Useful Internet Marketing Automation Tools

admin    Twitter Software     Automation, Internet, Marketing, Tools, Useful

Useful Internet Marketing Automation Tools

Automation Tools

I am asked quite often about automation tools that I use so I chose to put it in writing so I may make reference to this post when anyone asks. I’ll keep the post updated as I change, add or remove tools. And I’m going to be very honest about my viewpoints on the tools. I will list them alphabetically.

Amember – Amember is a membership management program for membership sites. Amember is one of the finest out there. It is a bit complex to get setup and working but once it is, it works very well. It can integrate with almost anything. It has got a built in an affiliate marketing programme but in every case where i have used it I have integrated it with iDevAffiliate. Just because I use one central affiliate center as much as practical.

Animoto – Animoto can take still photos and turn them into awesome and incredible videos. When i need to throw together a fast video and do not feel a bit like sitting down in front of last cut and revising a video this is where I go.

Article Video Robot – Like animoto, Article Video Robot creates videos for you. But Article Video Robot creates videos from your article content. It isn’t quite as simple as just pasting in your article but it is pretty easy. Expect to spend five to ten minutes creating a video for each article. But when you are done you have got your article in video format ready to be submitted to the video sites.

Aweber – Aweber is an email autoresponder service. Aweber is tied for my 1 choice together with getresponse. I have accounts both places and love them both. They each work a little differently but achieve the same goal in the end. If you’re looking for a good auto-responder I’ll definitely advocate Aweber.

Bookmark Generation – Bookmark Generation is a service that borders on the edge of being black hat. If you’ve ever heard about Howie Schwartz then you know he borders and crosses over into the black hat of marketing with some of his tools. That’s just a caution. Bookmark Generation is an automatic bookmarking tool where you supply the list of bookmarks and bookmark generation will bookmark them over a period of time so they appear to be they’re being submitted naturally. Very forceful tool for making back links.

Butterfly marketing Script – When you purchase butterfly marketing from mike filsaime he gives you a membership script called the butterfly promoting script. If you are familliar with the concepts that are taught in butterfly selling you understand how tough it is to manually do all of the jobs. The butterfly selling script makes it simple to manage. setup of the script isn’t incredibly simple and may be overly tough for a non experienced web person. It is an awesome script if you are web savvy. I’ve only one site using this script at current, i have been using quick Action Profits script more as it is simpler to setup and does essentially a similar thing. But if you can get this script it’s a good one.

acute auto-responder – This is another autoresponder program like Aweber and GetResponse. I would not endorse using this service over the other 2 as it is not as sophisticated. I only use this auto responder when i have an e-mail list that I can’t say I have double opt’d-in. I import and send an email to a capture page to get them to opt-in. Very rare I ever basically use this one.

FirePow – I have over 150 blogs out there and FirePow is what manages them all. If you are blogging then you want to have FirePow. It can install a new blog in seconds, keep the blog software and add-ons all updated. It can manage your posts, pages, etc . It can social bookmark your posts, it’s got a built in content creator called content blitz that will load up content automatically to be shown from a variety number| range} of sources. It has it’s own high PR blog network that allows you to push your blog and plenty of other promotional tools and features as well . I won’t do it justice here. You actually need to visit it and try it. There isn’t any way I could manage my huge network of blogs without it.

GetResponse – GetResponse is another auto responder service like Aweber. Both are tied for my 1. both are great and I couldn’t image doing without both. I use each for different parts of my business to help keep everything seperated. Hi can highly recommend GetResponse as an autoresponder service.

IDevAffiliate – iDevAffiliate is software that help me manage my affiliates. A number of the membership programs I use have inbuilt affiliate management systems already but where I am able to I try to use iDevAffiliate. Why you may ask would I pay for one when I can get them for free in the other software. Well, lots of reasons but here are merely a couple. One ) iDevAffiliate has awesome tools for both me and my affiliates. My affiliates can install a small customer that keeps them up to date on thier sales. In a launch they can get play by play data. It has inbuilt graphics, payment tracking, multiple levels, and so on. 2 ) I love to centralize my affiliate program if possible so that an affiliate can sell any of the products without needing to create multiple associate accounts.

quick Action Profits – quick Action Profits is a membership script that the best I’m able to compare it with is the butterfly marketing script. It is a complete membership management script which has a built in affiliate program, multiple membership levels, special access for JV partners and so much more. Amazing script. It is complex, or maybe I should say complicated not complicated. It is less complicated to setup than the butterfly selling script as well . Either this script of the butterfly marketing script will serve you well.

