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5 Surest Ways to Get Free Music off Internet

Igor Ovsyannykov — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:28 +0000

This article was written for Inspirationfeed by Rita Fridman. Rita is a software enthusiast and freelance blogger. She loves writing about popular apps and programs making our lives easier. Her recent contribution was for MP3 download software.

Everyone would like to get a universal means to get quality music for free and without much hassle. In the era of the Internet and digital audio, there are dozens of tricky ways to save free music onto PC. One may convert YouTube music videos to MP3 format, download music albums from torrents or music hosting websites, find free audio tracks on iTunes and Amazon, etc. Leaving aside the legal issues of these methods, I’d like to show you the most efficient ways how to download music off the Internet absolutely free of charge.

1. Last.fm

Last.fm is one of the largest music websites with millions of songs to choose from. It lets you listen to your favorite artists/bands and also download their songs for offline collection. Many tracks are available for free download on the website itself. Moreover, there are several utilities which assist with MP3 ripping from Last.fm, e.g. Free MusicZilla. The download method is simple: just run the tool, sign in at Last.fm and play the audio tracks you want to save, then choose the grabbed music and click “Download” button. Recommended for music fans who spend countless hours at Last.fm.

2. Free MP3jam

MP3jam is a new software for Windows which lets users to download music from YouTube free and fast. The main pleasure of this tool is that it has built-in search, so you don’t need to go to YouTube and copy-paste the links. Just type the title of a song, artist, album and download free music. There’s also a nice option of music sharing on Facebook and Twitter – just click the button and your friends will know about your music tastes.

3. Video2MP3.net

This is a popular online service offering users an easy way to convert YouTube videos to MP3 format. To function well, this online downloader needs Java applet or a special Firefox extension. The only negative thing about this method is the annoying ads. If you don’t like to install PC software, then this is the perfect tool for you to get free music off the Internet.

4. Freemake Video Downloader

This is a nice Windows tool for downloading videos and MP3s from YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other video streaming websites. The software has an intuitive interface and provides fast video and MP3 downloads due to its multistream ripping technology. It’s also possible to download YouTube playlists, channels, charts, user favorites, etc. The software works via link copy-paste or browser plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

5. Browser addons

Modern browsers allow users to install different extensions to rip music online. The most popular are VideoDownload Helper, Easy YouTube Video Downloader and YouTube to Mp3. They all are very handy but most of them are for Firefox only, as Google has a very strict policy concerning YouTube downloading apps. The developers of these addons are either small companies or just software enthusiasts, so the extensions are rarely updated. Still for an occasional use, that’s exactly what is needed.

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10 Marketplaces to Sell Your Digital Products

Designraid — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:10:32 +0000

Selling digital products is one of the best way to make money online. Not worrying about inventory, shipping, or damaged goods is definitely a huge perk. As long as they have an internet connection, your customers can be anywhere in the world to purchase your product. This eCommerce dream is now reality and today we will list high profiled marketplaces to get you going.

Apple Stores

You can sell content on iTunes, the App Store, the iBookstore and the Mac App Store. To sell on iTunes you have to have a registered Apple ID, with a credit card for verification purposes.

Magazines

Magazines are uploaded with APPS, and customers can subscribe to the magazine (as people can pre-pay for their subscription or it can be free (with ads inside for APP creator to profit). Magazines are sold by Apple from their “Newstand”.

Books

You can sell your eBooks on the iBookstore via “iTunes Connect”. There is a “paid” book account, and a “free” book account, and the free one is quick and easy to join, whereas the “paid” one is more complicated requiring tax and bank details.

Free books do not require “ISBN”s, and ISBN’s are optional with the paid books.

The iBookstore only accepts “ePub” files and “multi-touch” books. “ePub” files are easily created with the free online program Callibre, whereby you can upload any format book and it will convert it to ePub for free. To create a multi-touch book you will need to create your book with the Apple iBooks Author Program.

Podcasts

You cannot sell a podcast on iTunes, however, it is free to upload your podcast to the iTunes directory.

