PureText is a free little utility that allows you to copy and paste items from rich text editors (Word, Outlook, Browsers, etc) and strip all the garbage code off of it.

“PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”

To use PureText- simply copy as normal, but when you need to paste the item in Wordpress or your blog platform, use Windows-V (or an assigned hotkey) instead of Ctrl-V. In an instant, now you have some clean text. Check out PureText and streamline your blogging today.

The first part of understanding competitive marketing is that you have no competitors. You, whether as a business or individual professional, are absolutely unique.

Regardless of whether you sell windows or online marketing services, every single facet of your business and product has the ability to be differentiated.

It is critical to understand this fundamental idea before launching into any marketing effort. If you do not define your niche strengths and detail your individual selling benefits, then you are choosing to market yourself against other companies who are selling on the same points. Rather than set yourself apart, you are choosing to be a part of the crowd. This idea is very critical to reaching marketing success. Without setting yourself apart, every hour of labor and every dollar of your budget that you spend on marketing your business is fighting against dozens or even thousands of other like-minded businesses.

Step #1 : Identify the Competition

Whether you are in the real world or in the online marketplace, you must ask questions about the companies who interact with the same type of clients that you are looking for. For online research Google, Superpages.com, and CitySearch.com are valuable sites for locating both brick and mortar businesses and virtual ones without a physical location (web companies, consultants, etc)

While it may seem “dated”, the yellow pages is also a very easy to utilize competitive research tool. Yellow page advertising is typically not very effective, but many successful businesses have full page advertisements detailing years of success they have had. Chamber of Commerce and business networking groups are also very easy ways to identify competitors with a simple phone call to the coordinator of those groups.

Action Item:

Create a chart of at least ten other companies. This chart should be broken into two main categories of competitors. Five of those businesses should be in a similar stage to where your business is today. Five of them should be of companies that are where you want your business to be in two years. By understanding where you are and where you want to be, many marketing strategies and tactics will be detailed out.

Step 2: Shop the Competition

What do your competitors offer? Ask them. Pick up the phone, send off an e-mail, and gather as much information as you can about what they have to offer… and how they offer it. When interacting with them – take note of as many different aspects of the engagement as possible. If you sign up to be contacted online, record the points of contact they use to reach out to you. How fast do they respond? Do they send an e-mail follow-up? What information are they providing you?

If you interact with a live business contact on the phone or in real life, think like a consumer. How are they talking to you? What mannerisms do they have?

Action Item

The easiest way to understand how your competitors differentiate themselves is to ask the same questions of them that you have been asked. Have the top ten questions on your mind and try to ask every one of them. Ask yourself the honest question of “Is this business successful and do I want to be like them?” If the answer is yes, realize that they have probably faced many hurdles in the evolution of their own marketing process and sales cycle. Learning from your competitors past experience is an effective way to streamline your own learning curve and maximize your own results.

Step 3: Make Comparisons

Once you know who your ten competitors are and have tracked the responses to your ten most common questions, you now have a snapshot of how a variety of similar businesses are attacking the very same issues you need to overcome. Try to make creative comparisons of the companies that most closely resemble your own business model.

Action Item

Identify areas that seem to have gaps amongst competitors who are currently in the industry. Examine how your model of business can fit into those gaps. Once you have detailed the gaps, find at least two valued professional contacts and ask them to make independent reviews of the information.

Conclusion

By understanding the marketplace in your industry, you can detail and adapt your own marketing efforts to focus on areas that you competitors have left unattended. Identifying areas of prospects that have an unaddressed need is a more effective way of allocating marketing effort- rather than fight for the same cluster of prospects that are already oversold; you can offer your services to a group that has been left unattended.

Ideally this competitive comparison takes place at least twice a year. Old competitors may close shop or change tactics, and new businesses may try to focus on the same niche and create a more aggressive environment. By keeping a competitive report on like-minded businesses, you can have the data needed at your disposal to help minimize your business mistakes and learn from competitive failures and successes.

