Today I just want to tell you about an ad I saw earlier this week. Some of you may have seen it already. It’s a Pepsi ad featuring Thierry Henry and a bunch of meerkats. I didn’t really get the point of this ad when I first saw it… I then understood that there was no point! It’s definitely not the best Pepsi ad but it features meerkats, and with the World Cup coming up (only a few months to go), I couldn’t resist to post it to the blog. Check it out:

For those who don’t know who Thierry Henry is, he is a world renowned French football (soccer) player currently playing for F.C. Barcelona. There’s a very good chance that we see him playing at the World Cup in South Africa later this year. I really can’t wait for the competition to start! Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the ad! Feel free to leave a comment on anything you feel like!

A few months ago I published a blog post on how to automatically send a message to new Twitter followers. In this blog post, I recommend a great social media tool called Social Oomph. I’m regularly using this program as it helps me manage my Twitter accounts and improve my social media productivity. If you haven’t heard of it before, make sure you grab a free account now. It is the best social media tool I have used so far.

One of the great other advantages of this program is that you can schedule (recurring) tweets. Yes, you can fully automate your Twitter activity by getting the system to automatically tweet your updates whenever you want! So you can tweet messages while you’re at the beach, at the movies, at the stadium… and even while you’re sleeping! How good is this? This is truly a great feature and the best part is: Social Oomph lets you try this free for a few days! However, I must warn you… if you try this upgraded feature, you WILL want to upgrade, no matter how much it costs. The good news is: it’s pretty cheap!

With the free version, you can schedule messages to be tweeted once, as many times as you want. Good… but not good enough! With the trial and paid versions, you can schedule messages to be tweeted as many times as you want. You can indeed schedule recurring updates! If you have your messages ready, setting everything up only takes a few minutes, and you can then tweet for life without even connecting to Twitter, connecting to the internet and using a computer! To make money online… automation is key!

This is must-have if you’re an internet marketer or alike. Social media marketing has become very popular in the industry and every day thousands of dollars are made on Twitter with 140 characters or less messages… that people haven’t even tweeted themselves! Even if you aren’t in the industry Social Oomph still is a social media program you must definitely try. As a reminder, it’s free, but the real value is in the upgraded version! A must-have if you want to make money on Twitter! Who wouldn’t want to do that anyway?

Most of you must have heard of Google Alerts already. If not, make sure you continue reading the rest of this blog post! This free service offered by Google notifies users via email when new results are found on the web for specific search terms. Google Alerts is a great service for marketing professionals as it can help them monitor their online presence with ease. Creating an alert takes less than a minute and it works great for home and small-to-medium businesses.

To create an alert, simply go to Google Alerts and enter a search term. I recommend you to use quotation marks (as in “Cool Example”) so the searches are more specific and you thus avoid receiving unwanted alerts. Then choose a type of page to be monitored, how often you want to receive alerts and how many alerts you want per email. Then enter your email address and… that’s it! You will need to confirm your email address though, and repeat the process if you want to create multiple alerts. Note that they are now also available as RSS feeds.

Still not sure how Google Alerts can help you as a marketer? Let’s say you have a product called “Blue Widget”. If you set an alert to be sent to you for the search term “Blue Widget”, you will receive emails whenever someone writes about your product on the web. You can not only receive alerts about your products but also about the products of your competitors. Without having to search for anything yourself, you can know when your competitors announce new products, launch special offers, etc. Google Alerts can also help you identify new competitors and monitor your personal online presence.

You can easily track your company, product(s), service(s) but also your competitors and anything else you would want to monitor on the web. These are only a few marketing uses of Google Alerts. I’m pretty sure there are several other uses that I don’t know about yet. If you use Google Alerts for marketing as well, feel free to share your own techniques with us! This service is a must-have for almost all types of marketers!

A few weeks ago I discovered a great WordPress plugin for affiliate marketing called WordPress Affiliate Pro. This plugin allows you to place links on as many keywords as you want. The keywords are automatically hyperlinked on every single page of your blog. Manually adding links to your content is rather time-consuming and very repetitive. This plugin can potentially help you save hours of work!  It’s a real time-saver!

WordPress Affiliate Pro makes it very easy to input affiliate links into your content, which is very good in terms of monetization. Setting it up is pretty straight forward. If you know how to upload and activate a plugin, you shouldn’t have any problem. Otherwise, you may follow the instructions that can be found on the plugin page. Once it’s activated, you can start adding keywords and links.

For example, you can add the keyword ‘web hosting’ to the system, define a link (which can of course be an affiliate link, or any other link you want to be inserted into your content) and the plugin does all the work by hyperlinking ‘web hosting’ everywhere on your blog. You don’t have to manually add links to your content anymore. Another great benefit of that the clicks are tracked, which makes it very easy to know which keywords generate the most leads.

