Kutenda offers Internet marketing software for small businesses. I’m sure most small businesses have experienced a similar situation to me- logging in to multiple accounts, trying to prioritize my marketing efforts and do it efficiently. Kutenda is helping to solve many of those problems.

The features included in the toolset are pretty comprehensive. Just to name a few: Web builder, email marketing tools, PPC management, local listing submission, detailed reporting & more. The ease of having each of these pieces in one place is great- it definitely helps bring some continuity to your campaigns.

The web builder has some good features. While HTML experience is not required to use the WYSIWYG editor, it can be helpful to make more in-depth changes. If you’re used to calling your web designer to make one minor change though, this is a great alternative. There is also an on-page SEO tool, which aids you in optimizing your content and really get results in the search engines. Additionally, Kutenda has a drag-and-drop form builder, giving you the ability to easily create custom forms, which we all know can be challenging.

No Internet marketing endeavor is complete without email marketing and Kutenda does this well. They offer auto-responders, professional templates and list management. Plus, their auto-responder is multi-step, allowing you to schedule several emails in a campaign, which a lot of other popular email tools don’t offer. With detailed reporting on each campaign, you can track your performance and get better results.

If you’re feeling intimidated by the idea of managing your websites, have no fear! One of Kutenda’s best assets is in their ability to train. They’ll work with you from the ground up to help you achieve your goals. Check out Kutenda and you’ll find a ton of tips and tricks to help you get the most of their tool.  You don’t have to be an expert to get started, but be prepared to set aside some time to attend their extensive, live training programs.

While Kutenda is definitely in its beginning stages, there is a lot of potential there.  If you’re managing a small business and have no qualms about getting your hands dirty with web development, be sure to check them out and take advantage of the free 15 day trial!

I like to test products and services out for at least a month or so before writing a full review. I’ve been using the twitter tool, Tweet Adder for about 3 months now and the verdict is in: If you want to get followers fast, you have to try Tweet Adder.

Everyone wants to know how to get more followers on Twitter. With Tweet Adder, I’ve acquired over 6,000 quality followers across 4 different twitter accounts in a matter of 3 months – and they’re still growing.
Tweet Adder is a software that helps you manage multiple twitter accounts. What it does very well is to help you find good tweeters that fit the niche of your twitter account and then follow them based on parameters that you set. The philosophy here: if you follow, they will follow back. It doesn’t do what Tweetie or TweetDeck do. You can’t easily post a single tweet or see your tweet timeline. It isn’t meant for that. What it’s meant to do is to build your followers, and that it does very well.

You start by downloading the software at tweetadder.com. You can try it out for free or buy a registration that will allow you to manage 1, 5, 10 or an unlimited amount of twitter accounts all from the comfort of your tweet adder program.

After you download and install the software, you add your twitter profiles by entering your twitter username and password. When you log in via tweet adder you’ll see the amount of followers you have, how many you’re following and your follower ratio. This is where the fun begins. Clicking on “search” will offer several ways to search for people to follow. Remember the idea is: if you follow, they will follow back. Among the ways to seek out people to follow, you can search by keywords tweeted from a specific geographic location of your choosing (by zip code, city or state) and search the tweeters following someone else. When you do a search, Tweet Adder stores the tweeters that you’ve searched out in a database and will follow them for you based on criteria that you set under the “follow” tab. Even more importantly, tweet adder will remember when you followed each person and allow you to unfollow them based on whether or not they follow you back after a certain period of time has passed. More on that later.

So, if you sell motorcycle helmets you can find people to follow in your area tweeting about motorcycling or just set tweet adder to follow everyone who follows Harley Davidson. Of course, the following is the easy part. The goal of all this is to get those you follow to follow you back.

To get people to follow you back, you need to tweet often with consistency. Tweet Adder has a solution for this, but it will make you the very thing the Social Net Ninjas despise most about twitter: A spammer. Tweet Adder can tweet for you. Simply come up with a bunch of tweets (140 characters or less of course), enter them under the “tweets” tab, let Tweet Adder know how often to tweet, and Voila! You are now a spam artist.