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Some of the best stuff on the Web is free, especially if you know how to leverage hundreds of free options into a unified business strategy.

Almost every search engine has a free listing for various business categories. When you register your business on one site, you have to keep in mind that a strategy in how to coordinate those free listings back and forth across the Web. Whether you are a single professional working out of a home office, or a large regional business with hundreds of employeess in each office…understanding that every single city, neighborhood, and topical center has different free options is essential.

What does free really get you? On a small scale…not much. One can assume a free listing on any one search engine may only get a few visitors a month. If you have a good call to action, one of those visitors may convert into an actual interested lead.

When you combine them and establish dozens or even hundreds of valid local listings you gain many benefits. Each listing is a potential in-bound link on a relevant keyword from a well recognized site. Each link adds to the previous link, and with 25, 50, or 500 links…now your site shows up for competitive search terms in the most popular search engines.

Let us take an example and break down the math. Good marketing is often about repetitive and basic math:

You are a single professional. You establish 100 properly setup free local listings. Each one sends you one visitor a month. Your site converts 5% of your visitors into a lead who fills out a form and you contact. You close 20% of your leads. Free profiles on multiple search sites = one sparkling new client per month.

Out of 100 free local listings, a quarter of them give you valid in-bound links on search terms. Within a 30 to 180 day period your main site shows up for competitive keywords such as “my city profession.” You get an additional 100 visitors a month looking for the keywords you selected. Your site converts 5% of your visitors into a lead who fills out a form and you contact. You close 20% of your leads. Free listings on multiple search sites fueling organic results in the search engines = another new client each month.

Move the example up in the your industry: You are a business with 100 employees who all utilize a proper local search campaign.

First off, we will be realistic and drop that number from 100 down to 10. In most offices only 10% of the employees are actually going to do what they are told to do, even when it is in their own best interest to do it. If 10% of the office follows the steps, there will be 1,000 new incoming local listing links that also represent 1,000 new local search visitors that are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Utilizing the economy of scale and superior knowledge, your site actually converts 10% of those visitors into leads = 100 leads a month. Since they have additional support and help nurturing the prospects, they close 25% of the leads = 25 new clients.

As a professional, how much do those closed transactions mean to you?

For a larger group of professionals working together, those 1,000 incoming links can be tailored to target meaningful search phrases in the main engines that none of them as individuals could hope to attain without a much larger budget. The economy of scale is simple: leveraging a team allows the office to benefit from more exposure on Web, which in turn allows the company brand to grow stronger to help close those transactions.

A key benefit of both the single professionals and larger company scenarios is that a local search listing campaign and having a wide marketing strategy protects you from sudden changes in the online marketplace. By relying on dozens of smaller streams of visitors, no single site can impact your bottom line. Google or Yahoo can change something overnight, and you are protected from having your lead source dropping off the radar.

To help you on the beginning of your local search marketing strategy, here is a short list of a few standard local search sites that offer free local listings:

Google Local: (http://www.google.com/local/add)

Yahoo Local: at (http://edit2.ls.scd.yahoo.com/csubmit/)

Superpages.com: clicking the “add or edit a business” link at the bottom of the page. Be forewarned that you will receive a sales call for a follow-up to offer you many other services. Just let them know you’ll take all the free options they have.

Local.com: (http://advertise.local.com)

The following two are a popular and growing form of social media local listing sites based on community models with voting. User can review and comment on your business. These have the added benefit that they also serve to protect your online reputation:

Yelp.com: perform a search for your business name to find out if you’re already in Yelp’s system. On the bottom of the search result page, click add business which leads to a simple form where you can add your business.

JudysBook.com: (http://www.judysbook.com/Pages/Help/AddBusiness.aspx)

About the author:
Barry Hurd is president of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities. He has over 15 years of entrepreneurial Internet and online marketing experience. As an author and prolific blogger, he has reached online audiences around the world. Since the mid-1990s, Barry has been involved in numerous efforts to bring forth technical innovation through online business models. Past projects have included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Verizon Superpages, Intuit, and RISMedia.