Add links straight into your content with no editing at all!

Download WordPress Affiliate Pro

Get it now and turn your blog into a cash machine! Check out the videos on the plugin page so you can see how easy it is to use. This plugin is truly one of the best pieces of software I have ever used. It’s ideal for affiliate bloggers but can actually be used by any blogger. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to save time and improve the monetization of their blog!

Movember: previously known as… November. For those who have no idea what this is all about, here is a short description of the phenomenon: Movember is an international foundation organizing an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache to highlight men’s health issues such as prostate cancer and depression. Basically, the foundation asks for volunteers to grow a mo (for moustache) in November so their friends can donate to show them their support.

Movember was founded by a group of friends in Melbourne, Australia back in 2003. They recognized that men were lacking a way to engage and actively involve themselves in their own health. Since 2003, Movember has continued to grow each year, both in terms of participation numbers and funds raised. It has also expanded to other countries including New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and some other European countries.

We will all agree to say that Movember is truly great viral marketing. Each person growing a mo at this time of the year effectively becomes a walking billboard for men’s health. They help the foundation raise awareness and funds. To date, the event has raised tens of millions of dollars globally.

Movember is very popular in countries like Australia where you can see men starting to let their mo grow as soon as late October! And yes, that’s a form of cheating! If you’re into rugby, you’ve maybe seen some Scottish and Australian players proudly wearing their mo during this fall’s test series, like Matt Giteau (on the left).

If you’ve never had a mo before, and wear one for a whole month, all your friends will ask you about it. No doubt. And here is a great opportunity for you to raise awareness on men’s health issues… and the Movember Foundation! I think that’s a brilliant idea, and I’m really glad to see it’s going international. If you wish to donate to the foundation, you can sponsor a friend of mine’s mo. Only one week to go!

Last weekend I finally received an invitation from Google to join the preview version of Google Wave, which is described as a new personal communication and collaboration tool. It’s a web-based service developed in Australia and designed to merge emails, instant messages, social networks and wikis. There was a lot of hype over Google Wave these last few months and I’m glad I can try this new, very promising communication tool. Here are my first impressions…

First, anyone using Google Wave at this time should understand that this is only a preview version. Don’t be surprised if you find bugs. You are actually encouraged to report them to Google. There’s nothing really impressive the first time you connect but you get a good idea of what Google is trying to create: a comprehensive, real-time communication platform. A very noble goal, isn’t it?

Google Wave is very intuitive and rather well structured. With this new tool, we’re not talking about emails and instant messages anymore but about waves. These waves are created by users and can be followed by those who are invited to become collaborators. We’re not talking about recipients anymore but truly about collaborators. This is pretty straight forward and all the functions Google Wave has makes it a very promising online communication tool. You can drag things around,  embed waves in blogs and websites, play back any part of the waves you follow… It’s also customizable and most of the source code is planned to be released as open source, which is very interesting as developers around the world will be able to create applications and extensions.

Luckily, I got a few invitations to send out and will thus be able to use Google Wave more comprehensively the next few days after I can get friends and colleagues to join me.  If you haven’t received an invitation yet, ask around you. It seems that quite a few people received an invitation from Google these last few days (and thus the possibility to send out a few invitations). Otherwise, you may simply request an invitation to Google Wave.

Has anyone tried Google Wave yet? Feel free to comment this blog post. I’m eager to hear from already existing users! With the recent release of an experimental version of Google Social Search, the American giant seems to be on the way to provide us, once again, with great tools that are likely to change the way we use the internet.

A few weeks ago I got to use a cool web service called Skitch. It’s a screen capturing and image sharing service only available on Mac. I’m a Windows user, and even if I’m currently contemplating switching to Mac, I was annoyed with the fact that I couldn’t find an alternative that supports Windows… until I got my hands on Jing, which is a similar service available on both Windows and Mac. I just couldn’t believe there was nothing similar for Windows!

Whatever you do on your computer, you’re quite likely to find a use to this type of tool. I used to take screenshots the old way and upload them to a server… this is now part of the past! Jing seems to have a few more features than Skitch, such as a video capturing function, but both services are very easy to use. The way these tools  work actually makes it very enjoyable to use. It’s just so simple.

These tools basically allow to capture screens, add visuals and directly upload them onto the web. With Jing you can also capture videos, which is pretty cool (and not only because it’s free). You can select a specific area of your screen that you want to capture. It’s very flexible. The process literally takes seconds, and you don’t need to have your own place to upload the files to. One click will be enough to share your files. They are uploaded on Screencast.com (for Jing) and Skitch.com (for… Skitch, right).