The Ninjas have said it before and we’ll say it again: Social Media is supposed to be SOCIAL! If you want to build a quality following, leave the “tweets” tab alone, post daily tweets yourself via tweetie and use the other great features of this software.

If you follow... they'll follow back.

We recommend:
Choose a search option that makes sense and fill your list to about 10,000 people to follow.
Let Tweet Adder follow 35 or so people for you per day.
Let Tweet Adder follow back 20 or so people for you per day.
Let Tweet Adder unfollow 60 or so people per day.
Only unfollow those who don’t follow you within 10 days.
Set your follow ratio to 3 to 1 and check it.
Set your unfollow ratio to 1 to 1 and check it.
Under the “Automation” tab, UNcheck “Automatically Post Updates…” and “Automatically Post Replies…” Check “Do the following tasks..” “Automaticall unfollow users…” “Automatically Follow Back Users…”

Watch what the people you’re following tweet about and tweet back at them. Retweet their tweets, comment on what they’re doing; just be social and they will follow you back.

TIP:
It’s easy to end up following and being followed by spam bots. Following these bots is hazardous to your twitter health because they will muddy up your tweet timeline. You want to see real tweets, from real people so you can interact with them in a timely fashion. It’s tough to have a dialogue when you have to filter through a bunch of get rich quick schemes and ads for penis enlargers. To avoid spammers, under the “search” tab, select “search by tweet keywords” and use a word that your target audience would use but that a spammer likely wouldn’t. Keywords like “going shopping” or “making dinner” will be tweeted by moms or dads, but not by spam bots. Use your noggin, and find people to engage. If you grow your twitter account this way, you’ll be able to activate a real audience who follows you in twitter because you’re real!

Other cool things Tweet Adder does:
Mass delete up to 150 DMs per day via the “Misc” tab.
Send up to 250 DMs per day via the “Messages” tab.

Be patient and tweet with consistency and the twitter gods will reward you with a growing list of followers. With its automated tweet and automated reply features, Tweet Adder can be used for good or evil. Leave “tweets” and “replies” tabs alone and use it for good! As always, if you don’t have the time to work with social media, we offer social networking services.

With their user base of 20,000,000 tweeters growing every day, it’s obvious that twitter is here to stay. But for how long?

New, viable technology seems to come out of the woodwork every few months or so. MySpace was the king of the social networking kingdom until facebook came along and conquered it. Now twitter is here, and while facebook hasn’t become obsolete as a result, twitter is most certainly eating into facebook’s market share. What’s next? Fardo? Zigmat? Breadstomp?

Thus, this social networking ninja believes it inevitable that by 2015 twitter will be an afterthought. With that said, I should add a caveat that as twitter hasn’t even established a real revenue model it’s a bit early to be playing Chopin’s Funeral March. Instead, I’ll bring to light some potential draw backs and flaws with twitter as it currently stands.

Firstly, like most social media, twitter is home to tens of thousands of spammer accounts. There isn’t anything quite like a solicitor to drive people away from, well, anything. While I feel it acceptable to use software and trains to find niche followers, the use of automated tweeting programs is wholly antithetical to the purpose of social networking. Social media is supposed to be just that: Social. It is my opinion that spammers crack the foundation of social media such as twitter and as such they should be unfollowed and left to die or change their methods. There isn’t a thing wrong as far as I can tell, with promoting your blog, website, business, etc, with honest to God, helpful, informative or otherwise REAL tweets.

The solution to this problem? Unfollow spammers. There are several great tools that work to that very simple end. TweetBlocker gives a grade (A+ thru F) to each and every person you follow. When it finishes compiling the data, which may take some time for larger accounts, simply sort by grade and delete Fs and Ds. Aside from using software to fix our problems we also have to be diligent to moderate our own accounts. If you suspect someone you’re following to be spam, have a look at their recent tweets by clicking on their avatar (their picture). If you see them tweeting over and over about mundane things like what show their watching, it’s likely that they are spamming with some kind of automatic tweeter. If every tweet they make contains a link to a site or some kind of sales pitch, unfollow them.

