7 Online Marketing Tools for the Smart Webmaster
Copyright © 2006 Kim Roach, All Rights Reserved
As an online marketer, it's hard to wade through all of the misleading information that is running rampant on the Internet. Who do you trust? Where do you go for the very best information in online marketing? Well, this article was written to answer those very questions. Below I have outlined 7 tools that can be used to increase your marketing knowledge, improve your website, increase your website's traffic, and even save time. Hope you enjoy!
1. Make Your Site Sell
The first of these tools comes from Ken Envoy, who has released his bestselling internet marketing book to the public for free. With 100,000+ copies sold, Make Your Site Sell! 2002 can now be downloaded free of charge.
This internet marketing bible has timeless information to improve your online business and increase your traffic. Because it was created in 2002, some of the information is a bit dated, but if you skip the search engine info, Envoy's book is a gem from front to back.
This is the book that got me started in internet marketing and I am forever thankful to Ken Envoy. Inside Make Your Site Sell, you'll find the three cornerstones of building a successful online business - developing a great product, building a site that sells, and attracting targeted traffic to your site.
Check it out at http://myss.sitesell.com
2. Dotcomology (http://www.dotcomology.com)
Another great resource for learning about online marketing is Dotcomology by Stone Evans. This one is a bit more up-to-date.
Inside you'll learn:
In addition, you'll also get a number of free tools for all of your webmaster needs.
Download this book for free at http://www.dotcomology.com
3. Website Translation
Do you know how you can multiply your content by 9 times by expending just a few minutes of your time? Simply translate your website into 9 other languages. There are tools out there that make the process quick and easy.
You don't have to worry about duplicate content issues either. It's all unique content that the search engines love. More content equals more traffic. 64.8% of the world is surfing the Internet in a language other than English. By translating your website into other languages, you immediately open up a stream of new markets and increased traffic from foreign search engines.
If you are a seasoned SEO, you'll be happy to hear that the competition in foreign language search engines is much less than in the English search engines.
There are a number of tools available that will enable you to translate your website.
The first one is a Wordpress plugin called Simple Thoughts. This plugin uses automatic machine translation to translate your blog into eight languages - Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
You can download this plugin at
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/angsumans-translator- plugin-pro-for-wordpress-blogs-released/
If you're looking for a higher-end solution, I would suggest you take a look at http://www.translationgold.com. Translation Gold can be used on blogs as well as traditional websites to translate your site into 9 different languages.
4. OnlyWire
Social bookmarking is a great way to increase the exposure to your articles. However, it can also be quite time consuming.
Fortunately, there is a tool that will automate much of your social bookmarking for you. It is called OnlyWire (http://www.onlywire.com) and it allows you to submit links to 17 social bookmarking sites all at one time. Simply create an account, give your bookmark a title, type in the URL, add tags, and send it off.
When using this tool, you must keep in mind that it is not meant to be abused. This tool is simply a time-saving device to help you in your social bookmarking efforts.
You must always submit quality content. In addition, you should also share and submit other sites that you feel would provide a great resource to these communities.
Social bookmarking is all about community. If you are not actively involved in the community and submitting links besides your own, then you are simply wasting your time.
However, if you spend a little bit of time to do things right, you can reap some enormous benefits.
To find out more about OnlyWire, go to http://www.onlywire.com
5. ROR Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an important tool for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search engines. Unfortunately, many of today's sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. Because of this, there have been a number of Google and Yahoo sitemap generators produced in recent years.
However, there is an alternative that presents many benefits over today's Google and Yahoo sitemaps. In addition, these new and improved sitemaps are readable by all search engines.
They are called ROR sitemaps (http://www.rorweb.com). They use XML feeds to describe your web content. These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can better understand your products, services, images, newsletters, articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.
You can create your own ROR sitemap at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
6. Web Templates
If you are a webmaster, then you know the importance of quality web design. Good web design can mean the difference between a paying customer and a confused visitor.
Fortunately, there are a few websites that are providing free, quality templates. One of these can be found at http://www.oswd.org, where they offer over 1,600 web designs.
Open Source Web Design is making the web a prettier place, one template at a time. To find a professional template for your own site, you can check out some of their favorite designs at http://www.oswd.org/designs/favorites/ .
If you are looking for a nice blog design, you can go to http://themes.wordpress.net, where you'll find over 800 themes, free to download.
7. Viral Marketing - PDF Generator
To start your own viral marketing campaign, I suggest that you look at Viral Publisher (http://www.viralpublisher.com). This free software allows you to create your own brandable PDF ebooks and optimize them for the web. Creating your own ebook and giving it away for free is a great way to increase your online exposure.
You can offer your ebook to your affiliates, website visitors, and your customers.
Because it's brandable, the user can customize the ebook with their own affiliate links, encouraging them to pass it along even further.
Start your own viral frenzy at http://www.viralpublisher.com
About The Author:
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Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews & SEO-News newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/). Kim's email is: kim @ seo-news.com This article may be freely distributed without modification and provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact. |
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