Click to download for Windows and Mac	Click to download for Mac only

Both services are free but Jing has a professional version that you may want to check out if you’re really into this. These tools are gold. This is something you’re going to enjoy using…

I’m sure most of you have seen some of the Mac vs PC commercials over the past few years. They’re everywhere, and there are lots of parodies too. Anyway, Windows 7 just came out a few days ago but Apple already released a new commercial about it. I’m planning on switching from Windows Vista to Windows 7 on my work laptop and I must admit that this commercial doesn’t help me at all in my decision. I even want a Mac for home now! Sometimes I wish Apple wasn’t that good at marketing…

I hope you enjoy it!

Inbounds links are useful for two main reasons: they can generate additional traffic to your website and, most importantly, influence search engines in the ranking of your pages. There are plenty of ways to get inbound links to your website. One of them is becoming increasingly popular: through user generated content websites and micro blogging platforms.

HubPages is certainly the most popular user generated content website. It has been designed around sharing advertising revenue for high quality, user generated content. Some of the pages – all built by web users – are very popular and generate a significant amount of traffic. Just so you know, some people are making heaps of money with these kinds of websites. I’m not explaining you how to make money with them though, but how to get more quality inbound to your website. Anyway, HubPages is the first website you want to look at.

Squidoo was founded about a year before HubPages and is also very popular. It doesn’t generate as much traffic as HubPages but is still a big player. Squidoo was designed to help web users easily find useful overview pages – called lenses – written by real people. With Squidoo, you have the option to give your earnings to charity, which is a good thing if you’re not really interested in monetizing your page.

Tumblr is a micro blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos and other types of content to their micro blog. Tumblr is popular for its customizability and ease of use. This is not the ultimate blogging platform, but if you’re not too familiar with blogging, or just want a simple but effective blog, then you should consider Tumblr. Signing up on Tumblr only takes a few seconds, and everything has been done to make you publish your content in the most simple way possible.

Posterous is another micro blogging platform but is slightly different from Tumblr. With Posterous, you can publish blog posts by simply emailing your content to a dedicated email address. If you’re confused about blogging, well this might be the best option. I just cannot think of a more simple way to publish content. You email your content and… that’s it. Your blog has been created. You don’t even need to log into the system to publish your content. You can do so though, if you really want to, to edit your existing blog posts for example… It is not as big as Tumblr but I really like the concept. Give it a try, it is definitely worth it.

ViralHosts is also a great way to get more quality inbound links to your site. This all-in-one cPanel hosting, list builder and mailer system allows you to host and build a site in no time. With ViralHosts, you can link to your main site, squeeze pages or any other pages you want. You know how much value search engines give to inbound links… ViralHosts is your chance to get quality ones! To be honest with you, I just can’t stop finding new benefits to using ViralHosts, so make sure you join free today and see how this system can help you build a strong online presence!

Otherwise, you may want to look at alternatives like Google’s Knol, SpongeFish or LaunchTags. Browse around and choose the ones you like. If you’re really after inbound links, then create a page on each of these websites. Keep in mind that not all will allow you to post links without a rel=nofollow attribute (which basically remove the value of the link for search engines), or only allow you to do so once your page is considered as a high quality page. Focus on quality and don’t insert too many links, one or two (to different landing pages) are usually enough. There is no use linking twice to the same address on the same page.

Twitter has become a pillar of social media marketing along with MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking platforms. It is important to master these tools if you want to use them for marketing purposes. I have often wondered how to automatically send a direct message to new followers… until the day I finally decided to take action. Strangely, I couldn’t find much information on websites and blogs, so I had to search in forums… That’s why I decided to write my own post about it. Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered how to do this too, Social Oomph is the answer to your question. The website used to be called TweetLater, for those who may have heard of it before.

With SocialOomph, you can automatically send a direct message to new followers, and it is very simple. You just have to create an account on the website (it’s free) and add your Twitter account in the dashboard (click Accounts and Add Account). Grab your Twitter username and password, fill in the blanks and enter the message you want your new followers to receive (don’t forget to tick the Auto Welcome box at the top of the message). Press Save and… that’s it! You couldn’t think of an easier way to do this. You don’t need to do anything from the Twitter interface (besides checking that the direct messages are actually sent maybe).

Social Oomph even gives you a few tips on how to write a welcome message. You probably already know what you want to tell your new followers, but their advices do make sense. Read them. Then if you ask me if you should do that or not… I can just tell you that only you have the answer to this question. I guess it really depends on your profile. Is this for a personal Twitter account, or for business? What kind of business? And so forth… I hope this helps! Social Oomph also provides other (free and paid) services to improve your social media productivity. Is is definitely worth a look.