If you’re like me, you’ve tried several social media monitoring and management services trying to get a hold on the firehose of information out there. Whether you are a small business owner, online marketer, a customer service agent or a blogger, it can be a challenge to discover, analyze and respond to everyone on the web you need to be talking to. And chances are, you’ve been disappointed by one service or another in the past.

I’m excited to announce the launch of Alerti, a Paris-based social media monitoring and management service that already has thousands of users on their French-language version. Alerti’s founders took on the challenge of creating a single, customizable interface to manage and share the flood of information out there on the web, and I think they have succeeded. And if you’re like me and need to keep costs low, they have you covered with a Premium package for just $35/ month.
 

 
FREE: I am working with Alerti and can offer a limited number of 3-month trials to Receptional.com readers who register at Alerti and enter “receptional” as the Bonus Code.

Maybe you already have a social media monitoring and management service, but you’re one of the 66% of users who told OneForty and KissMetrics in their recent survey that described their experience with their current monitoring service as “okay” or “frustrated.” Alerti offers a streamlined content interface, integrated work-flow management, and direct social media profile administration at an economical cost.

Key Feature #1: Custom Search – Alerti offers a customizable search based around a search engine that continuously scanning online content. Alerti empowers you to follow what is being said about you, your brand, or your competitors on the Internet, to measure the engagement of your communities, and to interact with them.

Key Feature #2: Dynamic Metrics – Alerti provides automated metrics analysis that you can also control to suit your needs. All graphs are customizable and the sentiment analysis of post results can be tweaked based on your own reading.

Key Feature #3: Work Flow Integration – If you are working as part of a team to analyze and manage your search results, Alerti makes that easy. You can tag individual posts for reference, share alerts out to colleagues and respond to relevant posts directly from your Alerti account.

Key Feature #4: Single Interface – Alerti brings all of these functionalities into a single interface, meaning that you can track keywords, measure engagement, manage work-flow, and respond through your Facebook and Twitter accounts from a single screen.

To top it off, they have an iPhone app so you keep track of your alerts on the go.

Whether you are looking for social media monitoring and management for marketing and sales, customer service, press relations, lead generation, or just a way to get more involved in the conversation, Alerti works.

See for yourself in other short demos about Alerti’s Custom Search, Single Interface, and Work-Flow Management features.

As I said, I’m using this service and I am excited to offer 10 FREE 3 month trials to bloggers or business owners who register at Alerti and use the “MN” bonus code.
–
Murray Newlands is the founder of Influence People and author of a recent book on Social Media Monitoring.

Personal branding focuses on finding your essence and presenting that in a way that stands out from the crowd. In different fields and for different people, standing out can mean different things. For someone in engineering, it could mean leading or working on a cutting-edge project. For someone in public relations, it could mean working on a campaign for a client that exceeded expectations. For an author, it could mean getting a great speaking opportunity.

When you think about what makes you stand out now and how you want to stand out in the future, don’t judge your accomplishments based on what others in your field are doing or have done. It’s not about whether you stand out more or less than the other person—it’s about how YOU stand out.

Those experiences will help you zero in on what comes easily to you, what you are comfortable doing, and whether you want to pursue the same or different kinds of opportunities to build your brand. It’s important to identify the instances and ways that you have stood out, but it’s even more important to identify the skills you were using. Keep that in mind when you make your lists.

TO DO:

Think about and write down the following:

• What projects, tasks or skills do your co-workers turn to you for help with?
• What parts of your daily work do you find easiest?
• What parts of your daily work do you find most appealing?
• What have you been recognized by your co-workers for doing recently?
• What recent professional accomplishment(s) are you most proud of?
• In what way do you most wish you could professionally stand out?

What is Personal Branding?
by Jim Kukral & Murray Newlands

Murray Newlands is an online marketing expert who founded Influence People, a San Francisco-based online marketing and blogger outreach consulting firm. Jim Kukral and Murray Newlands recently wrote What is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! to help people learn how to market themselves.

Since SEO is a cost-effective way to bring traffic and build popularity, today you will hardly find any website that does not do SEO to rank high on Google. Whether it is a big-time e-commerce site, a product-based portal or a family-owned business website, SEO is something all can access and enjoy.

