Marketing to Marketers Online Resource Center 

This site is so respected by the HR industry that, in this editor's experience, information from Salary.com is often used as the baseline for compensation negotiations. No-cost tools include the Salary Wizard, which offers the ability to find (eerily accurate) salary guides based upon your title and location, or based upon industry.

For example, the average base salary for a marketing director (across the US) ranged (at the time of writing) from $92,581 to $205,057. If you get personal with said industry averages by inputting your zip code, the Salary Wizard will also tell you the average bonus, amount of vacation time, etc. enjoyed by your colleagues within your geographic radius. Should you want to do an in depth analysis of your compensation potential, the extensive Personal Salary Report will run you $79.95.

Of course, hiring managers for both small and enterprise businesses can also benefit from the site to assess how much they need to pay candidates in order to be competitive in the marketplace.

Not surprisingly, this company watches and reports on trends across the globe, utilizing a cadre of 8000 trend spotters. Each month they roll out a very colorful and informative trend report in which they define and illustrate a few new must-know trends in marketing, retailing, etc. They bring together disparate examples from around the world to illustrate said trends. By the end of each reading, we often find ourselves wondering how we can quickly adopt these trends into our own respective marketplaces.

At the time of writing, for example, one trend was "(Still) Made Here", which is the "comeback of things local, all things with a sense of place". Some examples supporting this trend are:

• Dole's Dole Organic program, in which they put a three-digit Farm Code on each organic item (yes, down to the individual banana), thereby enabling consumers to type in the Farm Code at the Dole website and view photos of the farm and workers who brought them their product;
• Tesco's plan to use carbon footprint labels on every product that they sell so consumers can choose which companies to purchase from;
• A new hen kit (called "Omlet") for surburban gardeners, who can use it to neatly and efficiently raise a hen for home-laid eggs;
• The retail industry's new efforts to support local labor, and so much more. A must-read for those who like to learn new things.

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 so-called "relevant" search results back in return. Web Marketing Today (by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson) is an excellent place to get up to speed on most any marketing- or ecommerce-related subject, from affiliate programs to link exchanges to shopping carts to email newsletter publishing.

In addition to Dr. Wilson's own articles, ebooks, product reviews and so on, there is a Web Marketing Info Center organized by topic. It includes hand-picked links to articles from around the Web (10,000 and counting articles, btw). The site offers both no-cost and subscription-level access (which runs $49.95/year), plus a very informative complimentary newsletter.

One of the features of the paid subscription is an email that you receive once a month. It really covers the waterfront of Internet marketing and includes links to articles that have appeared all over the Web over the past 30 days. The articles are broken down into categories, such as automotive, SEO, PPC... you name it. As a matter of fact, Larry Chase (the publisher of Web Digest For Marketers) can personally attest to taking at least two hours out of every month to ferret through all of those articles, just to decide which ones warrant further consumption.