Apps

To sell APPS on Apple you have to first apply to join the iOS Developer Program or Mac Developer Program. All APPS must be accepted by Apple, whereas APPS are all welcome on the Android database.

Udemy

Udemy is a growing marketplace for online video course creators. Most courses consist of many small videos put together as one big course. Udemy is well known for its ease of creating and uploading video course content.

You can upload video, documents and graphics as required in order to teach your course and they are all hosted by Udemy.

Customers come into Udemy and search keywords of a course they want to learn. They then select a course from the course options, they pay the course fee, and then they can stream the course (or download the videos) any time from then on from their Udemy account. Their settings are saved in their Udemy profile account so they can come and go as much as they please. There is also a space for “chatting” to the teacher who can answer questions posted by students, which all other students can read too.

The benefit of Udemy over other video marketplaces like Mindbites is that it doesn’t cost anything to list your online video course, it is free to upload and host one of your video courses. However, if someone buys your course, then Udemy will keep 20-30% of the sale price. If you drive that traffic to your course, you earn more money. Affiliates can also sell Udemy courses for a commission.

Udemy do require that your course be at least 60% video content and at least an hour of video.

MindBites

Mindbites is a marketplace where you can upload your video online courses and people can buy and watch on the Mindbites website (where your digital course is hosted), and you can even embed the video players right into your own website or blog.

The main difference with Mindbites from Udemy is that you have to pay to have your course online for people to buy and view (whereas Udemy is free to upload and host your courses). Mindbites has different size accounts depending on the size of your videos, the smaller your online course data, the cheaper it is to host them on Mindbites.

The “free” account with Mindbites will hold up to 250MB of data and any sales made on your account pays Mindbites 35% in commission when a sale is made. But there are larger accounts with more features, and less commission is payable to Mindbites for a higher paid plan.

The video player has a “promo” video size that people can watch which is intended to make the viewer want to purchase the full video at your pre-determined price.

Like Udemy Mindbites has an affiliate program to encourage other people to sell your video course for you.

You can also upload other documents with your video course for the buyer to receive when they buy your video. You can also put your collection of videos into a “series” to sell as a set. So a customer could just buy one video to do one task, or a collection of videos to learn a whole new skillset.

Warrior Forum

The Warrior Forum is a large forum with over 600,000 registered users, which appears to have at any one time between 5,000 and 10,000 people inside the forum browsing live. It is free to join the forum, and you can post questions and answers to question any time.

For online product creators the Warrior Forum is a Hub of activity of newbie internet marketers looking for training, tools and advice on how to move forward in their online careers.

The Warrior Forum has a special area named the “Warrior Special Offers” and inside this area is an ongoing stream of online product creators and internet marketers listing their products for purchase (although some now give things away free in order to receive your email address – this is called “list building”).

To purchase a WSO “thread” will set you back $40, a one-time fee, and once your thread is “live” anyone who visits the WSO area will see your thread in the directory and they can buy your product there and then.

The down side to WSO’s is that it doesn’t stay on the top page one of the WSO forum for long, usually less than a day. However, after your “thread” goes beyond page three you are allowed to “bump” the thread for another $40.

You need to source affiliates to sell your products on the WSO, or traffic alone will not bring much sales. The Warrior Plus affiliate program (for a small fee) works alongside WSO’s to manage your affiliates, which are sourced from Warrior Forum profiles, this way you can avoid any suspicious affiliates out.

You can also sell your JV Zoo product, or Clickbank product from within the WSO forum.

JV Zoo

JV Zoo is a real contender for Clickbank as it has grown in popularity since its inception only a few years ago.

The main success of JV Zoo lies in it’s ability to seamlessly integrate with the Warrior Forum. Unlike Clickbank, the seller and the affiliate are immediately paid into their Paypal accounts. Product creators also have the benefit of perusing the affiliate applications to promote their products before they approve them. This way you avoid accepting a fraudulent affiliates, which can happen.

JV Zoo also has many built in benefits, which all compete with Clickbank, including:

Creating dime sales (increasing the price with each sale)
Lifetime commissions for affiliates for future sales on your site

You need to know that JV Zoo only works with Paypal, if you can’t use Paypal you won’t be able to use JV Zoo. Sometimes certain countries can’t use Paypal.

