I like visiting author’s websites.

I often decide to buy a book or not based on the value and professionalism of a website. One of my clients in another business is dedicated to making his site a complete experience that accompanies his book.

If you want to find out what your overweight employees are costing you in sick time, increased health care, etc. you can use his online calculator.

This was a low cost thing to add to the site but makes it very interesting for business owners. As he continues to add things that engage his audience, his book sales and consulting practice will continue to grow.

If you are considering writing a book, start with the website now. Build an audience. This way, when your book hits the shelves, you are adding cool features instead of writing your about page. You can visit Tom’s ever growing site at http://www.healthybodyweight.com

If you want to really create some word of mouth, do something really bad to a client and then keep insisting they pay you for it.

I completely understand accidents happen and I have been patient for 9 months, but Nuvox, our past provider of T1′s has insisted that we pay for service that did not live up to their promises. After several outages last year, one for almost two days, we decided to move everything to a wonderful datacenter.

Nuvox continues to bill us and insist that we owe them money. We spent a lot on buying new equipment, mirroring everything and sending it across the country. On principle we refuse to pay them, even if it hurts our credit.

My buzz point here is this. I was quite willing to quietly leave their service and move to one I could count on. For a few thousand dollars they have continued to badger us and now I am going to be sure to tell everyone I know. Why have they worked so hard to keep that very negative experience fresh in my mind?

There can never be a strong, positive buzz or word of mouth success unless you can provide great service. Negative is much easier.

I have watched the Buzzoodle list grow lately, and I have noticed a funny thing.

Clients that have known about it for months are just signing up.

One reason may be that they have known about it but have not had the time. I think that the main reason is that they keep hearing and reading about it on an ongoing basis. Think about how much more likely you are to purchase something after the third person tells you about it.

How many times does someone have to hear about you to buy from you? This is a very valuable number to know and it drives home the point that you have to keep broadcasting your message in different ways all the time.

Here is an excellent blog on email marketing.

Chris Baggott was mentioned on the Forbes Best of the Web list, which is great buzz for him, so I visited him and liked what I saw. I commented on a post where I thought I could be insightful, and he then highlighted me in a post.

Please note that I did not promote myself or the company. I always try to add value to the blog through meaningful comments.

By watching what other people are buzzing about, you can perfect your efforts. If you read the email marketing blog, you can learn a lot about how to create more buzz with email.

CNN is collecing storys about how the internet has changed your life.

This is the kind of thing that takes five minutes, and if you are selected could get you a lot of visibility. This is the kind of thing Buzzoodle challenges are built around.

If you read this and don’t post something there, you are not serious about buzz.

Forbes best blogs list: Is nicely categorized and interesting. I already read many of the listed blogs.

Feel free to email the editor and tell them that Buzzoodle was robbed.

A lot of companies are jumping on the bandwagon and talking about Buzz and Word of Mouth.

For many of these companies, measuring the number of posts on blogs is how they measure results.

This is probably effective if you are releasing a Hollywood movie, but is it effective if you are releasing a new trade magazine for kitchen appliances? No.

Blog measurements are only effective for the very mainstream products that can build a universal buzz. If I had a trade magazine and a bunch of people started making comments on their blog, but they are not in my industry, it does not have the same value.

Target your buzz and word of mouth to your audience and find better ways to measure it, such as with Buzzoodle or by building your own campaign. Don’t be swept up by the hype over having every blog posting about you. That is not automatically a good thing.