SENuke – This tool is at the center of my Web 2.0 marketing. SeENuke will create accounts on a substantial number of web 2.0 sites, store the password information, and so on. After you create accounts you put your article in and spin it so that SENuke can generate a completely unique copy every time it has to. It’ll then go login to web 2.0 sites like hubpages, google knol, for example. And post a new new article into every one. After you finish posting to the web 2.0 sites ( which takes a minute or two ) you then post to the social bookmarking sites all immediately and then to the RSS directories. If you’ve got a video it can post to a number of video sites also. It turns a weeks worth of work in front of the computer into roughly an hour.

This is a tool that if I didn’t have, I might potentially not still be selling. It is worthwhile’s weight in gold. There’s another similar product out there that comes from australia, I’m not going to mention it by name but stay away from it. I gave it a try for 2 months and it didn’t work fine, is complex to use and does only a little part of what SENuke does. Can you tell i truly like this product?

Traffic Geyser – Traffic Geyser is a video submission service that submits your video to many video sites with just 2 minutes of typing in of info. There is a similar site called tubemogul. But there’s really no comarison. TubeMogul is free but does not do anything close to what Traffic Geyser does. I met mike latterly at a conference and he was talking about some of what’s coming in Traffic Geyser and it is absolutely incredible. It’s no secret that video is what’s working in online marketing now and Traffic Geyser is what can make it work for you. If you go to the Traffic Geyser site there are some free videos you can watch to see what it can do for you.

TweetSpinner – TweetSpinner is another one of the twitter automation sites. There are a large amount of free sites out there too. TweetSpinner is a paid memership but has some truly cool features. I’ve got a new product coming out soon that discusses using twitter and at the center is TweetSpinner as the tool to help rule the twittershpere.

Unique A|rticle wizard| – if you are an article marketer and have never heard about Unique Article wizard you owe it to yourself to look at it. UAW is a service that respins your article before it posts it to each new article catalog. But it’s not your everyday spinner that turns out something that is unreadable. It works completely differently because a human has to respin each paragraph two times. It then takes the different adaptations of paragraphs and makes new articles out of each one. It can submit to thousands of article sites and will only submit to ones that fit your criteria so you aren’t post spam to article directory sites where your article doesn’t fit. This eliminates the duplicate content penalty.

Wishlist Member – Wishlist Member is another membership management system. Wishlist Member work completely inside wordpress. Yes RAP that we discussed above can add members to wordpress but wordpress doesn’t have a pleasant membership level control. Wishlist Member adds some awe-inspiring membership level controls including automated advancement of levels based upon time. This is what I use for my Micro-Continuity Sites. When you sign up for micro-continuity you are entered in at week 1 and every week you obtain access to the subsequent week. Wishlist member handles all this completly hands off from me. It also integrates with amember and clickbank, paypal, 2checkout and more.
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To see More information about theseTools visit Automation Tools

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Ecommerce Web 2.0 Tools Everybody Should Know

admin    Banner Web Advertising     ecommerce, Everybody, Know, Should, Tools

Ecommerce Web 2.0 Tools Everybody Should Know

So you have built the online shop, found the supplier to get the goods from and set up a cart and accounting system…

Now if someone would just come to your site and buy something.

It is one of the sad ironies of life that one of the reasons people often give for leaving a 9-5 job to set up their own website at home is they are tired of the traffic.

And that is exactly what they are looking for now.

Traditionally there were several ways to get this done:

* Use the services of greedy… err business-savvy eBay or other puny… er growing online auction services.
* Pay for ads through Google Adwords
* Buy banner advertising
* Write articles and comment on forums.
Thankfully, several new web 2.0 addresses have proved to be a hit with not only netizens but also search engines.

Web 2.0 platforms are a boon to smaller ecommerce operators. They don’t only allow you to bring more people to your site they also let you communicate with your paying and potential customers and build your service into one that is more targeted towards the people that buy your products.