JV Zoo listing and sales fees are also relatively low compared to Clickbank, but like eJunkie, you may find the affiliate force at JV Zoo not as strong as Clickbank and you may have to recruit your affiliates (or Joint Venture partners) yourself in order to sell your digital product.

Most product creators list on marketplaces like JV Zoo because they intend to market their product to their own email list. Therefore the demand on affiliates are not as large to turn a good profit.

8 Effective Plagiarism Checker Tools

Igor Ovsyannykov — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:00:45 +0000

Whenever a guest blogger submits an article for publication, you can use the following tools to ensure that they didn’t commit plagiarism. Usually, from my personal experience, sneaky people spin content. What does this mean? Article spinning is when you take a freshly written article and use software to change the meaning of a sentence through the use of words with similar but subtly different meaning to the original.

Let’s use the word “cars” as an example. The content spinner will change it to vehicles or automobiles. Basically thousands of word-for-word combinations are stored in the software to draw from. This ensures that a large percentage of words are different from the original article. Then they go and submit these articles to different blogs with their dofollow link. The entire point is to get a nice SEO boost for the website they’re trying to promote.

The entire process is very smart and I was quite impressed when I discovered it a few year back. People who manage websites know about this and other dirty tricks. The rabbit has already been pulled out of the hat, there is no reason whatsoever to use this shady tactic. I think a well written article from the guest blogger is the least you can ask for if you’re a website owner. After all you’re the one who busted your ass to get to where you are today. Therefore people who want to use your traffic and reputation for their agenda should have full respect.

As a blog owner you should be fully aware of duplicate content and understand that Google doesn’t take this issue lightly. Your website can and will be penalized. Here are some useful duplicate content checker tools. We hope they’ll help you catch people who are trying to take advantage of you. Please not that all of the images are linked to their represented website.

Copyscape

PlagSpotter

Dupli Checker

Plagiarisma

Plagium

Article Checker

Plagiarism Checker

CopyGator

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Top 5 Hard Drive Recovery Programs

Igor Ovsyannykov — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:21:32 +0000

This article was written for Inspirationfeed by Benson Garrod. Benson is a digital content strategist for Salvage Data, a company offering data recovery services in Washington, DC, Boston, NY, and other major cities. He enjoys keeping up with the latest trends in data recovery, smart phone apps, new gadgets, and other fun tech stuff!

As cloud computing becomes more and more popular, computer users everywhere are relying on off-site backups and streaming for all their data-storage needs. But the hard drive still plays a crucial role in the world of computer data. After all, it’s always going to be quick and easy to save a file straight to the hard drive.

Of course, hard drives sometimes become corrupted or fail. Also, there is the very real and irksome possibility of accidental file deletion. Almost everyone has experienced this little headache at least once in their lives. But what many people don’t know is that files that have been recently emptied from the desktop recycle bin can still be found on the hard disk – even after said disk has been reformatted.

The trick to recovering these files lies with quality file-recovery software. So in the spirit of retrieving vital lost data, here are some of the top free hard-drive recovery software programs around.

Recuva

Recuva not only assists users in recovering accidentally deleted files off their computers, but off their digital cameras, USB drives, MP3 players and more. Recuva gets top marks for its easy-to-use nature, as most people have no problems quickly setting up and running the program via its Quick Start feature. That said, there are some advanced features, like Deep Scan, that computer pros can use to perform advanced searches. Recuva will even recover deleted emails.

Glary Undelete

This is another popular free option that offers a user-friendly interface. The program itself has the ability to recover data from local disks or external devices. It also will scan all parts of a drive looking for any part that has been corrupted. Should the program find a corrupted part of a drive, it will then display the deleted files and provide an estimate as to whether or not the files can be retrieved.

Pandora Recovery

This option also has achieved much popularity due to its focus on user ease. Not only is the program menu easy to navigate, but it comes with a very straightforward and helpful Setup Wizard. The program can recover hidden, archived, compressed and encrypted files and will recover to a local hard drive, network hard drive or flash drive.

