iPad Apps for Internet Marketers Resource Center 

Analytics HD by Inblosam LLC delivers a rich variety of Google Analytics data that goes beyond the usual topline report. View an infographic overlay of your data on your Dashboard, or tap topic buttons - visitors, traffic sources, content, goal and ecommerce results - for specialized results.

What makes this analytics app worth the expense ($6.99 at time of writing with an option to upgrade to a premium version with more data) is the ability to segment your data (i.e., new visitors, paid and organic search referrals and mobile traffic).

Unlike smartphone analytics apps, which suffer from minuscule screen size, this iPad app is an effective bridge when you need to track or run analytics programs on the fly without lugging a laptop.

We have noticed some negative reviews on the iTunes download page complaining about the app timing out and other issues. We did not experience any of these problems in our own test drives.

It's not exactly an app, but a Bluetooth-enabled wireless keyboard is an essential tool if you want to do more with your iPad than flip through digital magazines or watch TV.

Almost all of the work for this newsletter was done via the Bluetooth keyboard, from creating and typing in usernames, passwords and registration information to searching, sending email, posting social media comments or sharing and writing the reviews.

The iPad's onscreen touch keyboard is handy, but the Bluetooth external keyboard ($69 for Apple/Mac version) turns the iPad into a workhorse.

Flipboard takes the drudgery out of reading your social-media feeds by displaying each one in an attractive magazine-style format, showing the pictures and videos your contacts have uploaded and alternating types and styles to make each post stand out. Use the swipe gesture to "turn" each page of your feed, just as you would page through a magazine.

Each account you connect to Flipboard - whether Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and any other RSS feeds you follow - gets a separate cover page, complete with artwork, on Flipboard's interface. The content is scannable, easy to read and easy to interact with because you can tweet, retweet, comment on and share it.

Flipboard was named Apple's iPad App of the Year in 2010.

One caveat: If you're a social-media power user, you'll still want community-specific apps such as Friendly Facebook for iPad or Twitterrific. Flipboard doesn't replicate all their social-curation functions, such as dividing followers into lists or differentiating between work and social contacts or casual versus close friends.

The iPad's own iBooks app is a respectable contender, but our nod for the best book reader goes to the Kindle app because it offers the user a richer experience and exploits more of the iPad's native features.

You can download the complimentary app and browse books without an Amazon account, but having one and synching it with your iPad gives you a nearly seamless "Like it? Buy it" experience. The Kindle app also gives you lots of options to customize your viewing screen (background color, type sizes and place markers).

This catalog application shows you how the iPad represents the convergence of all promotional channels. It has the display space of a printed catalog page, the interactivity of a website and the portability of a smartphone.

While this catalog app doesn't have whiz-bang animation like other digital publications, it does organize its copy into logical layouts that both mimic paging through a catalog and also allow you to deep dive into the items on each product page.

To be most valuable as an app, the catalog must allow the customer to view products, get info and purchase without leaving the app or having to complete the purchase at the website.

This Lands' End app does indeed allow shoppers to seamlessly toggle between the catalog and the order page. This makes it easy for the shopper to put a product in her cart and then keep shopping - a worthy goal for any online retailer.

The business-card fishbowl is a standard fixture at trade show booths, but those hot leads can grow cold the longer they sit in it. Instead, give your booth attendants iPads with this lead collection app, and send them out into the crowd to collect the data right from prospects.

Using forms you design and upload, this app cuts the lag time between data collection and data entry and improves accuracy. Your booth people spend more time chatting up prospects and less time waiting in line for the booth computer.

Synch with your customer-management system or download your data to a spreadsheet for further review. After paying to download the app, small businesses can create free accounts, while accounts for larger users begin at $19US monthly (at time of writing).

With your iPad, you can take your presentations anywhere, even an on-the-fly hallway consult with a prospect who can give you only 5 minutes. Why waste the opportunity with another boring deck of PowerPoint slides?

That's the point behind Prezi, a presentation-creation tool with dual iPad and desktop apps. After you create an account, download the Prezi creation tool to your computer desktop.

Use the tool to create your presentations which live in your account at the Prezi website. Then, when it's time to wow your prospect or client, launch the iPad app, which accesses your list of presentations, and tap the one you want to display.

Prezi also works on your regular desktop or laptop computer, helping you create unusual, animated presentations that encourage you to think beyond the usual bullet-point list. Your apps come with a free limited-use public license, but you can upgrade to premium versions ($59 and $159 annually at time of writing) for more functionality.

This app by MarketingJobForce.com, one of the career communities sponsored by Beyond.com, lets you search and apply for jobs without leaving the app or forcing you to switch back to your main computer.

Once you create your account and submit the job title, keywords, industry and location you're interested in, the app will research its database and return brief sketches of matching openings.

Find one you like? Tap it once to pull up the full listing. You can apply right then and there, save it for review or share it via email, Twitter or Facebook with your other job-hunting friends.

This app, which is a custom published edition of the women's health and fitness magazine Shape and sponsored by the artificial sweetener Splenda, may well represent the future of digital magazine publishing.

Unlike some digital magazines, Shape's designers have mastered the possibilities the iPad offers: properly sized screen displays that render text and graphics well without having to resize for readability, circle-shaped tap zones that expand into video or related articles when touched and subtle navigation that tells the reader when to swipe left or right to read more or to scroll up and down.

One trick worth copying: 6 small tap zones on a single screen, each of which delivers a different text without exiting the screen.

Even though this is a sponsored publication, it minimizes ad interruptions. The layout drops a small but noticeable yellow tap zone branded with the Splenda logo into relevant locations throughout the content. One click on the red "Close" button takes the reader right back to her place in the content.

This app turns your iPad into an ultra-portable cash register, accepting credit and debit cards as well as cash payments, calculating tips and taxes and sending electronic receipts.

Square, whose use we witnessed recently in a small business, uses a plug-in card reader (supplied via postal mail by app developer Square, Inc.) for credit and debit purchases and has a separate function for cash payments.

Both the app and the card reader are free. Square, Inc. makes its money through a per-transaction fee and a percentage of the sale. Despite this cost, the convenience can take some friction out of the sales process by taking the payment method to your customers instead of making them stand in a register line.