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Every day there are a thousand blogs and community portals striking up conversations about every topic imaginable. This online conversation is being leveraged for both “Good and Evil” by business and personal users, ranging from things like search engine marketing to promoting a new product on a local community site.

Here are some important tools you can utilize to understand how your business is perceived online:

1. Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts)
Google Alerts is a free service that e-mails you an update of relevant Google results based on the keywords you select. It is simple yet highly effective way to setup a weekly e-mail that notifies you of keywords with your personal name, company name, and even the name of your competitors. By staying up to date in the conversation, you can react to things as they happen and maximize your response.

2. Technorati.com
Unlike Google, which views everything as an entry of data that is sorted and indexed, Technorati tracks blogs as if they are conversations between people. It tracks how many people commented on other blogs, how many readers are subscribed to each blog, and the overall ripple a conversation has online.

3. Google RSS Reader (http://www.google.com/reader)

Google provides a free Web enabled RSS reader. This may not include your name or search strings, but when you find a blog or site that has information about your brand or your industry, subscribe to it’s RSS feed by using Google’s RSS Reader. If they talked about you once, they may be inspired to talk about you again.

To help cover the basics of what you need to monitor, here are four items you should keep an eye on:

1. Company name and slogan. If you have a name with more than one word, you can use quotation marks around it to reduce the number of false reports on your name.

2. Company Web site. Keep an eye out for both your company URL with and without the www extension. Many bloggers and commentators will only include a link to your site and may not use the proper name of your company.

3. Names of executives and team members. Make sure to add the name of everyone on your executive team or who drives significant value for your business. You can use quotation marks around full names to reduce false reports. You will also want to consider variations on basic names such as “Bob / Robert”

4. Names or properties, developments, products, or services. Any significant asset in your company that has a proper name should be on the monitoring list for your marketing and public relations efforts. There is nothing worse than trying to list a property that has a negative headline article in the local newspaper that you do not know about.

There are three main reasons to monitor your online presence as part of your weekly duties.

1. Protecting your online reputation and brand
You spent a lot of time and effort creating your brand, and your online presence may be the first interaction a potential client or business partner is exposed to it. By knowing what is being said about you online, you can protect yourself against opinionated statements and leverage good information for marketing and public relations campaigns.

2. Competitive intelligence
If you really want to know what “Web 2.0″ is, it means that the competition is moving faster than ever. Monitoring your own online presence along with competitive sites is a key way of keeping up-to-date with the marketplace.

3. Reacting to the industry
When you accept that over eighty percent of the current prospect base is turning online for information, being able to react to trends on a daily basis allow you to set yourself apart from the competition that is oblivious to changes in the industry. Having a strategy for maneuvering those obstacles as they happen is an easy way to establish your business as a leader in the industry.

It is not a requirement to participate in the conversation, but being ignorant of a conversation regarding your business is a quick way to being blind-sided by situation that could have been dealt with in the early stages. Many topics in the online marketplace tend to have a short lifespan. Knowing how to identify and monitor the ones that have an impact or growing trend allows you to make the decision to interact and allocate your effort accordingly.

Do you remember a professional situation where you found out through a friend of a friend that some nasty rumor was floating around?

What about the time you found out six months afterwards, or the time it seemed like everyone but you knew the rumor?

While the online world is transforming business, it is also transforming the way potential customers, employers, employees, and mainstream media is finding out information about your business. The blogosphere has begun transforming search engines into conversations about your reputation.

Many businesses understand the value of showing up for a beneficial keyword such as “New York Real Estate”, but what happens when your business shows up for “Real Estate Fraud” because an unsatisfied client or unscrupulous competitor managed to get a story to show up under searches for your company name?