Softperfect File Recovery

Softperfect should take care of most data recovery jobs, no matter how big the task. That’s because this software boasts the ability to recover files that have been emptied or lost due to viruses and crashed software. It can also recover files from formatted partitions and will work in conjunction with RAID and Linux file system.

Restoration

This option can be favorably compared with the rest on the list. The program can recover files from local disks as well as external devices and supports most windows systems. It also features a stripped-down main window as well as a quick install that involves merely clicking the EXE file.

The above options should take care of the data-recover needs of most computer users. And since they are all free of charge, those with data issues can sample each one to find the option that meets their specific criteria.

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12 Solid PDF Tools for Professionals

Igor Ovsyannykov — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 08:23:37 +0000

This article was written for Inspirationfeed by Kathryn Smith. Kathryn is a tech and entertainment blogger. She also identifies various Internet utility sites and shares them with fellow people. Off late, she takes special interest in studying anti-scam-phone-aggregator websites like the reverse call lookup.

PDF files are preferred over other document formats because of the ease with which they can be created and presented. It is not just about being able to view them and read them. There are some amazing tools enabled by Web 2.0 technologies that help interacting with PDF format files. For instance, highlighting, annotating, adding colors, customizing text font, inclusion of hyperlinks and many more such things have now been made possible on PDF through these tools. Here are a few of these amazing tools any serious professional must make it a point to have.

PDF Aid

PDF Aid is a convenient web tool that helps users extract the images on their PDF files with ease. This tool is available free and is very user-friendly. No longer will you have to worry about extracting all those images from your PDF presentation. With PDF Aid you can easily extract all the images with a single click of your mouse.

PDF Reader

As the name itself suggests, PDF Reader is another excellent online tool that is free of charge and is a great tool to work with on any of your PDF documents. It lets you work on the document with the same ease that you would work on any word document of Microsoft. Especially, it is the best tool that helps you annotate, just as you would on any word document.

PDF Excel Converter

You no longer have to worry about the PDF documents that you need to present in the Excel format for editing purposes. You can use the excellent tool PDF Excel Converter that helps you effortlessly convert any PDF document into the Excel format for presentation.

PDF Converter

The PDF Converter is one of the most versatile online tools you can lay your hands on. This fantastic tool allows you to create PDF files and documents from practically any form of document that you have. You can now easily convert all your documents in Power Point, Excel, and Word documents to an easily readable and presentable PDF document.

Web2PDF

People come across a lot of useful information while browsing the Internet. Web2PDF offers an easy solution to save the information from your blog or website in the form of a PDF document. Simply paste or enter the web page Url and you’re done.

Booklet Creator

Booklet Creator lets you convert any PDF document into a printable booklet that can be distributed.

PageFlipFlap

This is another great online tool for PDF. This easy to use tool helps you convert any PDF document or Word file into a convenient flipbook. The flipbooks get a neat and sleek look when done and make great reading companions.

ILovePDF

You do not have to struggle with bulky PDF files any more. ILovePDF is here to help you split your PDF document into convenient smaller units. Conversely, if you have too many incredibly small files that won’t even qualify to be called files, you can give them a semblance of a file by consolidating several of them and merging them into one convenient PDF document. This easy to use tool does not require cumbersome installation software or downloading.

PDF to Word

This excellent web2.0 tool can be used to convert any PDF document into other convenient Word formats. The tool helps making things simpler for you in the classroom or at work.

Bee PDF

Bee PDF is a great tool that lets you share your information with others instantly. This is actually a website that helps you to host and share the files you have created in the PDF format. You may upload and share as many PDF documents as you please.

HTML to PDF

Though this may sound like a difficult proposition and too technical for a lay person, in reality it is a very simple process. This tool helps you convert any interesting information on the web or any blog post you come across, into a PDF document very quickly.

BlogBooker

You can now create your own blog-books of excellent quality. This fantastic tool lets you collate all your blog entries and the comments received from readers and convert them into blog-books. You can dig into the Archives of any blog that runs WordPress, Live Journal, or Blogger to convert them into blog-books within minutes.