I’m pro-twitter for sure, so let me just remind you that scrubbing our accounts clean of spam will help ensure twitter stays viable for as long as possible.

Lastly, a downside I see with twitter is that as it’s going on year 4, it still suffers technical problems like downtime and over-capacity errors. I don’t know what they’re waiting for to fix these problems, but I haven’t personally seen the same issues with facebook. If the trend continues as twitter grows, it’s likely that people will get frustrated with it and move on. And what will they move onto you ask? Well, as I mentioned earlier, those with the technical prowess and creativity to come up with the new frontier in social media will provide something. And that’s really all it comes down to. Maybe it will be a page that follows what you’re doing on the web right now. Maybe it will social bookmark, update and post comments on blogs for you based on your surfing habits. Maybe it’ll remind you to buy milk next time you’re out. Whatever it does, it’s coming!

Is Twitter great? Yes! Will it be here forever? No. Our recommendation: Tweet on, don’t automate your tweets and give those that do the boot. Also, be aware of new, rising social media. And like you should do with twitter, ride the wave as long is it will last!

I’ve gotta admit feeling a little bit giddy as I signed into my LotusJump account for the first time. Based on the taste I got at Pubcon Vegas, I was prepared for a multifaceted SEO tool. After an hour or so of hands on time, it was obvious that Lotus Jump is more than a tool; it’s a veritable SEO assistant.

What’s it do?
LJ’s main function is to help you boost the search engine clout of your website and to make you aware of favorable web networking and traffic driving sites.
It searches the internet for back linking, directory submission and and even article submission opportunities. What you might not expect, and what LJ does phenomenally well is provide step by step instructions for submitting those links, urls and articles. It’ll even provide you with html code you can include in your text and blog comments (”html code”: a fancy word for a “link”).

How does it work?
Sign up for LotusJump.
Choose a domain.
Choose keywords.
LJ will take the domain and keywords and return a list of simple SEO tasks to complete.
Click a task, read the easy to follow instructions and follow them.
Done.

It sounds so good, there’s gotta be a catch.
Well, the only draw back to Lotus Jump is 1 single bug I found that sometimes lists tasks that cannot be completed. An example would be a task that asks you to comment on a blog but fails to indicate how to do so. After a month of using the application I only ran into this problem 2 times. Each time I simply deleted the task and moved on.

What’s it cost?
LJ has 2 levels of subscription. $24 a month will get you access to tasks based on any 3 keywords of your choosing for 1 domain name. Opt for the Pro package at $49 a month and they’ll more than triple the keywords (10) and add a competitive backlink task that isn’t included in the basic package. If you’re working with multiple websites you can manage them all for an additional $19 each.

Sum it up?!
LJ was created for the internet layman. Yet, it is a smart, savvy, all-in-one, SEO assistant that this Social Net Ninja would dare call indispensable for anyone with a website. Go with the $49/p mo package to get the extra “Competitive Backlinking” task and triple your keywords and you’ll be cooking with gas.

Tips for using LotusJump:
-Filter tasks by keyword and then complete them by task type. Click filter options, choose one keyword (uncheck all other keywords) and then choose one task type. Click apply filters and complete all task types that LJ assigns you.  Once you get in a groove with a specific task type and keyword you can really fly through your tasks.

-Article Submission tasks: It may seem like a lot of work, but I recommend writing different articles for each article submission. Many sites require that the content you submit be original and unique. At the very least, if you intend ignore this advice and use articles you’ve already written, never use the same article twice.

Jump on LotusJump!

I just published a brief, basic, social networking tutorial on infobarrel.

Info Barrel - A well moderated content submission site.

InfoBarrel is a content publishing site that allows helpful “do-follow” backlinks. They also offer profit sharing on their advertisements. What does that mean to you? Well if you publish on the site, you’ll be able to build your site’s search engine clout by linking back to your site with relevant keywords. You’ll also make residual income off any ads that are clicked while people are reading your article. InfoBarrel pays a hefty 75% share of each click so get writing!

