Work.com Small Business Community Blog

Monitoring What People are Saying About Your Business, Part II

Justin Palmer of Palmer Web Marketing shares a great tip for brand monitoring in his Work.com guide Low-Budget Internet Based Brand Monitoring:

• Omgili Searches: Do a search for your company or product name on Omgili. Omgili is a search engine that focuses exclusively on forum threads and other customer-generated content. You'll probably be surprised to find how many people are talking about your brand.

Monitoring What People are Saying About Your Business

We've already covered how to find the top blogs in your business niche, but how does a time-pressed entrepreneur track what they are saying? First of all, think beyond blogs - you need to be monitoring anything that people are saying about your business on social media sites, forums, consumer review sites, Twitter, social aggregators, social bookmarking sites, and news sites.

1. Google Alerts: First, make sure you have Google Alerts set up, not just for your business name but for important topics of interest, public-facing employees, competitors, and so on. See this list of what you should be tracking.

2. Feed readers: Make sure you are using a feed reader such as Google Reader to subscribe to relevant blogs and feeds. Set up folders as needed to organize your feeds into topic areas of interest.

3. del.icio.us: Periodically check how many people are bookmarking your site or article by going to del.icio.us/url and searching on your URL. 1002 people have saved Work.com & 155 people have saved Aaron Wall's guide Learning Search Engine Optimization - how does your URL compare? You can see if your site is most popular in a category by visiting the popular page for a specific category - for example, http://del.icio.us/popular/smallbusiness/.

4. Twitter: To monitor how your business is perceived, create a Twitter account and then send "track [your company name]" to Twitter to get text messages whenever your company is mentioned by any of the million Twitter users.

5. Technorati: This is not always so accurate, but it's still useful to get a read of who is linking to you. Try http://www.technorati.com/search/work.com  to see the sites linking to Work.com.

6. Stumbleupon: Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ to see who has favorited your site - here's Work.com on Stumbleupon for example.

7. Business review sites: Visit local business review sites or consumer reviews such as Yelp, Citysearch,  DexKnows, and My 3 Cents to see what people are saying about your business.

Happy tracking and if you have other great resources please add them in the comments.

Twitter for SEO - Starter Follow List

Are you on Twitter yet? Here's a quick-start list of who to follow to learn more about search engine optimization for your business. Following up on my previous list of Twitterers for Business, here is a list of Twitterers for SEO. Follow them to pick up the latest SEO advice for your business, and make sure to add value and increase the chance that they will follow you too by Twittering your SEO tips you've learned as well:

• sugarrae
• dannysullivan
• graywolf
• HawaiiSEO
• rustybrick
• jillwhalen
• seosarasota
• sengineland
• lorenbaker
• Search Marketing Gurus
• jessicabowman
• Aaron Wall
• Greg Boser
• stuntdubl
• sitelogic
• aviw
• kevinnewcomb - Search Engine Watch

If you know other people to follow for SEO advice, or if you are one of them, please add your Twitter handle to the comments.

How to Find the Top Blogs in Your Business Niche

I just checked out the new blogged business blog directory and Work.com community leader Anita Campbell's Small Biz Trends blog is a top-rated blog there. If you are a business looking to participate in conversation with your niche community online, blogged is a great tool to explore what's out there.

ReadWriteWeb lists 6 other ways to identify top blogs in any niche:

1. Technorati blog finder
2. Del.icio.us blog bookmarks
3. StumbleUpon
4. Google Reader Recommendations
5. AideRSS
6. Ask.com Blogsearch

Google's Matt Cutts Gives Tips to Small Business Owners

Matt Cutts of Google gives great advice to small business owners about local search, Wordpress, video, sitemaps, and site setup.

Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com - All Business News in One Place

Now you can keep track of what's happening in business, all on one web page. Entrepreneur, blogger and author Guy Kawasaki just started a fantastic new business resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs - Alltop.com's small business page, which aggregates the best business news feeds from top business sources around the web, allowing you to get the latest business news at a glance.

You can  preview each story by mousing over its headline, so you can quickly scan top business stories. Featured are headlines from all the greatest business sites, including NYTimes Small Business, Startup Nation, Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, Fast Company.com, Work.com (our Guide of the Day feed - thanks for featuring us Guy!).

Congratulations to Work.com guide authors and bloggers whose blogs are also featured - Carmina Perez's Mogulette-in-the-Making blog, Scott Allen's The Virtual Handshake Blog, and Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends.

alltop, alltop.com, guy kawasaki, small business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs

List of Social Voting Sites Relevant to Business

Besides Bizsugar, the digg-style application which I am finding so sweet, there are many other social news and voting sites that are applicable to various business niches from insurance to real estate. Here are some more social voting and news sites to which your fans may submit your business blog post, article or Work.com guide, or you can scan to get ideas on what to write:

• AMPM Insure Insurance Community - insurance articles
• bizSugar - the hottest business topics
• digg world & business
• RealEstateVoices - real estate news
• Sphinn - internet marketing
• YCombinator - startup & entrepreneur news

As always, please share others you may know of!

bizSugar

Check out bizSugar, a site where you may submit and vote on the best business articles from around the web.

The Best Business Advice & Resources Via Email: WhatWorks

Work.com just launched WhatWorks, a new email newsletter which highlights the best business advice and resources, including top Work.com guides. WhatWorks is edited by Work.com editor Dan Kehrer. Dan is known for his accessible style and hands-on solutions for business owners and startup entrepreneurs. He has over two decades experience as a business and financial publishing executive, editor, author and entrepreneur -- and has helped conceive and launch several national business magazines including Independent Business (now called MyBusiness) and Emerging Business, and of course Work.com.

Find out more about Dan or subscribe to WhatWorks.

Tags: entrepreneurs, startup, dan kehrer, daniel kehrer, work.com

4 Great Lists of Online Tools for Entrepreneurs & Business Owners

Mashable's got a fantastic Online Business Toolbox list where they have compiled more than 230 of the best online applications relevant to business in categories such as accounting, customer relationship management, file storage, e-commerce solutions, and time and project management tools.

If cash flow is low, check out Bootstrapper's The Poor Entrepreneur's Toolset: 100 Freebies for Bootstrappers.

If you are a freelancer, Freelance Switch's has a fantastic list of 101 Essential Freelancing Resources.

Get answers or advice from one of the sites on Mashable's list of 30+ Tools for Questions and Advice (for business questions, you know where to go.)

Tags: entrepreneurs, freelance