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Five Programs to Follow and Unfollow on Twitter

Igor Ovsyannykov — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:41:56 +0000

This article was written for Inspirationfeed by Amanda Greene. Amanda is a blogger and Brand Manager for RHL, leading online supplier of dorm essentials.

It goes without saying that some Twitter accounts are just less than beneficial to follow. Yet, at the same time, there are some accounts that you just don’t want to miss out on. People are constantly tweeting inspirational and informational content that is bound to make your life better. So how do you find the balance?

Today we would like to provide you with a few tools to empower your Twitter experience. Listed below are sites that can not only help you figure out how to unfollow the right people, but sites that can help you follow the right ones.

1) ManageFlitter.com

ManageFlitter.com is a site that helps you manage your Twitter account. Unlike most unfollow sites that I find, this one allows for plenty of filters to help organize who you want to unfollow. They even have a “spam score” filter so you can seek out those you follow who have been reported as being possible spam. All too often I find sites that list the people who don’t follow back without any other reasoning as to why one should unfollow. This site does the extra work.

2) Who.Unfollowed.Me.

When you first sign up, this is a “lite” version of the full site. You can still benefit from this program because it does allow you to see who unfollowed you, as well as people you aren’t following back. Be sure to check back in on a regular basis as it does consistently update your Twitter account’s unfollow information.

3) TheTwitCleaner.com

I have found the TwitCleaner to be the most organized of these sites. It simplifies everything by laying it out all on one page from a report you have the site generate. It’s easy enough to unfollow, as you simply click on the profile image that you have unfollowed.

4) Tweriod.com

This site is more indirect – it doesn’t actually list potential people for you to follow, but you do run a report for your Twitter account and your follower behavior. When it’s done, it allows you to know the primary time, during the day, to tweet. It’s very helpful to know when to reach your existing followers and to get your message out to more people.

5) Replyz.com

One of the best ways to obtain followers on Twitter is through interaction. What better way to increase your interaction on Twitter than with a site that helps you do just that? After you sign up, Replyz.com gives you questions based on frequent subjects on your Twitter account. You can reply to the questions, and this is a way of reaching out to new potential users.

Twitter is not an easy beast to conquer. You can easily get lost in the confusion, but when you manage your account well, you are increasing your odds of success. We hope the following tools will help your news feed be more exiting!

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5 Best jQuery Plugins for Parallax Scrolling

Brian Taylor — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 08:08:05 +0000

Nowadays, you find a lot of websites being designed creatively with different ideas. A new type of effect called parallax scrolling has gained popularity in recent times and is being used to create a variety of background styles in websites.

This technique has been employed in most of the video games in the past and now it is being used in various websites to make the interface more attractive. Parallax scrolling provides 3D effects for websites as it features layers of images which move around in varying speeds.

You can add special effects to your website by using different types of jQuery plugins. jQuery is a well-written JavaScript code which improves the application’s performance with minimum lines of coding. Here is a collection of 5 popular jQuery plugins for parallax scrolling.

Stellar.js:

Stellar.js is one of the jQuery plugins which provides parallax scrolling effects to any scrolling element. It is very easy to use as it works by adding some simple attribute data to the markup. It allows you to accurately align the elements and background. Here are the major features of Stellar.js – you can add different scrolling speeds to the elements by including attributes and re-position an element’s background image as you scroll. The unique feature of Stellar.js is that all the elements get back to their original positions when they come to the edge of the page.

SuperScrollorama:

SuperScrollorama is an interesting plugin which is an extension of Scrollorama. Using this jQuery plugin, one can add attractive scroll animation effects to the website. You can add many transition effects to the text like fade, fly, pin, rotate, zoom, wipe and unpin. The SuperScrollorama plugin also provides many other added effects like scaling, smushing, horizontal page slides, page wipes, bounces, flinging, coloring etc. With this plugin you can also set the target as to when an element should appear in the view port. You can set a duration for the transition effects and create a timeline of multiple tweets. This plugin can be used to give your website a fun and energetic look.

