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The social media marketing niche is full of hype pipers and hope dopes. Everyday I get a “product launch” email touting the latest Wordpress plugin, software app or marketing system, promising BIG traffic or quit-your-day-job If you have been around (the internet marketing scene) for even a few months you’ll know just what I am talking about. I am at the point where I am more interested in the way the product is being marketed than what the product is.

I have settled in to a few (mostly free) web 2.0 tools that make my social media marketing work.

So, shut up and tell you what they are already, right? Got it…

Video Syndication...The big gun in video submission is, of course, Traffic Geyser. This is a great service and, besides taking hours to set up and being priced on the high end, works very well at getting you and your silly videos plastered all over the web. However, recently I stumbled upon a free video submission service called TubeMogul that I like quite well, thank you very much.

TubeMogul allows for automated submission to the 12 big video sites all at once. The interface is super-simple. It allows you to add a title, description, tags and category setting to you video. And you can upload as many videos as you want for nada (FREE!).

Check it out at TubeMogul.com.

Social Media Submitting and Bookmarking ...Some of the new folks get confused here so let me briefly explain… Social media marketing calls for lots of “submitting”. One of the mainstays is submitting your post (your story, your article — whatever you call your content) to a social media site.

There are really 2 types of sites for post submission. There’s the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and technorati which just want you to primarily submit a link and tag. There’s not much voting or browsing of these “bookmarks” going on after you submit.

Then there’s the social news sites like Digg and Propeller. These sites want your link and tags also but you will also need to provide a good description of you post and hope that other vote it up.

So, with that out of the way… On to the freebie.

I have used a few of the paid tools out there to automatically submit to both the social bookmarking sites and the social news sites and, in my opinion, the free tool at SocialMarker.com works better than all of them. You just input your post data, check the sites you want to submit to and arrow through the submissions. “That was easy!”

Keyword Research...Yes, I still do keyword research, I think it is important to keep track of your main keywords and look for variations as new topics come up. I use the free tool from the giant keyword service called Keyword Discovery. The free tool works great for bloggers who are not building 10,000 word PPC campaigns.

Check it out here.

Image Editing by far, the service I use the most is picnik.com. I always have to crop, resize, fix, etc. the images I need to use. This online editor makes it quick and easy.

Free Video Capture and Editing, this may be a bit advanced for the new folks but just in case you are ready to stick your toes into the video pond, here’s a couple of free tools you’ll need.

First, you will need a good screen capture software. I like the tools from TechSmith, either Camtasia (V3 is free right now) or JingProject.

Once you have you fancy screen capture then head over to Jumpcut.com and start editing. This is an awesome free online editing software that should cost big bucks.

So, there you have it… The list is not long but, trust me, these free tools will get you f-a-a-a-r in your social media marketing endeavors.

You can try lots of other similar free marketing software, tools and systems; there is an endless number of them that’s for sure.

This is what has worked (and continues to work) for me. Enjoy!

The big free list... Brand Overviews

HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate. Blog Search Tools

TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only. TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags. Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates. IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies! BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

Serph – Track buzz in real time Google Trends – shows amount of searches and google news stories Trendpedia – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs. BlogPulse Trends – Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT) Omgili Charts – Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums. eKstreme – blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us. Message Board Search Tools

BoardTracker – tracks words in forums BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums. Omgili – Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Google Groups – Searches usenet groups. Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups. Twitter Search Tools

Twitter Search – Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’. Twitstat – Twitter Tweitgeist – Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets TweetScan – search for words on Twitter Twit(url)y – see what people are talking about on Twitter Hashtags – Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time. Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now. TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud. Twilert – Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service. Web Site Traffic

Compete – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites. Quantcast – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Alexa – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views. BlogFlux Page Rank – Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites. Search Data

Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume by country and region. Google Insights – Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase. Yahoo! Keyword Tool – Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month’s search data. FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms. Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes. Multimedia Search

YouTube – Search for videos and channels by keyword. MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine. Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else? Flickr – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users. Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL. Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting. Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web Social Bookmarking

Digg – Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking – general cool stuff Delicious – Social bookmarking Feed Aggregator

Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome. URL cruncher

Bit.ly – URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc Specific Social Network Tracking

Adonomics – Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing. Search Engine rankings

PageRank Checker – Shows Google page ranking Advertising and Event Tracking

MediaHound – Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

As always I'm all ears if you have a comment or suggestion for our up and coming marketing tips.

100 marketing tips tip in 100 days will help you achieve your goals, all you have to do now is use these tools!

Danny D.

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