There are several different types of web 2.0 platform that you, as an ecommerce operator, should be aware of:

* Video platforms
* Material hosting sites and blogs
* Social bookmarking sites
Video sites
Rich media, like video didn’t even register on peoples’ radars five years ago but that has changed with the rise of YouTube.

Now the general consensus by marketers is that you risk ignoring video at your peril.

While YouTube is the undoubted king of video sites there is are many others on the internet with different benefits and different audiences, and it is often beneficial to release your video onto a number of different sites, much like wholesale electronics supplier Chinavasion has done. These are only two of the video sites online and a Google search will bring up many more results.

Good examples of this are the Chinavasion Metacafe page and Chinavasion Revver page.

Don’t forget, when making videos, short is sweet and including descriptions and tags is always essential.

Content Sites
There are a number of content hosting sites online including Squidoo, Hubpages and some of the document hosting sites on the internet as well as blogging platforms like wordpress and moveable type.

Blogs can be excellent content hosting solutions that constantly draw attention back to your site and your products. Some, like wordpress are useful in that you can either set one up that is hosted on their server (like http://goodecommercetips.wordpress.com) or download their software and plug it directly into your site. The Chinavasion blog is one such blog. There are plusses and minuses with both scenarios and it is a decision to weigh up carefully.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Once you’ve created content you’re going to need to get somebody to see it.

A good way to draw attention to your site, and to the resources you create for people is through social bookmarking sites.

These sites are basically ways for netizens to share sites that they think are interesting with other people and are loved by both netizens and search engines.

One popular example of this is Stumbleupon. A Stumbleupon blog can create a lot of attention on its own right as seen by the Chinavasion Stumbleupon blog.

Social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook are a different type of social bookmarking. While you can in fact use these to share your links with people they are also used to communicate with your customers, keep them informed of what is happening at your company and see what else is happening.

The new Friendfeed service is a great example of this, as seen by the Chinavasion Friendfeed room, with people sharing different links and discussing what they have found.

When putting items through social bookmarking sites it may pay to consider masking your actions a little by also submitting other links, particularly when using sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.

So what pitfalls do you have to take consideration when marketing through web 2.0?

There are two main concerns. The first is that you remain aware of your reputation online and the second is you take into consideration the time getting involved takes.

You develop a good reputation by providing great content. If something appears to be poorly written or lacking in useful information you risk getting a bad reputation.

Another way to ‘loose face’ is to fail to develop a relationship with customers On sites like YouTube, or in the case of Chinavasion Metacafe, check up on videos from time to time and answer any questions that clients and potential clients have. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to deal with every flamer or troll, in fact it is probably more beneficial to ignore the people who seem to be just posting a comment to get someone arguing with them.

Essentially if you cut corners or try to trick a customer it’s going to hit you hard in the long run. Treat people fairly and they will remain loyal to you.

Those are just some of the excellent web 2.0 posting tools out there on the internet that make great marketing tools for up and coming e-commerce operators strapped for cash.

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Preventing Facebook Stalking – Privacy Tools

admin    Twitter Applications     Facebook, Preventing, Privacy, Stalking, Tools

Preventing Facebook Stalking – Privacy Tools

Facebook is generally regarded as one of the most entertaining social networking sites. However, it has it own advantages and disadvantages. Facebook’s advantages include keeping in touch with long lost friends, playing games and offering many fun applications. The disadvantages include the problem of “Facebook stalking” and theft. Facebook stalking is the ability of a stranger to lookup personal information about another individual and then use that information to commit crimes such as identity theft, harassment and fraud.

“Facebook stalking” can lead to disastrous and unfortunate results. Individuals can publish incorrect, defamatory or other negative information on the Web, or use personal or private information to harass someone.

Facebook has recently introduced new privacy settings that allow the user more control in determining what information is publicly available and which Facebook friends have access to everything a user publishes on Facebook.

One good way to ensure more control over the information you post on your Facebook account is to add only persons you know to your friends list. Verify that a friend request belongs to someone you know personally before confirming them as a friend. If you can’t identify a person who’s issuing a friend request, or do not recognise him or her from your work, school or social circles, do not accept their friend request.

