The Internet has made it so easy to listen to what our prospects have to say and develop goods and services based on their needs. Every small business owner needs to listen and ask people for feedback and suggestions. You never know what ideas you can come up with by knowing what your audience thinks about a specific topic. Creating online polls and surveys could not be any easier these days. There are plenty of services that let you create your own polls online and start collecting data. Here are 5 tools to get you started:

PollDaddy: PollDaddy needs no introduction. It’s one of the most versatile online poll solutions around. You can easily integrate your polls into your website with this service. PollDaddy can be used to survey your customers, employees, partners, and so on.

Flisti: an easy to use tool that lets you create polls without any sign up and share them with your Facebook and Twitter friends. Great for setting up quick polls. Continue reading 5 Awesome Online Poll Tools For Business

Those of you who own an online business have probably gotten positive or negative e-mails about your service from your visitors from time to time. While some visitors are passionate enough to write to webmasters and explain their concerns, not everyone is going to take time to do that. That’s why every website owner should put the effort to add a feedback box to his/her website. Asking for your visitors’ feedback is the best way to find out about your business’ strengths and weaknesses and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of ways one can add a feedback box to a website. Gathering data is only a part of the process. Working with a service that lets you analyze your data is even better. The good new is you don’t have to a programming guru to add such functionality to your website. These 5 feedback tools let you do that fast:

Kampyle: a feedback analytics package that lets you add a compact feedback button to your website and start gathering some good data from your visitors. The service lets you respond to customers’ concerns, which is nice.

CrowdSound: a social feedback tool that is very attractive and very easy to install. Gives you the chance to get some instant feedback from your visitors.

Monyta: it’s a website friendly tab that sits on the top of your website at all times and gives your visitors the call to action they need to take the next step and give you their feedback. Continue reading 5 Tools to Gather Feedback From Your Visitors

Many small businesses assume that starting an online store requires a lot of funds and resources. If you plan to run an Amazon.com size store, then you will need to have a strong team and lots of resources. But how many small businesses will want to run such a store? Starting a decent-size online shop couldn’t be any easier these days. There are plenty of tools and services that let you get the job done in an affordable fashion. In fact, here are 5 ways to start your own online shop without breaking the bank:

highwire: a powerful e-commerce platform that provides you with the tools to manage your orders and customers and manage all aspects of your business easily. Gives you control over HTML and CSS too.

Shopify: designed to help you go online with your store as quickly as possible. It has plenty of themes for you to choose from to customize your online shop. It offers SSL, custom domains, and business tools (e.g. discounts, promotional tools, …).

WordPress E-commerce themes: WordPress is a great platform to start an e-commerce website with. It has a ton of plugins that can enhance your store too. Continue reading 5 Ways To Start an Online Shop Fast

Many social media beginners use Twitter, Facebook, and other top sites to only share information with their prospects and customers. Businesses that are doing just that are missing the boat completely. While businesses should take time to interact with their customers, they should also listen to what others have to say about their brand. Knowing what people are complaining about or would like to see your business offer can help you improve your product and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of social media listening tools around. Here are 5 great tools to get you started:

Addict-o-matic: gives you a quick way to search through blogs and the social media sites to find what you are looking for. It covers Twitter, Bing, YouTube, and …

Trackle: lets you keep an eye out on your competitors and your own brand. Sends you e-mail as you get mentions around the web.

Continue reading 5 Handy Social Media Listening Tools for Business

Owning a content portal is not a bad way to start an online business, especially if you are into the publishing business. If you are just starting, getting videos, images, audio, and animation files to make your portal more dynamic could be a bit challenging. That’s why royalty-free content are so popular. If you want to enhance your podcast, add animation to your portal, or want to mix videos, royalty free websites can help. It does help that you won’t have to pay a fortune to get your hands on some of these items.

These 5 exciting websites can help you find the royalty free music, video, and audio files that fit your business needs:

Graphic River: as the name suggests, Graphic River is a marketplace for stock graphics. Includes textures, vectors, icons, and templates.

Active Den: has some killer Flash content for you to take advantage of on your website. Includes music players, galleries, games, and much more.

Stock Exchange: has plenty of free and royalty free images for you to choose from. A great place for bloggers and publishers to look for high quality images. Continue reading 5 Ways to Find Royalty-Free Content For Your Portal

One of the best ways to keep your business going in the right directions is by learning from your competitors. Every business makes mistakes. While you do not want to pick up those, there is no reason you should not look at the positive strategies adopted by your competitors to see if there is anything you can adopt in your own business. Those of you who own an online business can benefit a lot from keywords spy tools. They can tell you what keywords your competitors are using and how they are spending their money online. This information can help you improve your advertising efforts and find new areas to focus on.