When such reputation nightmares happen, companies face the challenge of removing those negative results off the first few pages of the search engines or with getting information out there that provides a balanced dose of positive articles. Unfortunately it is often impossible to get a negative article removed from search engine results, but it is possible to make sure that it is hard to get information to show up instead.

Here are ten recommendations for establishing a healthy presence and reputation on the search engines.

1. Make sure your own web site shows up.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but unfortunately I’ve seen several $25k sites that don’t even show up in the search engines for the proper name of the business or the executive team. Do not trust your web designer when they say your web site shows up. Check yourself. Try doing a search for your company name and brand, along with the personal names and brands of the people on your team.

2. Buy the domains that are important to your business.

When you created your site, www.yourbusiness.com sounded great. How about your personal name www.firstnamelastname.com? How about your streetaddress.com? Domains cost less than $10 a year each, so spending an extra $20 to $100 dollars a year could be a very worthwhile investment if you plan on having control of your brand. If properly setup all those extra domains provide a sure-fire way to have your main business site show up on a variety of names that are important to you.

3. Start a blog.

You have www.yourbusiness.com, but how about buying www.yourhometownrealestate.com as a blog? You can use popular blogging software such as www.wordpress.org to create an almost free blog attached to your current website. By providing fresh and weekly content to the blog, the articles in it will show up on various long-tail keyword phrases for your company name. After a few months you will have multiple results whenever someone searches for your company.

4. Use sub-domains.

If you really do not want to budget for buying individual domains, try sub-domains on your primary domain. Most hosting services allow you to have multiple free sub-domains such as www.careers.yourbusiness.com. Sub-domains are treated as individual sites in the eyes of the search engines and have almost as much power as the primary domain. By adding a few pages of information to sub-domains such as biography, careers, location, and team, you can add dozens of results for searches to find your information.

5. Use social media accounts on other sites.

There are literally dozens of social media sites out there that can be used to create free profiles that show up for your company name. Linkedin.com, RISMedia.com, and RealTownBlogs.com offer free profiles that show up in the search engines. When you are given the choice of creating a profile name or adding a title to the account, think carefully about the exact phrase you want to be found under and try to utilize your company’s most common name.

6. Grow a social media site.

Search engines love constantly growing and evolving information. By starting your own forum or social media community, you can provide the search engines with new pages of information under your company name every time one of your users creates a new page or comment on your social media system.

7. Check out pay-per-click ads.

While I almost never endorse paying for pay-per-click advertising, you may find someone has decided to spend the $1 a click to advertise why they hate you on your own name or for the terms that drive business to you. There are ways of requesting this advertising cease by contacting the search engine, and if you spot something on your own name make sure you click it once or twice… you’ll find some quick comfort knowing you just cost the person a few dollars.

8. Use free directory profiles.

There are literally hundreds of free directories online. Google, Yahoo, and Superpages are all examples of sites with free directory profiles. In addition to having the benefit of being found by the search engines, having profiles on these directories is a way of being found by fairly substantial user communities. After creating the profiles, be ready for the follow-up sales call looking to offer you a lot of fairly useless advertising enhancements.

9. Volunteer your information and expertise on other sites.

The blogging world is always looking for fresh information. If you have a recent article or viewpoint to share, contact a local blogger or newspaper. Good information is always newsworthy, and it is usually fairly easy to get information published about a local community event you are sponsoring.

10. Use video.

You may be saying “but I don’t have a $5k budget to waste on fancy video.” Don’t listen to your budget! It doesn’t take a huge budget to put on a business suit and find a decent backdrop to take a quick thirty second video of your office. Even a casual video on YouTube under your company name is a hundred times better than an aggressive attack from an opinionated critic.

There are hundreds of other ways that can be tied together into a solid foundation for your business reputation and brand. Depending on the goals of your business, the above points can be integrated into search engine marketing plans to drive SEO results, to aid specific business projects, coordinate affiliated business partners, or even to establish your own business community. Taking a few minutes to examine and detail your current situation and the goals of your brand is essential to safe-guarding a company’s future. Understanding what people find when they search for your company name and how they interact with that information is critical to making sure that searchers find the information you want them to.

