If your client depends on you to be a specifier and come up with short lists of Web services to consider, this site may do some of the work for you. The StrikeIron Marketplace is an e-commerce-enabled marketplace for commercial Web services. For example, you might be looking for a Web monitoring, analysis or order processing system for a client. Instead of wading through endless search results from a traditional search engine, you can use this site to zero in on exactly the kind of Web service you are looking for and compare pricing and features between companies. Many of the services/tools offered are "plug-and-play" or actually hosted on the StrikeIron website, so it is easy for you to zero in on those that easily integrate with what you already have and with one another. In many cases you can use the hosted services on a "pay as you go" model of pricing (while at the same time having the ability to choose from a number of companies for that which best suits your needs. A complimentary trial allows you to conduct a few searches and try things out; the full service is subscription-based.
Which social-media blogger do the rest of the social-media bloggers read
and write about? This one, spearheaded by Lee Odden. Lee and his fellow
contributors cover social media, search marketing and online PR.
If you're responsible for a site's search engine optimization (SEO), then you need a tool to track your progress. This tool will monitor your site's rankings within all the major search engines, including incoming links, and report back to you via brightly colored charts that track your performance over time. There is a complimentary basic plan under which you can monitor up to 10 URLs, which means you'll track your own site and key competitors' sites as well. You can choose to be notified by email every time a site's ranking changes, which is an excellent way to spy on the competition's SEO activities.
Jakob Nielsen has been called the "world's leading expert on usability." His site is a fantastic resource for those who want to stay up-to-date with usability trends and news. Sign up for Alertbox, and you will receive a biweekly notice when a new column is published. At the site, you will find lots of resources and news, as well as links to (fee-based) reports on usability as related to email, Web design, Intranets and more.
Whenever you need to search for a specific marketing resource or want to check out a new tool, service, software program or
utility, search our database first and save yourself some time and money. The reviews that you read right here in this email newsletter are poured into one of
58 Internet marketing categories.
Some of the categories include: Best eCommerce Blogs, Advanced Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Sales Lead Generation
and Best Google Tools and Tips for Internet Marketing.
You can browse by category or use the search tool found halfway down the homepage. Each site reviewed is handpicked by our
editorial staff and represents the best and brightest in its category.
Marketing professionals on the go will want to bookmark this site, which is a guide to no-cost wireless Internet access hot spots around the world. Hot spots can be found in independent coffeehouses, hotels, airline VIP lounges, city parks, college campuses and at selected retailers and restaurants such as Panera Bread Co. and Apple retail stores nationwide. No-cost hot spots (not surprisingly) are highly coveted but impossible to find when you really need them - like when you need to get a report to your boss or client, pronto. So, if you want to know where the complimentary hot spots are in your area, or in a place you'll be visiting, check this site out and do a little advance planning. If you're in New York City, for example, you can take advantage of complimentary access if you find yourself in the middle of the hot spot rooftop network that extends between Avenue A and Avenue B from 2nd to 10th Streets in the East Village. Who knew? In southern California, no-cost beach access is yours. Now that's what we call the Internet marketing consultant good life.
There's nothing worse than desperately seeking a quick, authoritative resource for a marketing topic you know nothing about (although your client does not know that and never will), and getting 1,450,273 results back in return. WilsonWeb, created and shepherded by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson since 1995, is an excellent place to get up to speed on any marketing or e-commerce related subject, from affiliate programs to e-commerce storefronts to email newsletter publishing. In addition to Dr. Wilson's own articles, ebooks, product reviews and so on (worth reading in their own right), you can search his Web Marketing Info Center by topic and receive back hand-picked links to articles from around the Web on your subject of interest (over 10,000 have been indexed over the past several years). The site offers both no-cost and subscription-level access ($49.95US per year), plus a very informative complimentary newsletter.
Need an alternative to Google Analytics, especially for bloggers? This desktop real-time analytics package (runs on Windows, MacOS
and Linux) could be it, and it's gratis (in beta at time of writing). It's so comprehensive we can't list everything in a single review for fear of leaving out
something important.
Here's a quick rundown: an easy-to-use interface; live visitor tracking, analytics and notifications; one-click access to all the
Web sites/blogs you manage, visitor and member tagging, deep searching of statistics; developer tools to customize your Woopra application and plenty of support
via FAQs, user forums and tech support. During beta, use is restricted to 10,000 pageviews a day, more than manageable for many of the Internet marketing consultants
who read this.