If you don’t normally communicate with a person on your friend list, it’s perfectly acceptable to “unfriend” them. Reserve your Facebook friend list for people who are actively involved in your life or who are looking to reconnect.

Use the Faceboook privacy settings to lock down your information. Create separate “friend lists” that categorise people according to how you know them. Family may end up on one list, while work associates may end up on another. Before you publish anything, determine which list of people may see your materials. Pictures of a holiday with your family may be inappropriate to share with your colleagues from work.

Limit access to your personal information to your friends. If you’re feeling comfortable, you can extend this to “friends of friends.” Do not make all information publicly available, and be sure you know what each Facebook application is asking for. Limit Facebook applications’ ability to publish information about you to others.

Information about you, including photographs, documents, and videos, can remain available on the Internet indefinitely. Even if material is removed from the original publication site, cached copies and copies that are downloaded and saved can be republished elsewhere. Some things seemingly take on a life of their own. As the original publisher of your information, you have the most control over who sees it and how it gets distributed, but only at the time you first publish it.

Pictures of your latest university escapades may become a severe embarrassment years down the road when a prospective employer is trying to find information about you. Think carefully about what you say, and what you post, and limit access to the most sensitive words and images.

Social networking can be a great tool, but it does not mean that all people in your various social circles should have unfettered access to every aspect of your private life.

A good rule of thumb is to avoid publishing information that a prospective employer cannot ask on an application form. Give careful thought to publishing information such as your full name, date of birth, address, employment history, or personal details of your medical history, and educational achievements.

Periodically review both your friend list and your privacy settings. Ensure that your default privacy settings restrict public access to your information and monitor your friend list to include only those persons you know and trust.

Common sense rules for all Social Media sites:

Use a strong password – over 8 characters
Never use the same password on another web site
Change your passwords frequently
Use hard to guess questions and answers for password reminders
Never share personal information ie. address, location, phone
Lock down your profile for friend access only – know your friends
Monitor your friends list – remove unwanted friends
Pay attention to picture uploads – “A picture is worth a thousand words”
Use Facebook advanced Account Privacy settings menu

Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media Tools

admin    Twitter Tools     Media, Reasons, Should, Social, Tools

Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media Tools

Twitter is an amazing business but most of us are not even aware of its huge potential. With Twitter you build and even expand your network. This is one platform which will help you to build relationships with your potential clients. You will meet people from various sectors with similar business interests. Moreover when you are interacting with someone in Twitter, you can always add something personal.

When we interact with someone, it would be great if we put our personal side to the tweets. So next time, they think of hiring your services, they will not only think of your company, but the one who has communicated with them. They will feel as if they know you. The Twitter is a great place to know about the performance of your company and your competitors. If you want to stay ahead in competition, you must know about your closest competitors. You can monitor the reputation of your company from Twitter. Even if it is criticism, you should try and accept it in a positive manner.

Social networking will help you in many ways. Think of Facebook. Apparently it looks like a platform where people get to make new friends, join communities, post their comments and talk about diverse topics. In your wildest imagination, you might not have thought that they help in web marketing. But they do help in web marketing. These sites are accessible to a number of people. Even if you have a small business, Facebook can help you to promote your products and services. Social media websites are the most effective ways of telling people about who you are, what you are up to and what you do. Once they know about the who, what and when, they will gradually take one step further and try to find out more about your company.

The best way to create a network for your business is by making friends in Facebook. This is a great place to find out about your potential customers, clients and people who belong to this industry. A facebook announcement will help you to create a buzz and this definitely increases your visibility in the Internet. The basic thing about web marketing is visibility. If you have good visibility, people will automatically visit your site. When you are tweeting, you are giving constant updates about your company and services to the world.

If you do not have good customers, you will be soon out of business. There will be always a bunch of loyal customers who will vouch for you and support you. Through social media sites you can not only create a credible profile for yourself but you can transform your customers into fans. There will be always someone who will swear by your brand because they recognize the potential of your brand. The rapport should be such, that they will spread a good word for your brand. You can invest a little time and effort and you will soon find people who will be more than your customers. This is the perfect platform to know your customers as well tell them more about your brand.