Here, a slight change to the tactic I described earlier: brand conquesting - placing your brand in direct competition with your business rivals.

Professionals spend a great deal of time establishing and developing personal and professional brands. For many professionals, a proper name is the way they market themselves. When many prospects meet a networking business person at a social function, they remember a personal name and a friendly demeanor before anything else. On a tcompany level, that type of personal brand is often matched in recognition by the power of the company brand. For the company, the business brand is pushed across to prospects using marketing, public relations, and word of mouth campaigns. This company branding is costly and takes time. Between the personal brand of the professional and the professional brand of the company, the goal is that leads will be generated and a transaction created.

Yet as professionals and companies establish huge brand campaigns in the real world - many of them ignore the online equivalent and don’t even know it exists.

When a prospect meets a competing professional, they usually talk for a few minutes, shake hands, exchange business cards, and move on. Sometime in the future the prospect will go online and do a search for one of two things: the name of the friendly person they met or the brand name of the company and the geographic area they are in.

Here is where brand conquesting comes into play.

Rather than find the site of “Bob Jones” working with “House Brand A,” they find a page from “Jane Doe” and “Competitive Brand X.”

Jane Doe has carefully understood the nature of online search. She has written an informational piece about the other company on her site and properly submitted it to the search engines. Individuals looking for Bob Jones may actually find the information they need to reach Bob Jones on Jane’s informational page, but the entire time they are reading about him, they are also being exposed to Jane’s competitive brand. Depending on how aggressive Jane is, the information about Bob Jones and his brand may be positive, neutral, or negative.

This type of competitive brand exposure is a way to leverage the huge budget of the real world and collect the benefit of another company’s marketing dollars. It is used by almost every online marketer to identify an audience painstakingly collected by a competitor, then purposely led to another point to be exposed to another company’s brand message. Many companies and professionals expect that when they go into a search engine and try to find a proper name they will be found at the top. In many cases this is not the case. Different profiles and negative reviews of them are typically more prominent, sometimes competitors have well designed pieces about them, and other times completely random information from a local news story or community member happens to mention them. In all of these cases they are losing a good portion of the marketing dollars they spend in the real world.

The corrective action for this is simple: understand how your brand is established online and understand how competitive brands are established online. Develop a solid online brand to protect your company from bad reviews online, to prevent competitors from stealing your traffic, to provide agents with another point of superior marketing, and to control information prospects read about your business.

To learn more about brand conquesting, see 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog

Barry Hurd is president of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities. He has over 15 years of entrepreneurial Internet and online marketing experience. As an author and prolific blogger, he has reached online audiences around the world. Since the mid-1990s, Hurd has been involved in numerous efforts to bring forth technical innovation through online business models. Past projects have included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Verizon Superpages, Intuit, and RISMedia.

For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com

For more social media marketing ideas, read:

• Social Media Marketing: Video Blogging for Real Estate
• All Leads Are Not Created Equal
• Why Web Sites Fail to Rank: If You Create It, They Will Come

Our team is made up of a collection of media consultants in online marketing; ranging from search engine optimization and online community experts, to real world public relations and guerilla marketing evangelists. All of the Social Media Systems staff is “hands on” with our projects, equally sharing our skills and our ideas with a variety of associates around the world.

According to Wikipedia, a large shared-source collection of hundreds of thousands of different terms-

“A virtual community or online community is a group of people that may or may not primarily or initially communicate or interact via the Internet. Online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other in real life. The dawn of the “information age” found groups communicating electronically rather than face to face. A “Computer-mediated community” (CMC) uses social software to regulate the activities of participants. An online community such as one responsible for collaboratively producing open source softwaredevelopment community. Significant socio-technical change has resulted from the proliferation of Internet-based social networks.^[1]“