Scrolldeck:

Scrolldeck jQuery plugin provides many scrolling presentation decks for a website. You can make use of left/right arrows to change the slides. This plugin is best suited for websites that display the webpages in the form of slides. By adding certain classes to the elements you can animate the slides on your website. With this plugin you can create websites with animation, full-screen images and parallax effects.

Spritely.net:

spritely.net is used to create animated backgrounds and dynamic characters on webpages. It can be used as an alternative to flash if your website doesn’t support it. It is a lightweight, simple plugin which is suitable for websites that use only HTML and JavaScript. Using spritely.net you can animate objects and make them fly over the text on a webpage or animate a background without affecting other elements on the webpage. It is compatible with iPhone, iPod, iPad and Android devices and supports all major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer 6+ and Safari.

jQuery Scroll Path

jQuery Scroll Path allows you to define custom scroll paths. It uses canvas flavored syntax to draw paths by making use of methods like moveTo, lineTo and arc. jQuery Scroll Path comes with a custom scrollbar which allows click and drag scrolling. To help you get the path right, a canvas overlay can be enabled when you initialize the plugin. Scrolling is facilitated with the mouse, up/down arrow keys and also with the space bar. The plugin uses CSS transforms to rotate the entire page, in supported browsers. In browsers that do not support CSS transforms, all rotations are ignored but the paths are still followed.

By making use of these jQuery plugins for parallax scrolling, you can create a website that attracts viewers. These plugins give your site a cool, creative and vibrant look. jQuery plugins help designers create dynamic webpages and other web applications with advanced animation and effects. These plugins give visitors a better browsing experience.

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7 DIY Resources to Help You Create a Successful Website

Tobi — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:00:01 +0000

According to recent data from Pingdom, there are over 634 million websites in the world, 51 million of which was created in 2012. Over 70 million websites are hosted on WordPress, the most popular open source CMS available online.

One thing is for certain, though, a significant portion of these websites created every year fail. In fact, data has shown that the top 515 websites on the internet generate 45% of overall website traffic; this begs the question, if just 515 websites generate 45% of all internet traffic, what happens to the remaining 600+ million websites on the internet?

What this shows is that a significant portion of websites created (perhaps 99% of all websites?) will never amount to anything.

There’s a lot that goes into creating a successful website and it’s far from just setting up a domain name and then forgetting everything else; you need to choose the right niche, choose the right web host, choose the right domain name and create an appealing website. And let’s face it, majority of the hundreds of millions of people who own a website can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars building the kind of website they want; whether it is design, choosing the right tools or building the foundation of your website, sometimes you just have to do it all yourself!

If you want to create a successful website from scratch, here are 7 resources that will be of immense help.

1. Easy WebContent

Wordpress is the best CMS and with its flexibility, good code and wide use all over the internet, its impact can be critical for every business. However, if we’re being honest, WordPress is not for everyone.

Depending on what kind of site you want to build, hiring WordPress developers will often cost several thousands of dollars or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Easy WebContent simplifies the process of creating websites by making it easy to build the website of your liking using drag and drop features and then publishing it as it is to your web page; you can also connect your own custom domain name to it.

2. WebsiteBuilder.net

While Easy WebContent is a great website builder, it isn’t for everyone; there are dozens of other site builders you might want to use or compare.

Websitebuilder.net is a compendium of information on site builders; you’ll find site builders you’ve used before as well as those you are only hearing about for the first time. You’ll also be able to compare features, pricing, as well as the capability of each site builder mentioned.

At the time of writing this post, there are over 20 site builders reviewed that can help you create personal sites, blogs or even full-fledged ecommerce sites.

3. Make a Website

Unlike the first two resources mentioned, Make a Website is a website dedicated to helping you create your first website from scratch.

All the information and resources you need right from choosing a niche to determining a web host and setting up your website is provided.

4. WordPressBasic.com

Like I said earlier on in this article, WordPress powers over 75 million websites – that’s more than 10% of all websites online – and more than 40% of the top hundred blogs are hosted on WordPress.

If you want to use WordPress and you have the patience to learn and figure things out on your own, then the tutorials provided by WordPress Basic will be very helpful. The tutorials are in video format and are very helpful; you’ll learn everything from setting up WordPress to installing plugins and even configuring permalinks on your WordPress blog.