How to Join Twitter and Why Twitter Tools Make Things Easier

admin    Get More Twitter Followers     Easier, join, Things, Tools, Twitter

How to Join Twitter and Why Twitter Tools Make Things Easier

It is easy to join Twitter, but it’s not so easy to find Twitter tools to help you use it properly. There is a lot of advice available on joining Twitter, but not on how to use it to the full even though there are many tools available if you know where to look.

Having mastered these, there are many other twitter tools available for you that will enable you to easily carry out many different tasks, such as attracting followers with the same interests as you and making sure those you are following are following you in turn. It is possible to achieve this manually by checking the pages of those that should be following you or trying to identify the thumbnails on your page, but it is quicker if a Twitter tool does it for you.

Other tools involve the integration of Twitter with other social networking applications, such as Facebook and YouTube, and methods of reducing the URLs that you publish in your tweets to a more manageable size. It is certainly true that Twitter does this automatically but you have no control over the appearance of the visible URL.

You might wonder why such tools are necessary and why you should even carry these tasks out? If all you use Twitter for is to make and receive tweets and to communicate with your friends and family several times a day, then it is true that you don’t need any tools: you can get by just using Twitter for its main application – making tweets and sending messages withing the 140 characters permitted. Many people use Twitter as a marketing tool, however, and others use it to determine what others are twittering about, away from their usual cisrcle of follwers and friends.

Immediately you join Twitter you will probably send a few test tweets to see how it works. You will then start to try out some of the tools and services available on the site, such as trending, lists and retweets. Once you have mastered these, you will be ready for more advanced Twitter tools such as those above, or even more advanced trend analysis and how to automate your Tweets.

For example, there are tools that enable you to write out several tweets and then have them automatically submitted at specified times and dates. Sometimes Twitter is over-subscribed and you can’t login. By using the appropriate tool you write out your tweet while you are waiting and once Twitter comes back on line have it automatically submitted, thus saving yourself a lot of time.

It is very easy to join Twitter and to get started using it, and if you like what you see, there are a large number of Twitter tools online for you use to simplify specific purposes and tasks. A number of them operate individually while others come in the form of plugins for blogs such as Wordpress enabling you achieve integration of Twitter with your blog.

No matter what Twitter tools you choose to use, they will make life easier for you so join Twitter and do what you can to make using it easier and much more enjoyable and satisfying.

Understanding 4 important free promotion tools

admin    Twitter Web Advertising     Free, Important, Promotion, Tools, Understanding

Understanding 4 important free promotion tools

All online entrepreneurs who have recently started their new business or service would like to use free promotion strategies to promote their business website. Usually, new entrepreneurs start operation on a low budget. Hence, they rely on various types of free promotion tools that will generate traffic for their sites and thereby start earning money through their business. If you have a good product to sell online and if you are not effectively using online advertising, then in that case your business is going to suffer. You should not give any excuses by saying that you cannot afford to spend on advertising. This is because you can now use free promotion tools that are easily available online. The various types of free promotion tools are as follows:

1) Promoting by the SEO method:
You can promote your website by using the search engine optimization concept. This can be done by optimizing your web based content and thereby making it search engine friendly. In order to effectively use the SEO strategy, you need to have H1 tags for your title and also use content that consist of target oriented keywords. This is how you can improve the page rank of your website and thereby generate lots of traffic to your website.

2) Writing articles:
Article writing method is the most effective form of free promotion. In this case, you don’t have to spend on advertising cost. However, you need to take time to write articles and submit them to free article directories like Ezine Articles. Ensure that you follow the article submission rules before you submit your articles to the concerned article directory. Below each article you should provide a link to your website. So, when people read your article and when they reach the bottom part of the article, they will get inclined to click the link that you have provided.

3) Obtain reciprocal links:
You can promote your website for free by getting involved with reciprocal linking campaign. This method is not so popular among search engines. This is because many webmasters acquire reciprocal links by unethical means. Usually, search engines appreciate links from quality relevant sites. So, in order to effectively obtain the benefits of free promotion through reciprocal links, you need to identify relevant high page rank sites and convince the webmaster to reciprocate your link request. If you succeed in exchange links with a high page rank site, you will be assured of getting good amount of targeted traffic to your site.

