What You Need for Online Sales
What are the cool web marketing tools of the prosperous online marketer? Just as any tradesman needs tools to do his work, so the web-based businessman must have proper accouterments to get their work executed.
The IM toolbox has a number of categories — web site tools, traffic tools, communication tools, and payment tools, among others. And you could say this tool or that one should be grouped as this that or something else. But let’s forget about how or why they’re classified and just focus on what they do and why they’re useful.
WordPress — the web-based marketer’s publishing platform of preference
Unquestionably you’re not a true online entrepreneur unless you’ve got your own web site, complete with your own “dot com” domain and web server. So the first tool to be aware of is the blog, the quickest and easiest way to set up a web site. And if you want to get a full fledged blogging web site up and running with as few clicks as possible, you ought to know about WordPress.
Why WordPress? First of all, all blogs are by definition dynamic, data-driven web sites, as opposed to static HTML. So the web pages are continually fresh. Search engines prefer fresh, dynamic web pages over static, stale, HTML web pages.
WordPress software, which you can set up on your hosting account easily, delivers hot and toasty fresh web pages by default. So search engines will love it.
But that’s just for starters. Since you control the host site and the software, you can modify the look and feel of your blog with any of thousands of color schemes and column formats, called “themes.” Your web site can be different in minutes, even though it’s entirely template driven. Pretty cool, right?
But the real reason to use WordPress is that’s its so easy to beef up functionality. By installing small pieces of value-adding software known as scripts, plug-ins, or widgets, the site owner can do some pretty exciting and complex things quickly and easily.
You can add advertising such as eBay auctions. You can add search engine optimization tools. You can add stats tracking to track where your users are coming from. You can add a combination of helpful scripts. The list of what you can do is practically endless.
And you never have to get out of the admin interface of WordPress, because you can investigate, find, install and activate these scripts all right there in the WP dashboard. Snap!
Let’s look at some cool web marketing tools for WordPress.
Sociable — the indispensable sharing tool
You need users, right? Add sociable to your WordPress site and instantly all of your posts, pages and even your RSS feed will automatically add links to a bunch of social bookmarking sites. If you’ve ever found a blog post with those little icons at the bottom and wondered what they were for, well, now you know.
The end result is when anyone reads a post on your blog and they like it, with the click of their mouse button right there on your page they can immediately share your site with their social network. You can select from any or all (not recommended!) of close to a hundred different social bookmarking sites! Way cool! Recommended.
Pretty Link — the ultimate link shrinker
If you’ve ever hovered your cursor over a link and saw something a mile long with all kinds of weird stuff and wondered just where in the heck it would take you — and maybe decided against clicking — then you understand the reason for Pretty Link.
This script will shrink, track and share any URL and show it on your WordPress website using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shortening service)! Plus Pretty Link also tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser used, and more.
Pretty Link is a fantastic tool for cleaning up those ugly affiliate links, tracking clicks from emails or Twitter tweets, and a lot more. There is a commercial version, but the free one does all you need all on its own!
All in One SEO Pack — the first essential tool
This one has emerged as something of a standard, it’s almost hard to call it cool in this day and age. If you are doing web-based Marketing with a WordPress blog, you gotta have this one.
It automagically optimizes your page titles for the search engines, inserts all the appropriate and correctly formatted META tags on the fly, and even helps you prevent the typical duplicate content often seen on WordPress blogs. And that’s just the beginning.
If you’re a newbie, you don’t really have to any more than install it, it works out of the box. As you get better with SEO and learn how it works, you’ll like that you can fine-tune almost everything.
Google Alerts — stay tuned in to the world
Regardless of your area of specialty, regardless if you’re publishing with WordPress or not, regardless of just about everything else, if you want to stay on top of your product, your competition, your industry, your favorite fill-in-the-blank-here, you really want to know about Google Alerts. All kidding aside, this is how the experts or gurus emerge as — and then stay — experts or gurus.
It’s easy to find the setup page. You’ll need a Google account, which is free. Login, then set up an alert on any search term you like. I suggest choosing the option to to be sent email “as it happens” at the start, until you know the volume. If you get too much email, scale it back down to one a day or one a week. Now, whenever someone writes, blogs, tweets or comments on your alert text, you will hear about it. You must use this tool, or you will lose this game!
That’s ample cool web marketing tools for this go round. Look for more on my site at www.coolwebmarketingtools.com.