Social media is no passing fancy. Businesses are and should be embracing this area of marketing and communications as a key component in their marketing mix. Managing your brand or products in the social media environment takes time, and like any discipline, requires a specific skill set to gain advantage. One key element that remains true today, and will remain true tomorrow, is that managing your social media efforts takes time.

As more consumers move towards social media to communicate with each other, search for information during decision making processes and dig deeper to better understand a business or product, managing your exposure in social media becomes more critical.

Social media tools have flourished with many tools offering realistic ways to streamline your work. Tracking who is talking about you and what they are saying is as important as getting your own message out there, and dedicated tools abound for that activity as well.

Once a niche area, the social media landscape is varied and deep today. Mainstream social media sites have gathered hundreds of millions of users, almost all with an opinion. You can partake in the conversation and help your own cause, or you can stand on the sidelines and watch the conversation unfold around you. Either way, there’s an excellent chance you’re involved already, like it or not.

So these social media tools are an excellent first step at getting a handle on the hoopla. Using these social media tools is but one layer, too, so be warned: Having social media tools is one thing. Having a social media plan is something altogether different. If you need a hand mapping your own social media plan, check out some of the consultants listed in the “Agencies” section.

Some of these tools will help you understand how to find the owner of a domain. Some will help you learn how to find domains you might be interested in and even where to buy them. Some can even give a clue as to the value of a domain.

Domains these days often fall into three general categories.

Category one is your normal, standard brand or business name. These are domains that typically only businesses should have, because they are the actual name of that business or a registered brand name.

Category two is words that are essentially made up. Looking for a famous example? Google. Before there was Google, the word didn’t exist. Today, it is a brand unto itself. Microsoft is another. Anyone can make up a word and build it into a brand, but be warned – it takes a lot of time, money and work.

Category three is the “keyword rich” domain. Basically, these are domains which contain keywords. They can be one or more words in length, but due to their keyword inclusive nature, are favorites of the optimization crowd. Keywords in a domain are a strong clue to the search engines as to the topic the domain is focused on.

With these domain tools, you should be able to learn everything you need to know about a domain you’re interested in.

My goal is to try to keep this section lightly stocked. I don’t really want to tell people their baby is ugly.

Anyway, let’s make with the “ugly list”, shall we?

If you’re in the Trash Can, feel free to email me suggesting I reconsider, but be ready. If I feel the tool is not one folks should be using, I’ll list out my reasons in the review. Nothing personal, but there are just some tools that bring no useful value to users.

The ones I think are useful are scattered across this site or are in the list below. Please bear with me if it takes me some time to get through them all.

By all means send it through to me:

If you really need to reach me now. I mean like you need me faster than fast, try @duaneforrester on Twitter. If I’m scanning Hootsuite, I’ll see it. Otherwise, that email address is still likely to reach me fast.

To be clear, I do have a day job, so if my response is slightly delayed, please bear with me.

Now, if you absolutely want to ensure I won’t return your email or tweet, and if you’re dying to make sure you get a poor review, just reach out and suggest I sign up for the “free trial” period for your tool/service. That’s the surest way to send me the message you only care about grabbing clients, but that you don’t really care about the clients themselves.

Otherwise, suggest away. I have no issues at all if it’s your tool. You should be proud of it, so long as it provides useful value for people using it.

There are popular global conferences that cater directly to entry-level and advanced-level SEOs. Bloggers have many options to choose from when the need to meet others face-to-face for some hands on learning beckons. If you’re a number cruncher, relax, there are conferences designed to help you dig deep into your analytics and see the forest for the trees. Need help understanding emerging trends? No worries.

Almost all of the conferences share a common structure, regardless of theme. You fly in the day before the conference starts. You can usually register and grab your badge/pass and swag-bag at that time to start refining your conference session choices. Day one begins with everyone showing up more or less on time. Throughout the conference area, you’ll find session boards designed to help you understand where and when your chosen session will take place.

Upon entering your session, your badge is scanned or stamped to note your attendance, and you find a seat. Power is often lacking, so bring a full charge and arrive early front a front row seat (usually the first few rows have tables and most have power bars nearby). Trust me – when you attend a conference, being in the front is preferable. You’ve got anywhere between 60 and 90 minutes of note-taking ahead of you, so being on time allows you to get set up, claim your power space and allows you to introduce yourself to the speakers as they arrive. Give them some space to get ready to present, but exchanging business cards is fine and fast.

Day two and three (and four) are basically the same, with later days seeing attendance taper off as schedules and late nights take their toll on folks. be ready to network every single day. bring lots of business cards and leave your inhibitions at thew door. The instant the speakers wrap up, make your way forward to intro yourself. These conferences are a key opportunity for you to hit the radar of folks who can prove pivotal in your learning, career and success, so don’t squander the chance.