4) Social Networking Sites:
Social networking sites are popular for interacting with each other. However, these sites are now also being used as a free promotion tool. You can get registered with social networking sites such as My space, Face Book, Twitter and Squido. Remember to set up a profile and add unique relevant content along with your back links to your website. This is enough to generate free traffic to your website. In order to effectively use this free promotion tool, you need to act tactfully and refrain from spamming.

All the above online promotion strategies are equally important. However, the effectiveness of each free promotion tool will depend on how best you implement them for promoting your website.

Ten Tools I Use Everyday

admin    Twitter Software     everyday, Tools

Ten Tools I Use Everyday

I was reading something the other day about business people not making the most of the tools they have that can make their lives easier, and it started me thinking about the tools I use and probably take for granted every day.

So here is my top ten tools list – maybe some of the will help you out too?

1) Shortkeys – http://www.shortkeys.com/

Shortkeys allows me to store macros of things that I have to type out every day. So for example, instead of having to type out “299 Steps to Website Heaven” every time, I have a “299 shortkey”. I also have shortkeys for different links I use a lot, my signature file, address details, and messages that I send regularly (for example welcome messages to new clients, or monthly report messages). There is a Shortkeys Lite version, but I use the Pro version which I believe I bought for about £18 ten years ago!

2) Twitterfox / Twhirl – http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox / http://www.twhirl.com

Lots of people use Twitter, and lots of them give up or let it fall by the ayside because it’s a chore to keep on visiting the Twitter homepage and posting tweets. I have both Twitterfox and Twhirl – both allow me to update my Twitter status, and read replies, direct messages and tweets from people I follow, without having to visit the twitter page at all.

3) Zoho CRM – http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas

There are 6 of us on the main NikkiPilkington.com team, spread across 4 different households and 2 different countries. Zoho allows us all to access the same info and keep up to date on what is happening with a client or prospect. That way if someone calls me, I can access their notes and see what any of the sales team has said to them, and know more about their situation. I can also find out their account balance with us and any conversations relating to invoices and payment.

4) Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Every client that signs up with NikkiPilkington.com is registered for a Google Webmaster Tools account – this allows me to check on a regular basis which phrases they are being shown for that we may not have targeted in the first round of search engine optimisation, whether there are any errors on the sites, where their links are coming from and more.

5) Clicky / Google Analytics – http://getclicky.com/36192 / http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics is a great free tool for analyzing visitors to your site – you can se where they have come from, which pages they have looked at, and lots more. It’s fantastic and I check it for myself and various clients every day. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t track visitors in real time – you have to wait until the next day to see stats.

Clicky tracks in real time. I can make a post on Ecademy or other places, and withing seconds I can see the people clicking on the links to get to my site. I can see which pages they have looked at, and even more interestingly for me, I can see the links in my articles that they are clicking on – so when I posted Using Twitter for Business part 2 – Ten Ways to make your twitter Life easier, I could see visitors clicking off the article to check out the various things I had recommended. It’s a paid service, although there is a free trial, and even the paid version is not expensive.

6) Web CEO – http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id=NikkiPilkington

I only recently acquired this software, after becoming a little disappointed with Internet business Promoter. How I wish I had found it earlier! Not only are it’s search engine positioning reports much more compact and easy to follow, it has so many other features built in. Site Monitor allows you to monitor the up and response time of your website, and emails you weekly with a round up. You can set it to run ranking reports regularly and email them directly to you (or in my case to my customers). You can run reports on your Pay per Click campaigns. All in all I wouldn’t be without this software now.

7) Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts

In this day and age it’s important to be on top of news and views in your industry, and when the industry is online marketing, things change constantly. A few well set up alerts allow me to receive emails the minute anyone mentions mine or my clients’ names online, as well as a whole host of other keyphrases that I have set up. This allows me to see trends, to troubleshoot for clients if necessary (our online reputation management clients in particular need a quick response) and more.

SEO Book Keyword count / Wordtracker – http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools / http://www.wordtracker.co.uk

Both of these are vital to me in order to give my clients and potential clients details of searches done in their industry. All too often clients come to me with phrases that they want to be on the front page of Google for, but when we do the research, it shows that no-one ever searches for those phrases. It’s no good being number one on Google for a phrase if no-one ever looks for it, i’m sure you’ll agree!

