Well with the New Year celebrations now a blurred and distant memory, and having just celebrated my 40th birthday (where did my 30’s go?), I thought it high time I welcome this blog to 2009.
To kickstart the New Year off with a bang, here’s a list of 25 of the best free tools and resources for Internet marketers. Some you’ll be familiar with, others less so, but I’m sure you’ll discover a few gems in this list you havn’t come across before. Best of all, they are all completely free to use, though some do offer paid upgrades and one or two require an email opt-in.
None of the provided links are affiliate links, these are simply recommendations that I think you will like and find useful.
This list is in three parts with parts two and three following in the next couple of weeks. Here’s part one…
1. - ClickTale.com
This is an incredible analytics package that allows you to watch recordings of your visitors mouse and eye movements on your website to better understand their behaviour. It’s a great complement to Google analytics and the free package gives you up to 400 page views. Perfect for improving your salespages and squeeze pages.
2. - JingProject.com
A very cool screen capture tool from Techsmith, the makers of Camtasia Studio. It has social networking tools built-in and you can add captions and effects to spice up your presentations too. Fantastic for demonstrating software or sharing information.
3. - Google Website Optimiser
GWO allows you to split test different versions of your sales pages to see which version converts the best. Do simple A/B split tests or multivariate testing (i.e. multiple headlines, fonts, colours, order links etc). Very easy to setup and Google provide excellent clear stats. You should have split testing software installed on all your websites. After all, if you’re not testing your sales pages, how do you know if they are performing well or not?
4. - The Twitter Handbook
An excellent and comprehensive guide to all things Twitter. Deborah Micek and Warren Whitlock explain what Twitter is, how to post Tweets and why you should consider using it in the first place. Includes links to several nifty Twitter Tools to make your Twittering easier. Well worth checking out. Sign-Up Required to download.
5. - Open Office
If you write ebooks or viral reports, this is an essential tool. Open Office is a 100% free office application suite from Sun Microsystems that rivals MS’s Office for functionality. Use the Writer word processor to write reports and then export them to pdf format using the built-in pdf creator. Brilliant.
6. - CSS-Discuss
The members of this mailing list have helped me out many a time over the years. If you code your own web pages and can’t work out why your website’s navigation bar looks fine in Firefox but misaligned in IE, or what doctype you should be using, this is well worth joining. Send an email to the list members with your question and you’ll usually receive an answer within a few hours.
7. - Google Docs
There’s all manner of things you can do with Google Docs, an online office suite you can access from anywhere with a web connection. Write reports, create financial reports, even survey customers for product creation ideas.
I find it particularly useful for outsourcing tasks, as you can see the progress your contractor is making in real time. You can even track how much traffic your published documents are getting by tracking them using Google Analytics. Google Account required.
8. - SpyFu
Spyfu is a fantastic online service that allows you to check out your website’s competition in Google Adwords® and organic listings. Guage the potential profitability of your niche by seeing how many competitors you face, and how much it costs to advertise. Free basic service with paid upgrades if you need bigger, more advanced searches.
Well that’s it for part 1. Let me know what you think about any of the above resources by posting a comment below. I’d love to hear your opinions!
Make sure you don’t miss part 2 of this blog post by signing up to my Email alerts mailing list below or at the top of this page
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I had heard of most of them except Clicktale (sounds an awesome tool) and CSS Discuss.. but there again i don’t do any hand coding so that’s unsurprising.
I have twitter but have very little idea of how to use in a business sense.
Finally Jing.. I’ve used it in just a sharing pictures with friends type of situation but I hadn’t realized it had a social site application associated with it.. I’ll look more closely at that part of it.
Looking forward to part 2
John