But the story does not end there. SEO is a large field of study and it comprises of handful practices. What would fit your bill and what not always remains a hidden story for most of the advertisers. SEO outsourcing itself requires a lot of planning and calculations.

Do you know the series of activities SEO services UK perform for a client? Do you know all the major ranking factors responsible higher customer response? Are you aware of top SEO services that can give you maximum boost up?

If you have contacted a reliable SEO company look at their important services you should get for your website. You can also leave the matter to experts as they will understand your needs well.

The top 3 services you must claim from SEO professionals:

Keyword research and competition mapping

Search engine optimisation starts with sorting out right set of keywords. Keyword selection can be very tricky and confusing, because you have to analyse pool of data from variety of source. Then assumptions, speculation, expectation – all come in play. Make sure the chosen keywords are good enough to drive more and more traffics.

Link development program

Building relevant backlinks for your site is important to rank well in Google. Make sure the inbound links are of high quality, means they should be from respectable and high authority sites. Link values are equivalent to vote for online popularity.

Video marketing

With YouTube, Meta cafe and other popular video sharing websites it is possible to retain online viewers. Audiences prefer watching videos than reading texts. Through videos you can communicate your marketing message most successfully and earn credibility.

So from next time while you discuss the scope of your SEO project with SEO service UK company keep these 3 services in mind.

This is a guest post by Sujoy1976.

Improvement is a term that is relative and differs from one person to another. As such it is quite impossible to provide a benchmark for what is the ideal standard of self improvement. In fact, becoming better from whatever you were is considered improvement. When it comes to financial self improvement, proper financial education is necessary for this. You need to implement your education into proper financial practices in order to improve yourself financially. Here are a few financial practices that you can implement in order to make yourself and your financial habits improve.

Plan a budget and follow

There are two steps in this process. What most people do is just plan a budget, perhaps follow it for some days and then it remains on the corner of the table gathering dust. Thus the only requirement is not planning a budget, what is required along with that is following is diligently. In this way you would be able to keep a control over the amount of money that you are spending each week and also know the things behind which you are spending the money.

Learn to know what you need

It is very important that you learn to differentiate your necessities and your luxuries. While planning a budget you should give first priority to necessities. And then if you think you will be able to afford some luxury then go for it. But remember to make this indulgence occasional.

Create a savings account

This is a necessary and outstanding financial habit. You should make it a point to keep aside some amount of money every month from your income in a savings fund. This can come of a lot of use. You can use this money to pay off your debts. You can also use this money if you need lump sum cash for any emergency financial purpose instead of taking a loan.

Use few credit cards

One of the greatest reasons for falling into debt is excessive usage of credit cards. If you can stop this, then you would be a step ahead in preventing yourself from falling into debt. You should use cash as much as possible. Since you cannot carry too much cash at a time, you won’t end up spending much. Also when you use less number of credit cards you can keep a tab on how much you are spending.

Apart from the above four, you should also try to pay back your credit card bill within its due date. Once the date crosses, you start incurring interest on your borrowed amount. Thus now you have to pay more than the amount you borrowed to be debt free.

A lot of mobile app developers have good business-to-consumer marketing programs and the apps themselves are pretty good, but they struggle to make money with their apps. Why?

There’s a great article on The Basics of Hacking about how to monetize mobile apps, in particular Android apps but most of the techniques still apply to iOS, Windows Mobile, and yes, even webOS.

One of the most effective yet underutilized ways in the article is placing advertisements within your app. This can be done without a third party but unless you find someone willing to pay you a ton of money for buying some pixels for a month then the best way to do it is to go through a third party company, like Moolah Media.

Moolah Media works by linking publishers with advertisers, and tailoring ads so that they’re relevant to the app and relevant to the individual users using them. That means they can work both for apps whose users are easy to target and for apps whose users are hard to target.

Disclaimer: My company Influence People does consulting work for Moolah Media.

In-text ads are basically little pop-ups that show up when you hover over a link. When somebody clicks on one, they are redirected to a page and the owner of the original website gets paid money. This is one of the most overlooked methods of content monetization. When you choose a third-party company, though, you need to make sure that you choose one that will help you make the most money.