Just make sure to have an adsense account set up and ready to. And be sure to have a handy list of keywords ready to use to link back to your page.

Infobarrel uses 100% genuine human eyes to review your first 10 articles. They don’t allow duplicate articles so don’t just copy and paste a recent blog post of yours. Write something original and informative for the site every now and then and you’ll be on your way to improving traffic to your site and building residual income!

I walked into room N2 of the Las Vegas convention center feeling
underwhelmed by the volume of it all. Thankfully, the one and only Eric from EricKnowsItAll.com was there to make light of the drab circumstances. Apparently, only a few dozen companies and a few hundred guests made attending a priority. Meandering about this event that touted attendance in the thousands, the social networking ninjas wondered if the whole thing wasn’t hyped up just a bit.

However after only a few minutes, we’d discovered several promising new
web tools with free trials, signed up for a free subscription to
website magazine, and had a baker’s dozen worth of requests to make use
of our ninja skills by silently offing this or that president of this
or that competiting social media corporation. If we can’t be contacted
around 2AM, now you know why.

Here’s a brief run down of the companys and their tools that we felt
really have something to offer. We’ll provide more in depth reviews of
these later:

LotusJump.com – For a few Benjamins a month, their service will track a
minimum of 10 keywords across as many websites as your heart desires
and provides a list of recommendations as to how to rank better for
those keywords.

Seotoast & Seosamba – CMS software optimized for SEO. The prior is free, the latter comes with a fee (ninjas only rhyme when they’re really excited about something). Seotoast and Seosamba both make it easy to build a fully seo’d website from the ground up. Make and maintain as many sites as you want for free with SeoToast. When your repertoire of websites grow to massive proportions, switch to SeoSamba for a nominal monthly fee and maintain every one of your websites from one easy to use dashboard.

SEOENG – A search engine optimization engine. Very cool.

More to come so stay tuned or follow us on twitter.

The social networking ninjas have just arrived at pubcon las Vegas 2009! If you’re attending drop us a line so we can meet you. Otherwise, check back during the week for updates and info about pubcon las Vegas!

In our last several articles we’ve gone over the different, free social networking tools there are out there. We’ve explained how and why you’d want to use them as well as techniques and tips for the best results.

Today I just wanted to write a brief overview to sum up everything we’ve gone through over the last several weeks.

Step 1 – Have something to promote and a target demographic in mind.

Step 2 – Prepare a website (a free blog, forum, html or flash based site).

Step 3 – Sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Zannel, linkedin, youtube, and any other social networking site you happen stumble upon that looks promising.

Step 4 – Build your network using the sites listed in step 3 by seeking and adding contacts.

Step 5 – Consistently publish good, valuable content on your website and share links to your info throughout your social network.

Step 6 – Consistently interact with the people following you within your social network.

Step 7 – Repeat steps 4 and 5 indefinitely.

It’s really that simple. For more in depth information, have a look through our archives and read up.

So you’ve been writing in your blog every day for a week since you read our last article. The writing is top notch, the topics are interesting and as far as you know, not a single person has seen any of it. What are you to do? First ask yourself these questions…

How Social Bookmarking Works

-Have I been promoting my articles on my social network? (facebook, twitter, zannel, myspace, etc…)
-Have I published my articles and not just “saved” them? Remember, you have to “publish” your article for it to go live for readers to view.
-Have I used social bookmarking to spread the word?
-Have you used proper SEO techniques?

WHAT??? You don’t know about social bookmarking and SEO? Well, read on young stink beetle…

Social bookmarking is just like regular bookmarking (if you don’t know what bookmarking is, you should start here before you get any deeper into social networking.) the only difference is that when you social bookmark, your bookmarks are viewable to everyone who uses the social bookmarking site. Some social bookmarking sites include stumbleupon, digg, yahoobuzz, mixx, and del.icio.us. Simply click on the links to sign up, and start bookmarking your blog articles! Each bookmarking site has a different method for accepting your bookmark submission to be viewed by the general public. Download our FREE traffic boosting guide for a detailed look at social bookmarking.