If you are ready to take your competitive intelligence game to the next level, these 5 keyword CI tools are must try:

iSpionage: a complete competitive intelligence tool that shows you information on any website’s PPC and SEO efforts. It helps you go through your competitors’ ads and build your own campaigns more effectively.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keywords spy tools around. It enables you to keep track of the most profitable keywords, find new markets to tackle, and expand your keyword list significantly. Continue reading 5 Best Keyword Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs

Those who run an online business are always in need of storing things. You certainly want to backup your sensitive information as hardware crashes happen all the time. Besides, if you want to share documents and information with your team, you are going to need a place to store your files. Online storage is not always cheap, but it is very necessary for anyone serious about running their business.

There are so many online storage solutions available for businesses. While you can spend thousands of dollars for your file storage needs, these online storage solutions can help you get the job done in a more affordable fashion:

DropBox: DropBox is a pretty straight forward solution to store your non-sensitive files and documents online. The system is secure enough and aims to protect your privacy but don’t go overboard with it. The pro plans are pretty affordable too.

iDrive Sync: a very affordable service that lets you share your documents across multiple computers by sharing them online. 2 GB of free storage is provided to get you started.

Backupify: lets you backup and restore your sensitive information in a convenient fashion. It can backup WordPress, Blogger, and all kinds of other services. Continue reading 5 Helpful Online Storage Services for E-Business

How does one pick a name for a startup? It’s easier said than done. Depending on what you plan for your startup, you want to go with a name that is catchy, simple, and brandable. Your domain needs to be available as well. After all, what good is it to you to pick a name without owning .com and other extensions of that name. Not everybody is great at picking names, which is why startup name generators help. They can give you ideas you may not be able to come up on your own. Besides, by watching how they work, you may be able to come up with more name ideas for your startup.

If you are looking to pick a name for your startup, these 5 simple tools can help:

Web 2.0 Name Generator: one of my favorite tools. It can come up with some crazy good names, but you have to be patient with it. You can use their dotomator service to get domain name suggestions.

Behind The Name: a cool random name generator for your startup that can create English and foreign startup names with a click of a button.

NOEMATA Name Generator: creates one word names for your startup in a flash. It also gives you access to a list of random names that you may want to take advantage of.

Continue reading 5 Killer Tools To Pick a Name For Your Startup

The field of iPhone development is growing fast. Add iPad to the mix and entrepreneurs have even more reasons to get involved in this field. As long as one has a unique idea, there is no reason not to start an iPhone business app these days. Of course, starting an iPhone business is more than just writing code and mastering the iPhone SDK. App entrepreneurs need to promote their apps and do all kinds of other things to take their business on the ground. So a little marketing training never hurts, especially for hardcore app developers.

There are plenty of books that try to teach you how to use iPhone or write code for it. But these 3 books teach you how to market your app once you have developed it:

iPhone and iPad Apps Marketing: it teaches you how to develop the right strategy for your app, how to market it, and even promote it using social media.

Starting an iPhone Application Business For Dummies: if you are a beginner, this book is going to give you the information you need to start with your first app. Don’t let the name fool you. It has plenty of information on pricing, marketing, and ways to generate buzz for an app.

Continue reading 3 Essential iPhone App Marketing Books for Developers

As an online business owner, you want to spend most of your time developing business assets and less time worrying about the platform your business is operated on. Once you have a solid, reliable content management system in place, you can spend more of your time on activities that matter the most to your business. A lot of business owners decide to go with closed source content management systems. While there is nothing wrong with that approach, you may be able to get more value out of open source solutions (and the support of the community as well).

There are plenty of open CMS solutions around these days. You can pull off almost anything with some of these solutions. Having said that, here are 5 open source CMS solutions that stand out:

WordPress: it needs no introduction. This site and millions of other sites on the Internet take advantage of WordPress. The new edition of WordPress will support multi-sites, so businesses can create many websites using one install. Can do almost anything with this CMS.

Joomla: Joomla is one of my favorite open source content management solutions for business. It’s capable of handling more sophisticated portals and has a ton of plugins and templates too. Continue reading 5 Powerful Open Source CMS for Business