet of “Twilight,” Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” and Mary-Louise Parker of “Weeds” in cozy pictorials.

In a departure from its traditional print and TV ads, the San Francisco-based company has also created humor-infused Webisodes featuring such unlikely pairings as Selma Blair with Rainn Wilson and the Dixie Chicks with Sandra Bernhard singing traditional Christmas songs. The videos launched Thursday and are designed to be shared through social-networking pages like Facebook and downloaded to iPhones. The six videos reside on gap.com/MerryMixIt and will be shown in movie theaters before features, too.

Josh here: I just have to say that I would love to kill the person who invented ads shown before movies. You used to be able to pay $10 for a movie and $15 on concessions, but now… You have to sit through 15 minutes of ads and previews. Don’t get me wrong, I love the previews of upcoming movies, but all the ads can disappear for all I care. I don’t want to be advertised to after paying an exorbitant amount to sit and eat junk food.

“They’re designed to bring a smile to someone’s face, given all the bad news lately,” said Olivia Doye, director of public relations and marketing for the Gap.

Here is an Interview with Turnip of Power | Social Networking marketer on the creation of a new advertising network called CMF ADS. CMF (Changing Marketing Forever) ADS is a widget-based advertising system that allows advertisers to purchase ad space on quality niche blogs on a CPM (cost per thousand views) basis. Currently, there are 20 blogs in the network that have been selectively chosen to participate in the initial launching.

I like discovering new and up and coming products or services and thought CMF ADS would be a great candidate to share with everyone. After you read through the questions below, I encourage you to visit CMF ADS and see what it has to offer. Without further adieu, here you go:

What was your motivation for starting CMF ADS?

My motivation was to implement an idea I had posted several times on both my blog and on the Entrecard Forums. Each time the idea was ignored or given the canned response of “We have limited resources for that.” Then recently I was disappointed with the Performancing Ads Network. Stan from razzball.com approached me and said “Why can’t we do something like that?” That’s how it all started.

What are your short and long-term goals for CMF ADS?

Short term the goal was to get good people involved who wanted to be part of something new. We wanted to test our code, our server, public reaction, and iron out all the little unexpected surprises. Long term we would like to expand our portfolio of blogs and reach out to other social networks. As we are only 3 weeks old today, we are still refining our initial goals. Just yesterday I rewrote the widget code to allow for this expansion.

What is your major selling point for CMF ADS (elevator pitch)?

For publishers: We monetize your social traffic for you. All you have to do is maintain a quality blog. We help promote your blog, help you with your website when help is requested, and at the end of the day provide you with a small paycheck for displaying our widget in previously unused space next to their social networking widget.

For advertisers: We get your message out there on 20 of the best up and coming websites. No need to interact with so many small sites individually. We bundle our members’ page views and sell them to you in a very affordable CPM bundle, providing geotargetting and other advanced features the individual site owner could not easily provide due to a lack of technical expertise.

I could imagine many bloggers will want to utilize your service. Do you have strict quality control admission?

We have quality control on both the publisher and advertiser ends. Nobody wants to advertise on horrible made for adsense splogs. Likewise, no blogger wants scammy ads on their website. We manually approve all blogs and ads, allowing both publisher and advertiser to opt out of any ads or sites they wish. Each blog in our network was discussed in detail before being sent an invitation to join.

If a blog is interested in joining what will be the minimum requirements for joining?

Initially we invited only WordPress blogs. Since then we have allowed blogs using other content management platforms to join. The main requirements are your own domain name, a minimum of a 250 pixel wide sidebar, and maintaining a high-quality blog. Sometimes we work around the sidebar issue in special cases, but generally adhere to these rules.

How does the advertising widget effect the speed and efficiency of a site?

Our widget opens in an i-frame, so won’t ever slow down the rest of a site from loading. In addition, we host the bottom image locally, further speeding up the process.

What has been the overall perception of the widget so far?

Reception has been great. The first day we announced our network we sold 25,000 impressions as well as numerous high-quality blogs looking to join the network. Many curious bloggers have taken notice, along with a few advertisers.

Do you see yourself in competition to Entrecard or merely using some of their ideas to create a stand along advertising network?

We don’t see ourselves in competition with Entrecard or using their ideas. We took twenty well-respected blogs and made an ad network out of them. Now because we are active in the Entrecard community it was only natural that these twenty blogs were discovered through Entrecard. One blog has since left Entrecard and we welcome that, as well. A good blog is a good blog, Entrecard or not.

What measures are you establishing to provide the smoothest growth possible?

To ensure smooth growth, we are only letting in a fraction of the blogs asking to join. Each step of the way we have checked to make sure all issues were addressed before moving on to the next phase.

Conclusion:

I think this network has some great potential to develop into a full service advertising network. I don’t know how often they will be accepting new publishers, but I would make admission highly selective, more on the prestigious side. Say it only has enrollment every two weeks and only X number of new publishers will be allowed in during the beta stage, kind of like Gmail was invite only for the longest time. This would help in the beginning to have controlled growth of all the system resources preserving the quality of the network and service by not having a bunch of down time.