9) Aweber – http://www.aweber.com

I run various mailing lists, both for my own company and for clients – and this is the best tool I’ve found so far. Not only can I set up unlimited auto responders if I wish to do so, but I can also send out newsletters and mailings, and find out the response rate, click rate and more. There’s even a handy checker built in that will tell you whether or not your mailing is likely to set off spam filters, which is handy in my industry as there are lots of spam emails going around regarding SEO.

10) Google Checkout – http://checkout.google.com/

I’ve never really been a fan of receiving money by Paypal, but it was once a necessary evil if you didn’t want, or couldn’t get, and account from Worldpay or another online merchant account, and if your ‘friendly’ bank manager decided that taking money on the Internet was like sleeping with the Devil himself.

However, since Google Checkout came out last year, I’ve been much more impressed. if you spend enough on Adwords there are no credit card processing fees, it’s easy to install, and you can email invoices just the same as Paypal. The money appears in your bank a couple of days later, not 30 days like Paypal, and all in all it is a much more pleasant experience. They also have their own fraud checks, which kick into action when the payment is made, and tells you not to ship goods / services until you have received the all clear, rater than giving you the money, you ship the goods and then paypal clawing it back from you as it was a fraudulent transaction.

So, there you have it – I hope some of these are helpful to you.

(Disclaimer – some of the above links are affiliate links – in various cases I could get kudos / points / about 4pence if you eventually go on to buy fro these companies. If that bothers you, feel free to strip the affiliate links out.)

Nikki Pilkington

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3 Tools Needed When Publishing Content Online

admin    Twitter Apps     Content, Needed, Online, Publishing, Tools

3 Tools Needed When Publishing Content Online

Publishing content on the internet is a very effective online marketing strategy since it not only gives you massive exposure but also helps build your credibility. This approach however can be labor intensive therefore it is always a good idea to look for ways to make your content distribution efforts more efficient.

When using content as a promotional means you are not only distributing it but also developing it as well. Both these tasks by themselves are time consuming so it would more efficient if they could be consolidated in some way.

Let’s look at 3 ‘tools’ available to you that could be used not only for content distribution but also for developing new information as well.

Digg

This is one of the largest social bookmarking sites online and is designed to bring late breaking news and other interesting content to you. The value of this site increases for someone who is involved in content distribution. Digg allows you to publish your own content to the site and then circulates it amongst a significantly sized membership base.

As your content gets circulated it can then quite easily go viral leaving the site and infiltrating other areas of the internet.

Delicious

Much like Digg this site also makes available to you information or news that is current and makes it easy to bookmark any content you find interesting. Searching for information relative to any topic you choose is made easy since content is ’stored’ on the site and is categorized by descriptive tags and keywords.

The search process is much more time efficient than what you would experience by using online search engines.

Submitting your own interesting content is encouraged on this site and shared with the membership which once again is significant in numbers. Here too the circulation of content is NOT limited to just the site itself.

TweetDeck

If yesterday was your first day online you have probably already heard of Twitter the social networking micro blog. This site offers many ‘downloadable’ applications but one of the most valuable is Tweetdeck. This app allows you to search multiple topics or keywords simultaneously for information of interest to you.

If you are using content online for promotional reasons you will never be at a loss for freshly updated information to use. The best thing is your searches yield real time results which make for the freshest content you will find.

From this same platform you can also broadcast your own content to other site members. Being Twitter is one of the fastest growing and largest social networking sites online you will not be shortchanged for the exposure you can receive.

Publishing content as a means for gaining exposure online is a very effective technique that offers several benefits. This particular online marketing strategy however could be even more effective if the process of content distribution and development could be better consolidated. By incorporating the 3 tools we spoke of here today in your efforts when using content for promotional purposes you will experience considerable time savings. These tools are not only great sources for new content but can also offer you significant exposure as well.

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Taking Advantage of Online Marketing Tools

admin    Twitter Tools     Advantage, Marketing, Online, Taking, Tools

Taking Advantage of Online Marketing Tools

The Internet Revolution has given rise to a plethora of online marketing tools. However, otherwise savvy and accomplished Internet marketers have overlooked many of these useful tools. It is essential for entrepreneurs to take advantage of the resources available to them in order to expand and elevate their level of business. Online marketing tools cannot only increase awareness of your company; they can also directly assist you to make a sizable return on your investment.