5. iThemes WordPress Tutorials

Similar to WordPress Basic above, the iThemes WordPress tutorials section provides quick tutorials on every aspect of WordPress; everything you need to know about WordPress, from knowing how WordPress works to knowing how to use images and embed links inside your articles is explained.

Unlike WordPress Basic, though, the videos provided by iThemes are very short; in other words, you can learn everything you need to know about using WordPress as a complete beginner in less than one hour.

6. Theme Forest

If you’re looking for website themes, graphic elements and all kinds of design elements required for building a successful website, Theme Forest is the #1 resource online.

Owned by Envato, Theme Forest is a community of designers that produce some of the best design elements online; you’ll find themes your website can run on whether your site is built on HTML or whether it is powered by a CMS like WordPress.

7. Google Analytics

Once you have your website and you start getting the word out about it, it’s important to track visits and actions on your website so that you know what people are doing on it and what page people are most active on.

While there are hundreds of quality web tracking apps online, Clicky analytics is a great one for example, Google Analytics gives you the most capability without you having to pay no matter how well your site grows.

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Top 5 Tools for Monitoring Your Online Reputation

Cara Aley — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:47:14 +0000

When it comes to monitoring one’s internet reputation, there are a surprising number of tools available with which you can do so. More and more consumers are conducting searches on businesses before buying their products. Patients are searching for information about potential physicians before committing, and employers are searching for information about prospective hires before pulling the trigger.

Many people and businesses have unfavorable information that has surfaced about them on the internet without them realizing it, which can have negative consequences both personally and professionally.

We’ll cite five fantastic tools that will help keep you apprised at all times of what is being posted about you online so that you can do something about it if you so choose.

Reputation.com

This site offers tools that will monitor and report out on search engine results containing information about you or your business based on keywords you provide. It also offers robust services that will assist you in suppressing information you prefer not to have appear in top pages of search engine results.

Since most people (94% according to ) read only the first page of search results, you want to be sure that first page and all that it reports about you is as clean as a whistle!

SocialMention.com

Social Mention monitors over 100 different social media sites for information about you, and you can select specific ones to watch in a handy tool on the website if you don’t want to monitor all of them.

Social Mention has a very unique feature outside of its standard daily alerts on selected keywords. There is a widget called Realtime Buzz that you can download and add to your website to show real-time alerts on specific keywords, like your company name. That way, visitors to your website can see whatever kind of press and comments are being generated about you in a real-time manner across over 100 social media sites (assuming you would like for them to!). The social media site data pulled in includes everything from Twitter to Facebook to WordPress to Yahoo. You don’t even need programming skills to figure out how to add this widget to your site.

Google’s Me on the Web

Found on the Google Dashboard underneath your account information and similar to the tools already mentioned, this tool allows you to set up the information you want searched for and with what frequency. The “Deliver to” field allows you to indicate to which address you would like alerts emailed.

Brandify.com

This product uniquely offers a scoring mechanism based on your business’s brand presence online, which is really helpful, as it sets a benchmark of where your score is and should be. You can also run the exact same scoring report on your competitors in order to see how you stack up against their results.

One helpful feature of the product is that once the report is run and you get your score, you are then given recommendations about different social media sites to join as a business in order to improve your score.

Yasni.com

Yasni’s Expose product is another great monitoring tool that allows for up-to-the-minute monitoring of your reputation online. Yasni offers a free service that has basic offerings like monitoring your appearance in Google and other search engines, but then also has two additional tiers with enhanced options. For instance, Yasni’s Premium services are great for HR professionals who seek to monitor multiple people or competitors, and provide regular PDF reporting on search requirements.

The five reputation monitoring tools mentioned here are the ones we have found to be the most successful at monitoring what is being said about an individual or business online, and in providing clear and frequent reporting on the information found. Each of the tools mentioned offers something unique that the others don’t, so considering using more than just one of the tools.

In general, it’s a good rule to consistently monitor your personal and business reputations online–you never know when the moment might arise when a negative piece online that you weren’t aware of could have its irreversible consequences.