I really enjoy when people go out on their own by mixing and matching various different ideas to produce a worthwhile product. Time will tell how things play out, but I would again encourage you to head over to CMF ADS and check it out for yourself.

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.

Here is a compiled list of recent Marketing Ideas for many different occasions starting with the newest Marketing Idea.

Marketing Ideas #5 Cut Prices - I find it amazing how well cutting prices works to lure people into a store. The problem with the price cut war is eventually everyone gets in on it and those that don’t cut prices get cut out by the customers. This year retailers have cut prices quick and early to attract customers into their stores.

Marketing Ideas #4 Do a guest post - Guest posts are a great way to introduce yourself or your product to a new audience. I believe any time someone asks if you are willing to do a guest post, you should jump at the chance. Yesterday, I did a guest post for Eric on Marketing.fm. If you would like to hear me talk about Social Network management you can head on over and check it out.

Marketing Ideas #3 telephone conference series - One realm I have never ventured into is that of a telephone conference series or packaging a product on mp3 or DVD. I have seen the effectiveness of marketing via these methods and the ability to upsale people on bigger and better versions of the same series later on consultant fees.

Marketing Ideas #2 Black Friday “Free treats for all” - As black Friday and the mad shopping spree from Thanksgiving to Christmas approaches, stores are getting desperate. The more desperate they get, the better deals you will find. Already, I have seen sites posting stores like Best Buy and JC Penny’s with Black Friday sales coupons. You can always visit BlackFriday.info to find the best collection of coupons.

Marketing Ideas #1 Thanksgiving Game - Sometimes the turkey just isn’t ready. Now, instead of awkwardly looking at all your family and extended family members you can pass that time with a new Thanksgiving Game.

Thanksgiving Marketing Ideas for your business - “Taking advantage of targeted advertising next to online recipes for holiday favorites is a great way to get your brand at the top of every shopper’s grocery list this year. When a consumer goes online to look up recipes on how to roast their Thanksgiving turkey, will they be thinking Butterball, Norbest or Honeysuckle White?

Starbucks new Gold Card marketing strategy - Just the other day I noticed Starbucks had started a new promotion, the Starbucks Gold Card. Although, it is not quite like the Centurion Black Card, it is on the right track. If you have seen this card or have purchased one, let me know your thoughts about the promotion. Do you like it or dislike it? Are you interested in getting one? Play the video below to hear my thoughts on the Starbucks Gold Card.

Seesmic marketing - What do you do when you don’t have a lot of time to express your thoughts and ideas? 1. You can hire an extremely fast typist and have them pound it out for you

Halloween Marketing Ideas - I have been seeing a lot of searches landing on my blog for Halloween Marketing Ideas and really wonder what people are tying to marketing on Halloween (or there about). Here are a few of my Halloween Marketing Ideas for various industries…

Real Estate Marketing Ideas - I don’t know if you have noticed, but the Real Estate market is taking a bit of a beating. When things in a market change so drastically in a sort time period, people have to get creative to preserve business and their way of life, none more is true than in real estate.

Quick Marketing Ideas - I am going to just throw out a few different marketing queries I have received to this blog and then reply as quickly as I can with marketing ideas. All of these are terms people have searched and found their way to my blog. I can’t promise that they found what they were looking for, although I hope they did. Just in case, here are my different marketing ideas for a variety of different areas.

Get CONNECTED with your audience - A list of 13 different ideas or ways to connect with your audience both on and offline.

Marketing ideas: allowing your product to advertise itself - 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.

Stop throwing money at marketing - And start changing the way you go about marketing.

My one month test and a new Marketing Ideas newsletter - Over the last month give or take I have been running a test for this blog to determine what kind of traffic and visitors I would receive if I put the least amount of effort into running my blog.

Are You Taking Advantage of Auxiliary Services? - There’s a very simple question that many marketers and businesses fail to ask themselves: “What do people need?”

The rainy day marketing strategy - As I write this blog it has been raining in the state of North Dakota. You wouldn’t know it but old man winter is already beginning to show his face around here. Not to mention that he left about 3 months ago. That got me thinking of a marketing idea that I would try if I owned a more traditional brick and mortar business.

How to market yourself - I got a comment recently from Jacqueline who mentioned that she had no problem marketing other people’s products and services but lacked in marketing her own. Since I am actually planning on talking about this subject with local business owners, I figured I might as well start practicing here.

3 Lessons of marketing deployment - I put together a short list of things I need to remind myself from time to time. These are just a couple of examples that make business, marketing and products all the more better when done right.

Is it your first time here? And another marketing idea. - Welcome to TEABERRY! As some of you know, I write to you primarily from Fargo, North Dakota, and like to share some marketing ideas I can easily take pictures of. This brings us back to TEABERRY in downtown Fargo.

Effective Marketing Online - Anybody with millions of dollars in their advertising budget can run a huge and effective marketing campaign, but how do you run an effective marketing campaign online for free? First off, none of these marketing techniques are new by any means, but they do sometimes get overlooked. So without further adieu, I present my top 5 effective marketing tips online.