Cribbed Content for August 15th
it’s been a crazy week, but a lot has been going on in the business world (not to mention my world lol)
- CVS Pharmacy bought small California chain Longs Drugs this week for $2.9 billion. Growing up with Longs, I’ll miss seeing the name around but they’re not one of the better stores so I don’t see it as a loss.
- AOL jumped into life streaming with their acquisition of Social Thing this week as well. I’ve never used Social Thing much, but I definitely won’t use it if it just gets pulled into their system.
- Affiliate Summit East 2008 in Boston wrapped up – I’m slowly getting all of my coverage posted. The next time I go to the show I hope to have a better laptop with a better battery and better wireless card so I can blog from the sessions instead of taking notes and blogging later. So much for live & current coverage!
That’s really about it this week since I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to antyhing outside of the summit. I did pick up some good tools, so the Free Toolsday column should be back soon!
Read MoreFree Toolsday for July 22nd
A great tool for anyone looking for a little scratch is Brickfish. Brickfish presents contests in a part web 2.0 part social media environment. For example, tell them how you make your summer sizzle and you could win $500!
There are tons of contests in different categories, and for the most part – the most creative wins! They also reward those with the most viral exposure, taking viral marketing to a whole new level! This is a great tool to show off your creativity and possibly win a prize. Brickfish also offers handy widgets and voting tools for contestants to get the word out on their entries. Users of the community vote, and anyone who wishes to vote has to join the community.
For any businesses out there that want to sponsor a contest, rates vary depending on the campaign. Variables include size, goals, purpose, etc. The great staff in the marketing and business development departments can give you an estimate if you e-mail them at info@brickfish.com.
Check it out today!
Read MoreFree Toolsday for July 1st
WordPress boasts an impressive 3,464,799 blogs using their self-publishing service. Anyone who uses WordPress.org to power their blog like I do know that one of the best features is the ability to import countless plug ins to add different functions to your blog. One of the greatest ones I’ve found is Twitter Tools.
Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by allowing you to archive your tweets, create blog posts from tweets or tweets from blog posts, as well as creating a daily digest post of tweets and posting tweets from the WP admin section. I have found this much more reliable than other automated tweeting services like twitterfeed. This is probably why over 25,000 people have downloaded this great plug in.
The plug in, like most, is really easy to install and only requires that you enter your Twitter login information. Whenever you post to your blog, a new tweet is posted through your Twitter account with the title and a link. This alerts your Twitter followers to your latest blog posts. Some people like this better than a feed reader because they can pick and choose which blogs to read based on the headlines.
The only thing I don’t like about this plug in is that a new tweet is sent even when you just edit an existing post. So if I know I’ll be going through old posts to update them (links, new info, whatever) I’ll disable the plug in temporarily and turn it back on. You can also edit the .php file of the plug in to prefix your title with whatever you want. As a default it’s New Blog Post: but you can make it say the title of your blog, New, whatever you like. This is helpful especially if you run more than one blog and run the automated tweets to the same Twitter account.
I highly recommend trying this out if you’re on Twitter (if not, get on it!). Also, share your experiences with Twitter Tools if you’re already an avid user!
Read MoreFree Toolsday for June 17th
Once again this week, it’s technically still Tuesday so I’m a bit late for the East Coasters, but hopefully this is worth it.
Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com said during the video panel at the last Affiliate Summit back in February that people go onto the internet for two reasons: to be entertained or to solve a problem. A great way to solve 80% of your business related questions is to go to LinkedIn Answers.
I haven’t had occasion to ask many questions since there are SO many useful questions in a variety of topics. In terms of business information that’s relevant to your working life, this tool kicks the crap out of Yahoo! Answers. This is targeted information in a really easy to find format. Unlike forums that can be filled with years of information out of context, LinkedIn Answers allows you to search for the information you need and find it fairly quickly.
Don’t take my word for it… go check it out! LinkedIn Answers. And remember if you’re an expert at something, share your wealth of knowledge and answer some questions too! Karma, people!
Read MoreFree Toolsday for June 10th
OK it’s TECHNICALLY still the 10th here in California, so here’s this week’s free tool.
SEO Quake
is an extension for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It’s a great tool for webmasters to improve their websites, but also a terrific tool for an affiliate manager doing due diligence on the websites their affiliates list.
My favorite feature is the Whois tool. I use this to check the registrant information on websites on affiliate applications before I approve them. I use the whois data to try to weed out the shadier side of affiliates registering with websites that do not belong to them.
As with most toolbars or extensions, which features you include are completely customizable. Another great feature for the SEM/SEO minded is the page rank button and the other Alexa rankings and Google index numbers.
Of course, there are tons of features of the toolbar that I haven’t even explored! So go check it out at www.SEOquake.com and tell me what your most useful feature of the toolbar is!
Read MoreContest Soon
That’s right, I’m gearing up for my first ever contest here at TrishaLyn.com. I’m not really going to make people
jump through a million hoops with some complicated point structure system to win – but I won’t lie, it will have to benefit me in some way of course.
Prizes are being compiled, details and rules drawn up, and everything should be ready soon. So in the meantime, stay tuned!
Oh, and a Free Toolsday post obviously didn’t happen this week…mostly because yesterday felt like Monday and it slipped my mind. So a really good one will be coming next week to make up for it, I promise!
Want to donate a prize for the contest? E-mail me at Contests@TrishaLyn.com! For those of you interested in donating, the audience is readers of my blog… so businesses, performance marketers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, etc.
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