Facebook and Twitter

In the realm of social media, it would be easy to focus on Facebook and Twitter alone. Indeed both of these sites are incredibly popular and continue to grow on a daily basis. Some of the best things about Facebook and Twitter are that they give you the ability to reach large volumes of people and target specific demographics. Additionally, these social media marketing tools are free and very easy to use. There are many other fantastic options available to Internet entrepreneurs as well.

LinkedIn

A good example of a site that is often overlooked by marketers is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is remarkable in that it allows you to interact with some of the world’s top business circles. Further, LinkedIn allows users to promote themselves and even their products to people, including executives, in a very professional environment. The climate for LinkedIn is usually far more “business-like” than that on other social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Thus, for those looking to market to established executives, LinkedIn is worth a look.

Social Networking

The number of free social networking sites on the Internet that can be used to promote your business, products or services is truly staggering. One important fact to keep in mind is that because social networking is so very popular, many sites have popped up recently that cater to specific interest groups or niche markets. For example, there are social networking sites just for pet owners, wine enthusiasts and baby boomers. The list goes on and on.  If you have a product or service that you know would appeal to a particular group, then it makes great sense to have a presence on the corresponding social media site. This way, you can market directly and specifically to the individuals who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

With all the exciting online marketing tools at your disposal, you will likely find many that will fit your needs. By utilizing the most established and relevant resources, your business will profit from these low cost marketing strategies.

10 New Productivity Tools and Resources

admin    Twitter Software     Productivity, Resources, Tools

10 New Productivity Tools and Resources

There are many great and easy-to-use tools and resources available online for freelance developers and designers. Here is a list of some great tools to enhance productivity while completing freelance projects efficiently.

SlickMap CSS

It is a simple style sheet that helps in displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It streamlines the web design process as it automates the illustration of site map and allows you to develop HTML navigation. It also offers additional links which can be customized as per preferences.

Flapjax

This is a programming language for modern, client-based Web applications. Its features include event-driven, reactive evaluation, event-stream abstraction for communicating with web services and also offer interfaces to external web services.

Synfig

This is another important resource for freelance web developers  that eliminates the task of manual tweening by producing smooth, fluid motion without using the animator to draw out each frame individually. This allows you to produce high quality 2D animation for your project.

Image flow

This is a user-friendly JavaScript image gallery which provides object oriented script that helps in creating many instances of it on one website. It offers multiple instances which can be customized as per choice. It supports multiple instances, compatible with all graphical browsers, supports all image formats, links, iPhone/iPod Touch and more.

Jekyll

Another simple, blog aware, static site generator for web developers. It provides a template directory representing the raw form of a website, runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and bring out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or favorite web server.

identengine

This is a javascript library that recovers and aggregates social profiles from various websites and networks. It helps in taking out the identity of a profile from social media websites such as Twitter, FriendsFeed, Flickr, Digg or any other web profile page.

Wavemaker

This is an easy way to build Web 2.0 applications including prototyping and development, a form-driven database apps, a front end “face” for SOA architecture. It automates all the heavy lifting needed to connect enterprise data to browser-based widgets.  It provides a drag and drop interface to manage images and files within a project.

eCSStender

It a useful resource which offers extensions to simplify the design process. It allows you to author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and make sure that design works well even in IE6. Its extensions include CSS3 Selectors, @font-face support, CSS rotation (currently bundled with eCSStender as an example), CSS3 border-and CSS3 Columns.

Splashup

It is a powerful editing tool and photo manager for a design project. It allows you to edit many images at one single time, control pixel level and check the depth of layers. It is compatible with all the browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photo-sharing sites, and even has its own file format to save work in progress.

Dotemplate

This resource helps in finding best website template for a design project. It offers a catalog of Web templates you can fully and easily customize online. It also lets you change the template colors easily with our Photoshop® like color picker, and choose your favorite color scheme

Hope these tools and resources would help in successfully completing a design and development project seamlessly. Please share your suggestions and feedback on the same.

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