…and don’t be a doink either. Telling me you enjoy my blog, articles and books is great. I appreciate it. Telling me you want to treat me to dinner and pick my brain sounds a lot more like stalking-about-to-happen or that you’re looking for free advice.

It’s also safe to say that anyone speaking at a conference already has plans. We always do. By the time you’re speaking at conferences, you’ve been to enough to know the flow of events, so dinners and parties are planned well in advance. It’s highly unlikely you’ll find speakers with open time at the last minute.

You want to impress a conference speaker, here’s some advice:

A bit of research will uncover the last article I published online. Mentioning that you’ve read it and enjoyed it is always nice. Telling me you enjoyed my session and presentation is also appreciated. Next up, hit me with an intelligent question. If it was covered in the session, I’ll think you weren’t paying attention. By making me think a bit, I’ll enjoy the mental challenge and I’m more likely to recall our conversation later. be respectful of time, too. Look around – are others looking to speak with me? If so, be mindful that everyone has to be somewhere else – speakers, other conference attendees and even yourself.

Most of all, don’t forget to swap business cards with me. Then you can drop me a quick email the following week to follow up and cement the contact. While this might seem like an awful lot etiquette to remember, it all boils down to just being polite in the end.

And if your boss is asking you to explain why they should cover the cost of you attending the conference you’ve chosen, you can explain that it’s the cheapest way to obtain the latest knowledge on the subjects that matter. Where else will you have access to dozens of experts on a range of topics all willing to interact directly with YOU and answer YOUR questions? The real question is can you afford to not attend?

Time being at a premium, it’s unlikely I’ll have time to read through every book suggested, but I’ll do my best to capture the basics of each book suggested.

Like so many areas, anything to do with online marketing (SEO, social, etc.) will tend to go out of date relatively rapidly. Most of the best SEO books today are well into newer editions, ensuring the latest changes are captured and the information is as current as possible.

Dedicated books will be included covering diverse areas such as SEO, online marketing, analytics, social media management, general business, conversion optimization and more. I won’t be getting into books on coding or database management as that is beyond the scope of this website. I will, however, try to include books on popular CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others.

People enjoy reading books about SEO, online marketing, social media management, etc. because it slows things down. In a world where everything seems to move at the speed of a click, reading a book makes us slow down enough that we can learn new things. Books also serve as a useful reference when we need to learn new skills. held in one hand, we can work the online system’s we’re trying to learn, with the book serving as a silent, non-judgmental teacher.

Books also condense the often scattered nugget of useful information on these topics into one usable resource. We might be in the age of the computer, but people still like books.

Now, to set the tone here, I’m talking about books. Either self-published or published by a big name publisher. Books you can walk into your local Barnes & Nobel or Chapters and buy. Not ebooks. Got that? I won’t be reviewing ebooks here, unfortunately, folks. There are simply far too many, and in the face of solid, professionally edited and published books, ebooks often don’t compare in terms of useful content and comprehensive coverage on a given topic.

You can usually find an affiliate program with products that will match almost any topic, and for those topics where an affiliate program doesn’t exist, simply reaching out to a company may kick-start one into existence. Plenty of people have convinced companies to start affiliate programs, so don’t worry if you can’t easily find a program for your needs. A well thought out and professional approach may just be all you need to encourage a company o start an affiliate program around your website.

Conversely, successful affiliates often have a lot of sway with established programs. When you represent a significant portion of a company’s sales, you’re in a place to ask for things that will improve your return.

In addition to the actual affiliate programs themselves, which we can view as “tools” to help you monetize your traffic, there exist tools specifically designed to help affiliate zone in on what works and what doesn’t. Some of these tools are part of affiliate program reporting suites, but a few do exist outside of affiliate programs and I’ll do my best to find and review them.

Any affiliate program you sign up for, though, will require dedicated time and work on your end to execute properly. Simply sticking the code onto your web pages isn’t enough. You need to make sure the placement is right, test color combos, image and text combinations and more. Test, test, test – never stop testing. Testing shows you the way to maximizing the return from any affiliate program. It’ll also teach you if the program and products you’re working with are a dead end. If they are, dump them and move on to another affiliate program.

In reality, there are often times when it simply makes sense to hire an SEO, social or online marketing agency. Regardless of your needs and budget, though, you should set your expectations early and hold the agency to the goals and commitments. If this means firing them early, do it. Don’t keep working with them; cut the relationship short, stop spending money for pointless service and move onto the next company or consultant. These are relationships you are establishing. And like any healthy relationship, there needs to be something in it for both parties. When that equation becomes lop-sided, it flat sucks.

