Well, it’s been four days since I posted about BrightKite and now I’m in. Someone was kind enough to send me an invite. I’d like to give a big thanks to whoever it was. The invite didn’t tell me so unless you speak up, it will just have to be your secret.

I’m looking forward to exploring BrightKite and reporting back what I find. One thing I can already see is the use of Placemarks, which are like bookmarks for the common places that you go to all the time. You can text @work to a special number and that will let people know you’re at work. This is like a short hand way of relating information.

I especially like that I can connect my Twitter account to my BrightKite profile. The advantage to me is that I can post to one source and have it distributed to multiple places. I have my Twitter account connected to several other social networking sites, so when I update Twitter I am also updating these places around the web. With the explosion of social networking sites and the maturing social market, I think it’s extremely important to automate your connection points as much as possible. It’s not practical to think that someone can go around to every social site and update their friends on what their doing. But if all those sites are plugged together, then it becomes fast and easy to let people know what you’re up to.

Eventually I can see this format expanding into the OpenSocial platform to provide you with one centralized social profile, but that’s another post all together.

So thank you to whoever sent me the invite and oh, and I have three invites of my own to give away. So, if you’re looking for BrightKite invites, leave me a comment about how you plan to use BrightKite (include a real email address in the address field) and I’ll send you an invite. Comment spammers need not apply.

Sharing the love,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

If you want to know how much website traffic a competitor is getting then you’ll want to take a look at Compete.com. Compete offers site analytic that let you do side by side website traffic comparisons between several sites. Compete also offers search analytics that can tell you what keywords a specific website is getting traffic for or what websites in general are getting traffic for specific keywords.

Here’s how the Compete website describes their Search Analytics, “It’s your starting point to build and optimize search marketing campaigns that create brand awareness, drive site traffic and increase sales. Use Compete Search Analytics to discover keywords driving traffic to any domain, identify gaps in your search strategy, invest in terms that drive the most engaged visitors, and track your performance against competitors and peers.”

Compete offers a great service that really puts important information in your hands. I personally like the site comparison tool because you can begin to get a rough idea of how sites are doing compared to each other in terms of traffic. You can use this information either as a benchmark for your current competitive efforts or you can use it as a gauge to research a market or plan strategies for acquiring visitor traffic.

The service offers some bare bones free information, but if you really want to dig into the keyword research, you’ll need to buy some Compete credits. Credits are purchased with real money and each report deducts a few credits from your overall balance. The system seems to be very fair.

I received free trial credits when I created a free account and the overall theme seemed to be that the more potential valuable you stand to gain from a report, the more credits it will cost you.

Perspective:

Gaining insight into what is going on with websites in your topic of interest is as much a necessity of picking a direction as it is a part of trying to gain a competitive edge.

While compete is not a complete picture of everything that is happening with a competitors website, it is a lot better than not knowing anything at all.

Combined with keyword research tools like WordTracker and Google Trends, Compete can be a very useful tool in your research toolbox.

Competing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

How many times do you bookmark websites and then forget to submit them to StumbleUpon? I know I forget all the time. So, I have a big list of Del.icio.us bookmarks, but my StumbleUpon profile suffers from lack of love. But all that changes today thanks to the urber geekls over at GreaseMonkey.

If you haven’t heard, Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. There are hundreds of scripts available for free. And if you like to tinker, you can also write your own. These scripts are fantastic and they can easily add days back into your life by making you more productive online.

My most recent discovery is the Greasemonkey script, Delicious Stumbles. The script adds a link to your del.icio.us page that helps you submit links on the page to StumbleUpon.

The great part is it takes what you’ve already written as Del.icio.us comments and it submits them to StumbleUpon. It does the same thing with your tags. So all you have to do is click the link, verify the info, and then submit the link to StumbleUpon. I’m telling you, the thing is genius. You can hammer out a few past bookmarks in seconds and keep your StumbleUpon profile well nourished.

Productivity is an important topic for me because I am easily distracted and I already have a lot that needs to get done. So anything that speeds my work and keeps me on task is worth it’s weight in gold. Greasemonkey is free, and the time these scripts will save you is almost like getting paid to do what you have to do anyway.

What’s your favorite productivity tool or Greasemonkey script?

Monkeying around,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

Today’s Microtween is about an Internet Marketing toolbar I’ve developed to help people get started with their online business ventures.

One of the things that I hear over and over is that people don’t understand the process for marketing online. They get confused or distracted and they’re not sure what order they should be doing things in.

So, I decided to take my own bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks toolbar and turn them into an organized set of resources that anyone can use to do Internet Marketing.

The toolbar is organized from left to right and each set of resources are limited to just a few essential to cut down on distractions. I plan to add more to the toolbar over time, but I will continue to keep in mind the principle that more is not better in this case.

The toolbar is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox (both Mac and Windows). In fact, I’m using it to supplement my own Firefox bookmarks toolbar so that I can download it and use it when I am away from my laptop.

Download the toolbar and let me know what you think is missing. Or let me know what you use the most. I’ll be adding a Getting Started button to it soon to help everyone get the most out of using it.

Idea seeking,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

Here’s a Microtween about putting thought bubbles in your videos to add interest, generate visitor traffic, and help people remember your videos better. The standard wisdom is to put your website address at the beginning and end of your videos when you post them to a video sharing service like YouTube so that people will see the address and visit your website. That’s a great piece of advice, but what if you could add a little bit of video spice to your promotional mix and get attention for it?

That’s where BubblePly.com comes in to help you out. You can you add thought bubbles to your videos and then share them anywhere. This is a very cool tool and it’s extremely simple to use. I’m not going to try and give you ideas for how to use it. Just take a look and I’m sure you’ll come up with you own promotional ideas.

Bubbling,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast