Alert Blog Reviews

I trust you had a great Christmas! As our minds dream of how fantastic 2010 will be, it’s time to look back at the hot topics of 2009. Here are Marketing Pilgrim’s top ten most read posts in 2009. Bing.com; Is it Worth Switching from Google? – A home run for Microsoft? While Bing certainly deserves credit for being the first serious challenger to Google, it didn’t hurt that 2009 was the year that Microsoft stepped-up its media outreach to us. Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – This post was written in 2007 and has been in our top five for the past 3 years! Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – A great guest article by Jon Rognerud and it still stands-up as a great primer for social media marketing. 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – A smart blogger knows not to simply update a popular post. Instead, you think of ways to expand on it–with a new post! This post from December 2008, added 8 more great monitoring tools for reputation monitoring. 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter – Back before there Twitter Lists were just a twinkle in the eye of Twitter’s founders, Brian Chappell authored the definitive list of marketers on Twitter. If we hadn’t introduced a policy to close comments on older posts, I believe this one would have easily broken 1,000 comments by now! 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – Just a little over a year ago, I spilled the beans on the plugins that power Marketing Pilgrim. Look for a new, updated list, in the New Year! Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch – How in the world did this benign looking post from 2007 make it into our top ten list of 2009? Good keywords! The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing – My good friend Ben Wills authored this post in 2006–which at the time was groundbreaking. In fact, I blatantly–with his permission–used it to frame an entire chapter of Radically Transparent! Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results – Do you get the feeling that we have a good grasp of reputation management issues? This post is over 2 years old, but, aside from the Google Pages reference, is still remarkably relevant. Facebook Really Does Make Mone y – When it comes to Facebook, I tend to defer to Jordan’s critical eye. She never fails to deliver! Some observations: As of today, Marketing Pilgrim consists of 6,792 (make that 6,793 with this one) posts and more than 45,000 comments! That’s a lot of words! Traffic was up 17.54% in 2009 compared to 2008. Not a bad growth rate! Referrals from Twitter were up 120%!!! Referrals from Yahoo were down 13%. Our own URL shortener– Gri.ms –let us track the origination of around 10,000 visitors! We know where you live! Want to see previous years’ top posts? Check out 2006 , 2007 and 2008 .

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The 10 Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Posts of 2009

I’d like to be among the first to wish you a very Merry Christmas. I’m not sure what Christmas means to you, but here’s what it means to me. Thanks Linus, I couldn’t have said it any better!

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Merry Christmas!

As we’ve done for many years, it’s time to forget about marketing and focus on the whereabouts of Santa Claus (aka Father Christmas). Fortunately, NORAD and Google make it easy to track Santa Claus each year , and this Christmas is no exception. What to do next? Head over to the official Santa Tracking site , test out the new mobile Santa tracker , or just go play in the snow with your kids! Merry Christmas!

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Tracking Santa Claus for Christmas 2009

At some point in your career you start asking the question, “what am I doing here?” Maybe you’re not there yet, but trust me, you’ll get to the stage where you wonder if you’re on the right career path, if you should perhaps change direction, or if you can turn that passionate hobby into something that pays the bills. Once you discover it, there are countless books that will help you Get Things Done or cram it all into a 4-Hour Workweek . The problem is, how do you discover what your IT is in the first place? That’s where Scott Wittig ’s Holy IT comes in. Scott is a good friend of mine. We almost launched a company together, discussed our respective careers, and debated the importance of the important things in life. So, trust me when I say, Scott has lived through everything that he shares in his book. With practical steps, case studies, and some humor, Holy IT is the book you should read, if you need to discover your special purpose in life– Steve Martin need not apply . Anyway, Holy IT is about 100 pages long (short?) and will take you less than 4 hours to read. But, once you’ve read it, be warned! It could change your outlook on life! Want a copy? How to enter this contest? Simply leave a comment below and we’ll randomly pick 3 winners (deadline for entry is 6pm ET this Wednesday). That’s all you need to do! And, if you don’t win, you can grab a copy from Amazon.com .

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Win Copies of Scott Wittig’s “Holy IT” Book

When we first launched Trackur , my target audience was the person that had outgrown Google Alerts, but didn’t have the budget for the existing–expensive–online reputation monitoring tools. Well, fast forward 18 months–and almost 13,000 registered accounts–and it turns out that Trackur is extremely popular among PR and marketing firms. You see, if they want to manage dozens of client accounts, they don’t want to have to blow their budget in the process. That’s why we built the Trackur Agency plan . We’ve been quietly adding all kinds of great features: Unlimited client profiles Unlimited saved searches Direct client logins No contracts White-labeling The white-labeling is the one that we’ve worked hard on and now we make it even easier to put your brand in front of Trackur–instead of ours. When you sign-up for an Agency plan , we’ll register a domain name on your behalf, upload your logo, and give you your very own social media monitoring solution! You can keep close control over your client’s monitoring, or give each client their own unique monitoring dashboard. All for around $300 a month! Actually, $297 a month is the pricing we’re offering until the end of the year. So, if you want to offer monitoring of any kind of news media to your clients, now’s the time to get your Trackur Agency plan.

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Hey Agencies! Want Your Own Online Reputation Monitoring Service?

To all Marketing Pilgrims, we hope you have a restful, thankful, and blessed Thanksgiving. We’ll see you back here on Monday!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

One of the things that’s been consistent about Trackur’s social media monitoring since launch, is that it tracks around 90%+ of online media. You know, news, blogs, tweets, images, videos, etc. But, what about that other 10%? Well, we think we’ve shored that up, with the new option to submit your own RSS feed to Trackur. The new Custom Feeds option lets you upload any valid RSS feed and have Trackur keep a watchful eye on it, for mention of any of the keywords you are tracking. Here are some example uses: You want to monitor a message board for any mention of your brand? Simply submit its RSS feed to Trackur. Want to keep track of any known issues at TripAdvisor? Monitor the keyword "bedbugs" or "mold" and Trackur will alert you if someone posts a review to your profile using those words. Are there particular language specific sites you’d like Trackur to monitor? Upload the RSS feed, et voila! We believe this new feature is going to make Trackur even more awesomer! Right now, the new feature is limited to Enterprise and Agency plans , will max out at 100 custom feeds per plan, and only supports RSS (we’re working on Atom support). As we test it, we may add the option to other plans in the future and remove the cap. Whether you use the new feature alongside your existing Trackur monitoring, or set-up Custom Feeds as some kind of RSS reader on steroids, we think this new feature gets us closer to 100% monitoring of the things that are important to you! Disc: Andy Beal is the founder & CEO of Trackur. But, if you didn’t already know that, he’d be surprised.

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Trackur Now Monitors Virtually Everything Important to Your Brand