Best Resources for Internet Marketing Consultants Resource Center 

Andiamo Systems is one way to track in real-time what people are saying about your company and your competitors. It will tell you who the most influential bloggers are for your brands, whether perceptions out there are positive or negative and which blogs and other word-of-mouth resources are the best targets for your PR and marketing campaigns. All you do is designate the brands and keywords that you want tracked, and then you can access your many online reports, which drill down all the way to snippets of each mention your keywords have received, with the publish date, source name, reach, authority, relevance and sentiment rankings. At the time of writing there was a complimentary trial at the site.

This complimentary service lets you test your Web design in 55 different combinations of Web browsers and operating systems. It's a handy tool to show a client how different systems can mangle sites using nonstandard code.

Type in a Web address, select which browser/OS combinations to test, and click the button. Browsershots uses distributed computing to test your page across a network of users, who send back screenshots showing the results.

We typed in "WDFM.com," and found that except for slight variations in column size and depth, our homepage renders correctly in every major combination.

One lack: No mobile simulation, but maybe that's coming.

The BuzzLogic service monitors in real-time all of the conversations that are going on in Web land on blogs and social media. The goal of this monitoring is to identify those people who are the drivers and influencers of opinion on any topic. To do so, they monitor and map the people who are posting to blogs, where they are posting, how many people are commenting on their postings and how their opinions on a given topic spread from one site to another. Marketers get a dashboard in order to identify "influencers" within a category and zero in on who's saying what.

A major benefit of this monitoring is that fact that BuzzLogic allows you to conduct "conversation queries" that pinpoint where major conversations about your brand or products are taking place, and then zip a text or display ad right into the social media discussion. They use the Google API to enable you to create your text or display ads, and then you select the properties where you want to run your ads just as you would for a Google AdWords contextual campaign. BTW, BuzzLogic refers to this as a "conversation targeting" ad system.

Don't you just love your iPhone? Now here's a gratis application that lets you schedule and manage conference calls with up to five participants when you're on the road. The app, created by telephony specialist IfByPhone, comes with 100 minutes of use per month with upgrades available. Create your complimentary IfByPhone account at the URL above, then go to the iTunes Store, search on "IfByPhone," and download Conference Call.

This UK-based website offers news specifically for consultants. Once you take a look at it, you will see how specifically and perfectly tailored it is to this niche. For example, at the time of writing major news articles focused on who was awarding contracts to whom and an overview on how companies are handling succession planning (or more likely, how they do not have a plan in place). While the site does focus on the big guns -- you can even click on firm-specific categories such as Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey -- there is much to learn here, even if you are a single-person firm.

CrazyEgg makes your Web analytics reports pop with a set of color-coded visuals like heatmaps and Confetti, which drops a colored dot wherever a visitor clicks on the page. See instantly where your hot and cold zones are, then toggle a switch to see where visitors are coming from.

For email folks: Upload your message to your site and watch where people click. Did they find your call to action? Or, did they click on images that you should have hyperlinked but didn't? Service starts at $9 monthly (track up to 10,000 visits monthly and 10 pages).