Thousands of free online marketíng tools clamor for attention, with new ones popping up every week it seems. You know you should be doing more to reach out to your customers, but just researching which tools to use can be a vast time investment, even if they don't require a big financial outlay. Below is a compiled líst of the most popular (or most useful) low-cost or free small business marketing tools. You might be using some of them already, but you're sure to find a couple that will round out your small business marketing toolkit nicely. And, if you're just starting out marketing a new busíness online, this líst may help point you in the right direction. Directories The Open Directory - A staple of the SEO crowd, this directory can be tricky to get into but well worth it for the link juice it passes along to...

Continue reading 39 Tools for Marketing Your Small Business Online

Linking is the mechanism that connects all the pages on the Internet. You've got links throughout your web site to let people navigate their way around. You may have links going out to other web sites that you think will be useful for your visitors. And hopefully you have links coming into your web site from independent sources. All types of links can impact your search engine optimization results, helping determine where your web site shows up online. Though the hardest to control, inbound links pointing to your site can make the biggest impact. At its most basic, the concept is that if several high-quality sites are linking to your web site, then Google and other search engines figure your site must be a popular, valuable...

Continue reading Who's Linking to Your Web Site and What Does That Say About You to Google?

You've tested your website, you've visited it a few times, you've gotten some feedback on it, and you have a bit of data about your visitors. You might want to make some changes. Here are the top ten issues in website design and usability. Think about these things in relation to your website and consider what you might want to do to perfect your site. 1. The First Glance In general, people look at the top left corner of your website first. You should have your essential information there: what your offerings are and how your potential customers can get it. Some visitors are at your site only...

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A Human Face Can Increase Conversions "People prefer doing business with people, and want to know that if they have a problem, there's someone there to help. So consider adding a message from the CEO, a photo of your staff or offices, and mission statement. It's proven to increase conversions..."

Continue reading Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for February 2010

We all make New Year's resolutions - some are personal, some are business or professional in nature. Even if we don't actually make New Year's resolutions, we engage in formal and informal "planning" as we look ahead to the new year. If you operate a website, you're probably aware that your website operations are now highly regulated. And the pace of legal regulations continues to accelerate. Which means that you face an increasing risk of legal liability. So, it's a good idea to give your website a legal check-up and to update your site before it's too late...

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Some 70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Facebook has more than 350 million users. By some estimates, Twitter will have 26 million users by the end of this year. And YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet, bar none. Social media cannot be ignored. It is just too pervasive, too ubiquitous. But from an ecommerce marketing standpoint, social media is often too little understood. The need for a clear explanation about what social media is and how to include it in your marketing was made clear to me last week, when Practical Ecommerce and HubSpot hosted a social media webinar. The event attracted dozens of questions before the broadcast and hundreds of...

Continue reading The PEC Review: The Social Media Marketing Book