Infolinks is one of the most popular ones and it uses a traditional pay per click system where the website owner gets paid each time someone clicks, regardless of whether the click converts to a lead or a sale.

A lot of newer companies are moving away from this model toward a performance based RPC model. This is like traditional pay per click except that site owners are rewarded extra if a good percentage of their clicks convert to leads or sales. Advertisers like it because it encourages publishers to produce content that people who are likely to both click and convert are likely to enjoy (and thus more likely to see the in-text ad) and publishers like it because they make a little extra each time somebody converts, which they don’t under traditional pay per click.

November is American Diabetes Month, which is a time to raise awareness of diabetes and support those affected by this disease. In 2010, 1.9 million new cases of diabetes were diagnosed in the U.S. in people aged 20 years and older, and the numbers continue to grow. 25.8 million Americans currently suffer from diabetes.

Diabetes is a chronic disease characterized by abnormally high levels of a blood sugar (called glucose) blood, resulting from either the pancreas’s inability to produce enough insulin, or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces. Over time, untreated diabetes can lead to a variety of complications including blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, even death.

In support of American Diabetes Month, we are launching Diabetes Resource Page. It is an online portal for people living with diabetes and their families to learn more information to improve their lives, share experiences, and gain access to an array of offers and free samples from brands such as Remedy Life, Life Script, and P&G.

We’d love it if you’d help us promote DiabetesResourcePage.com and American Diabetes Month to help save lives all across America.

Disclaimer: My company, Influence People, does blogger relations outreach for Diabetes Resource Page.

The recent release of the iPhone 4 on both the AT&T network as well as Verizon Wireless has opened the Apple device up to tens of thousands of new users. And if you’ve been using any smart phone device over the past few years, you probably already know part of the joy of ownership is having instant, mobile access to all your friends and followers you chat and interact with in your favorite social media communities.

So, now that you have or are considering moving over to the iPhone, you might be curious as to what the best apps are for maintaining your social media connections. The following will list six of the more popular, interesting or just plain groovy applications you can download instantly to your new iPhone.

Connect Socially With These 6 iPhone Apps

1. Fring: Not only does Fring provide you with free video calling, which with the amazing new cameras on the iPhone is totally cool, but it also allows you to reign in all of your most loved social applications.
2. Nimbuzz: is another aggregator application which brings many of your favorite IM and social applications together. By allowing you to communicate to most of your contacts via a single interface as well as being able to make contact detail edits, this may be the only social app you need to use with your iPhone.
3. Twinkle: If you’re into Foursquare or Gowalla, then Twinkle is something you’ll like a lot. The app/service allows you to combine geolocation services directly with your twitter stream. If you are looking to just explore this social arena, this free app is a great way to dip your toes without diving head first.
4. iPhone for Facebook: Let’s face it, if you have an iPhone, are into social media and have ever spent an entire weekend on Facebook, this app should bestill your beating heart. Now you can get all the amazing stuff from your Facebook account but are no longer tied to your desktop computer. With similar interface across all of the Apple devices, your iPhone Facebook app will make it easier than ever to connect with your high school sweet heart. We hope they want to connect with you too!
5. LinkedIn: Okay, face it. Social media apps are not just for fun and games. Sure you like knowing what your friends had for lunch or where your significant other has checked in, but business is important as well. With the LinkedIn app (made by the folks from LinkedIn, so you know it’s right on) you will be able to walk into any meeting and have access to nearly 85 million professionals who are a part of this business social network.
6. Echofon for iPhone: Twitter is one of the most popular social networks on the Internet. But you are a busy person and cannot simply sit watching your desktop client all day in order to stay updated with all the tweets put out by the folks you follow. What to do? Stay synced up of course by using the Echofon iPhone app. They have developed a process which allows you to stay up to date when you are out and about and only have access via your iPhone. Now, everything you’ve read will be marked as such and when you are back at your desktop computer, you know you won’t have to wade through a bunch of previously read messages.

If social interactions are important to you, you need to have access to your favorite communities wherever and whenever you like. Getting the best apps for your iPhone will help you stay in the game and become a social leader as well.

What are your favorite social iPhone apps?

Brian Tanner is a freelance writer for HP, a technology product producer that helps 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 including desktop computers.