Traffic Boosting Guide

Now for the complicated stuff…
You could take a 4 year course on search engine optimization (SEO) and not learn everything there is to know. Not only are there a lot techniques, but proper SEO methodology is constantly changing. Since most of us don’t have the time or the interest in being a full time web developer, I’ll share with you a few SEO mainstays. They are all listed in our FREE downloadable guide to boosting your internet traffic. It’s only 6 pages long and it could change the life of your website. So just download the thing and leave it in the bathroom for some interesting reading during your next visit.

Until next week!
-Sensei Brian

PS, does all this seem like more work than you have time for? email me directly to learn about our Social Networking packages. We can do all the work for you at very affordable prices.

The 2 great things about blogging are that you can create one for free and you don’t have to know anything about html, css, javascript or website creation at all to start one. That isn’t to say that your free, generic wordpress blog will do exactly

How to Have a Blog

as well as one that’s been set up with a customized look and SEOd to perfection (in fact it won’t, at least not right away), but at least it gives you a place to start getting the hang of blogging with no monetary investment.

Here is how you do it:
1) Go to Wordpress.com go through the sign up process and make sure that “gimme a blog!” is selected at the bottom of the sign up form. Click “next ->”.

2) On the next page you’ll choose a blog domain. For SEO purposes, try to choose a domain name that is related to what you will write about. I won’t go deep into this but, you know that term you’re always hearing: “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO” for short? Yeah, well, one of the easiest ways to SEO your page is by choosing a title that is also a good “keyword”. A keyword is a word that people use in search engines like Bing and Yahoo. Go to wordtracker.com to see what I’m talking about. Just enter a keyword in the field there and see the list of “keywords” related to your term that people search for. I’ll get a little more mileage out of the blend-o-matic 5000 for now and see what keywords related to “blenders” come up. I get results ranging from “blender magazine” to “frog in a blender”. And you know what, I think “frog in a blender” could be a fun way to represent a blog about blenders so I’m going to see if I can use that for my Blog Domain and Blog Title. Next, choose your language (English most likely, unless there is a different one you prefer to write in…) and then be sure the check mark in the “privacy box” is checked (this way your blog will appear in search engines.). Then click continue and you’ll be on your way!

3) Login to your blog (by clicking the log in button) and then get started by clicking on “appearance” toward the bottom of the left side of the page. Here you can select a pre-made, professional looking theme for your blog. I won’t go into detail about creating your theme here. You’ll need to poke around or read an online guide for more info. Suffice it say that it’s very self explanatory. Just pick one that you think looks good.

4) Lastly, and most importantly, you’ll need to begin blogging! That is, you need to post an article. Think of a topic related to the theme of your blog that you want to write about and get to it. We recommend writing your article in a text document such as notepad on a PC or textedit on a Mac. This way, you can easily save your work in a file on your computer as you go along. Many a blog post have been lost to cyberspace by writing an article directly in the text field of a blog. Don’t ask why, just trust me .  Once you’ve completed your blog post, sign into your blog and click on “new post” (this button is located along the top left of the page). Copy and paste your work into the field for the body of your text and enter a creative title that has something to do with what you’ve written about. Then click the “publish” button (you’ll find this button on the right side of the screen, it should be blue)

You now have a voice in the crowd. The most important part of blogging is to do it often. If you can post daily, do it. Just try to establish a routine. Post every Monday or every other day. Whatever you do be consistent so that the people who find and are interested in reading your blog will know when they can expect to find new posts. If your writing is good, helpful, fun, valuable, etc… you will slowly start to become a part of people’s daily routine. When you’re a part of someone’s routine, you have gained their trust. When you have gained someone’s trust, they are now a potential customer. Blog long enough and you’ll have a following of hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands to market yourself to!

Next week’s article will go over some tips to spread the word about your every blog uttering via your social network and handy system called “social bookmarking”.

Until then!
-Sensei Brian