Lately, I’ve noticed StumbleUpon come up more often in my Google Analytics referrer stats and, since I haven’t really used it as much as I should, I decided to play with it more often to increase the amount of StumbleUpon traffic to my blog.

Well, during  my research, I found a very resourceful site called Nick’s Traffic Tips (check him out as he all types of free goodies for getting more traffic to your web properties!) and he has a Free Stumbles page. I thought it was a very cool idea and am doing it here on my blog as well to share the love!

What Is StumbleUpon?

For those who are unfamiliar with it, StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking and networking site, enabling people to interact with each other and build profiles. Because of these two unique aspects, StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool to help boost awareness for your business.

See my other post listing 5 tactics to boost your awareness and credibility on StumbleUpon.

What Do I Need To Do?

It’s very simple really. All you have to do is follow these three simple rules:

1. In the comments section below, simply put the full URL to the page in the text box on your site you want me to stumble (i.e. http://www.cnn.com)
2. Please keep the links family friendly – no porn links allowed
3. No affiliate links, links to CPA offers, or the like – only links to your own site/blog

Note: It’s best and highly recommended that you’ve stumbled your own site first as you know the best tags and description better than I would. Otherwise, I’ll do my best…

That’s it! Periodically, I’ll check the comments and get to stumbling – *because I’m generous like that*

What’s The Catch?

Skeptical? No need to be.

• There is no “wait, there’s more” line.
• There is no catch.
• No strings attached.
• Nothing to buy or do.

Your turn…

Do you use StumbleUpon for your business? Don’t forget to add your link in the comments below! Also, feel free to spread the love to your network.

If you’re a stumbler, feel free to connect with me - http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/choklate/!

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However, building backlinks can be a time-consuming, boring process. You can outsource the process to an agency and pay a lot of money OR you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee! SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses and domains. Imagine being able to create 25 unique backlinks every day, with the click of a button, FREE! Well, you can stop imagining…

So, 25 unique backlinks every day… That’s a total of 175 backlinks every week, 750 every month. If you upgrade, you will be able to build 100 unique backlinks, 3 times a day! That’s a total of 2,100 backlinks every week, 9,000 every month! The good news is… you can get a Premium Account, FREE! All you need to do is to refer 12 members, and your account will automatically be upgraded. If you’re not really into referral marketing, you may upgrade right now for a low one-time fee.

Submitting a page to SocialMonkee via the members area takes under two minutes, but there’s an even faster way! They created a Firefox plugin that allows you to submit your page to up to 100 sites in just a few clicks, using nothing else than Firefox! If you have a Premium Account you will also get access to link reports and RSS feeds, which are great to keep track of your backlinks and get them indexed fast. Submitting your RSS feeds to RSS submitters is actually a very important step in link building.

Your turn…

So what are you waiting for? Join SocialMonkee now while it’s still free!

Also, let me know what other backlinking solutions you’ve found useful.

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Try Google’s Wonder Wheel! It can at least help you think about some ideas very quickly.

So What Is Google Wonder Wheel?

Google Wonder Wheel (GWW) is a wheel of wonder so to speak (LOL) which shows related search terms in a visual wheel like display where you can narrow down into other search terms which in turn become more wheels! Really, it’s a fancy way to view search results but is has great potential.

See It In Action!

Your turn…

Have you used the Google Wonder Wheel? Tell us how! Please share

UPDATE:

A Google spokesperson has informed Search Engine Land that the Google Wonder Wheel feature has been taken offline. Read more about it here: The Google Wonder Wheel Is Gone

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People ask me all the time where I find images for my blog posts and I’ve been meaning to create a post describing how to do so.

Well, look no further! I’ve found two video resources that explain extremely well what I do to find free killer blog images.

As an aside, I’m one of those people who look at imagery (along with the blog title of course) to help me decide if I’m going to read a post or not becasue we all know that pictures are worth a thousand words.

So check out the resources below and have fun finding those great images for your next blog posts!

Resources

• Search Creative Commons
• Finding Images on Google
• Update: Marty has so graciously suggested a plugin called Photo Dropper, which searches for Creative Commons licensed photos and lets you drop them into your posts – right from your WordPress dashboard with just 1 click!

Your turn…

Where do you get your blog posts images from? Please weigh in!

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So in the first and second parts of this series, you learned the basics of online reputation management and how to respond to bad publicity.

This last part of the series directs you to some of the top monitoring tools you need to listen, learn, and interact with others about your brand.

Even if you are one of the tiniest companies around, online reputation management (ORM) is one of the most important tasks you need to definitely add to your planner/calendar on a consistent basis.

Monitoring Your Blog

• Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing more than a million blogs. It goes one step further and keeps track of influence, authority, and popularity of blogs.
• Google Blog Search – Google search engine for blogs.
• BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a search engine for blogs and an automated trend discovery system.

Twitter Monitoring

• SocialOomph – Includes the ability to schedule tweets, receive an e-mail digest of tweets containing your specified keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies and @mentions. I’ve also created a video on how I use Socialoomph for Twitter automation.
• Advanced Twitter Search – The advanced Twitter search is a very powerful tool that searches all Twitter activity for keywords, links or user activity in real time. Keep up with interesting news and people you care about.
• Monitter – A real-time Twitter search tool that enables you to monitor a set of keywords (up to 3).
• TweetBeep – Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, basically anything, with hourly updates.

Monitoring Your Links

• WhoLinksToMe – Tracks backlinks and makes them easily sortable by anchor text, origination, and by the target URL with enhanced reporting capability.
• BackTweets – Provides an engine to search for specific links from your website mentioned on Twitter. Great also because it shows RTs (retweets) as well.

Brand/General Monitoring Tools

• Google Alerts – Provides email updates of the latest relevant Google search results using your desired keywords.
• Yahoo Alerts –  Same as Google Alerts where you can set up different alert types from your desired keywords.
• Google Trends – Monitor the current “buzz” for the latest search query trends.
• Keotag.com - Search for tagged blog posts across multiple blog search engines.
• Naymz – Build and protect your brand and monitor your reputation in Google plus a lot more. Basic version is free.
• Purewire Trust – Build your reputation quickly and gain trust.
• Yasni – Find yourself on the web with a people search. The search includes almost anything you can think of : personal and business profiles, images, locations, education, employees, bad news, property, reports and much more. It’s pretty interesting all the information this search brings back!
• BoardTracker – Includes a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information so you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

Because there are so many tools available (and plenty more that I have not listed), you’ll need to do your own research on which ones will make sense for you.

I’d recommend starting at the top and digging into some of these tools to see how they work and what benefits you can glean from them.

In the end, online reputation management is not something you can disregard or ignore. There will be chatter at some point. The question is are you in on it (and quickly) and can you do damage control before things spiral out of control?

Your turn…

1. What tools do you use to monitor your brand?
2. Are there any others you’d recommend?
3. If you aren’t using any reputation monitoring tools yet, do you plan to?

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