I’ll try to note the main work an agency does, as well as note if they are a shop or consultant. Main categories will include:

SEO Agencies & Consultants

SEO agencies are usually pretty up-to-date and can usually provide solid returns on SEO work for clients…provided they know their stuff. There are a lot of SEO agencies and consultants these days, and not surprisingly, some are problematic. I’m not going to try to rate anything on the grounds of morality here, but if I’ve had good or bad dealings with the SEO agency or consultant, I’ll share the facts. Of course, since voting is enabled on the site, you’re free to cast your own opinion for the world to see.

Social Media Agencies & Consultants

Social media consults seemed to spring up out of nowhere. There is a vast army of people claiming to be able to help you manage and improve your social media needs. Some know what they are doing; most don’t. The ones I know and trust, I’ll call out here. Many of them grew into social media consulting as a natural progression from SEO consulting – social media being a great driver of links, which SEOs prize. Still, have a Facebook account does not a social media expert make.

Full-service Online Marketing Agencies & Consultants

These guys are usually the larger, established agencies with brands you may have heard of. They offer a wide range of services and are usually the first to say they can help you even if none of their staff possess the needed skills. Their main goal in life is profit. They are a business after all. This means you will need to be very careful to monitor the amount of work being done on your behalf. These guys tend to be expensive, though results from their work vary, so be very careful. Taking the approach of hiring a brand-name agency to manage your online marketing work and walking away is a sure recipe for wasting a ton of money every year. While the same could be said of special shops, when your monthly fees nudge into 5 figures, any inattention ratchets up the costs quickly. All that said, there are some solid larger agencies, so don’t despair.

Mobile Search Consultants & Agencies

Mostly this will be limited to consultants. Agencies are adding this to their service packs because it’s a fresh, new and another potential revenue stream. True experts have lived in the trenches and helped sculpt success for large and small companies alike. And because Mobile is but one area, in addition to a more traditional website for most businesses, looking for a stand-alone consultant is often easier to manage and sometimes even cheaper. Don’t let this fool you into thinking their work comes cheap, however. Expertise costs money.

Local Search Consultants & Agencies

With the advent of “local search” targeting, well, your neighborhood, essentially, the growth of local search consultants and agencies has flourished. They won’t likely go away any time soon, either, as the concept of “local” is huge with the engines. This truly matters to the search engines, as users frequently type queries into the search box and want the engine to figure out the relevance for results based on where the user currently is. Sometimes this work merges with work performed in the Mobile space, as the proliferation of smart phone sis driving non-home-based search volumes ever-skyward. All the same, like the rest of the areas, there exist experts and not-so-experts-who-claim-to-be. I’ll try my best here to provide some direction.

Link Building Consultants

Without links, your SEO efforts will only net a fraction of their potential value. Link building and link building consultants are in hot demand. Rightfully so, I think. Link building provides the base support for SEO work, as well as an influx of direct traffic. Link building experts are magicians, often able to conjure links from sites that simply ignored your emails. The net result of their work is substantial and gains strength over time. On top of that, their work is a direct long-term investment in your website. Best to partner up with someone who knows what they’re doing, too, because links from bad websites can hurt your efforts. Almost as bad, paying for links can land you in hot water with the search engines.

SEO toolsets tend to offer more coverage in one location. We’re looking at websites or services that actually cover a number of SEO-related work tasks in this section. The main goal being to take a run through each SEO toolset currently available and assess its outputs against desired intentions. Plus, I’ll wonder out loud if the tool’s purpose has any real value to the SEO work you need to really concentrate on.

In many cases, most of the data will be very detailed, and largely things you should work on after getting the main points squared away. Too many times good SEO work doesn’t get performed because folks are buried in too much detail to even know where to begin. The best SEO toolsets will come complete with training – either hands on, in person or via documentation – designed to not only help show you how best to use the toolset to get the desired data, but also to help educate you should you be a novice to the world of search optimization.

These SEO toolsets usually come at a cost, also, so be ready to pony up some cash. Access to excellent data isn’t cheap, but the decisions you can make, and the success you’ll often enjoy from employing the best of these SEO toolsets usually outweighs the costs.

As with any SEO work, be ready to discover new things. Be ready to find hidden surprises you never thought mattered. Be ready, most of all, for the SEO toolset builder’s point of view on how best to accomplish SEO work. Each SEO toolset gets built according to what the builder feels must be included, so while all of the major SEO toolsets should cover more or less the same ground, expect some small variances in how they get there. In most cases, you will learn that no one SEO toolset is perfect, nor does any one SEO toolset cover everything YOU might wish to have in a toolset. But then again, you really do need to ask yourself if any more is really needed beyond what they have built.

Worst case, if you love one SEO Toolset and lament the lack of something, get after the builder to include your idea. Chances are you aren’t the only one looking for the addition.

Alright, let’s dive into the SEO Toolset reviews, shall we?

More to follow…