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.

BetaEasy: BetaEasy is designed for app developers, website owners, and product makers. It lets your visitors suggest their ideas, report bugs, and comment on your product.

UserVoice: a premium feedback system that adds a feedback discussion forum to your website and lets your visitors discuss ideas and communicate with you more effectively. It does have a free plan but you’ll have to pay if you want to customize its look and feel.

Gathering feedback from your visitors is not something you can do but rather something you should do. If you are not willing to listen to what your visitors have to say, your business is not going to go where you want it to go.

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.

iStockAudio: the audio version of iStockPhoto. Has plenty of royalty-free audio tracks for you to take advantage of (for your podcast, videos, and beyond).

Video Hive: great resource for those of you working on a video project. This site has stock content, menus, motions graphics, and other items for you to purchase and take advantage of.

Even if your business is small, you don’t have to have a highly sophisticated team of graphic artists and photographers to add high quality video and photo items to your website. There are plenty of websites you can pick up assets for your website. The above sites should give you some ideas.

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.

Elgg: a free social networking package that you can use to develop a social networking website exclusive to your business. Pretty powerful.

Pligg: a great open source CMS for creating Digg-like websites. A great software for managing user generated content.

SMF: SMF is not as popular as PHPBB or vBulletin, but it’s one of the most secure forum software solutions around. Every online business needs a support forum. SMF is SEO friendly and easy to implement.

It is true that the items on this list are all free solutions. But that does not the reason to go with them. They are pretty powerful solutions and have a solid community behind them. That always helps when you are in the process of choosing a reliable CMS for your business.

What’s your favorite open source CMS?

You can’t become a Facebook guru in one night. But there are simple steps you can take to take your business to the next level. If you are new to Facebook and have no idea how to get more out of it to take your business to the next level, here are 10 easy-to-implement tactics that should give you ideas:

1. Make a Professional-looking Facebook page: have you seen those Facebook pages that are all over the place. There is nothing wrong with that if it’s your personal Facebook profile that is messy and full of useless content. But your business page should focus on things that matter to your audience. The looks matter too. Your Facebook page could leave a long lasting impression on your prospects, so be careful what you show on your pages. It also never hurts to invest some money to put up a more professional looking Facebook page.
2. Add Interactive Applications: setting up a Facebook page should not be the only step you take to push your business. Don’t ignore some of those apps that can make it all more interactive for your Facebook fans. No silly apps though.
3. Throw Facebook Giveaways: Facebook giveaways can be very effective, if done right. We are not talking about those fake Facebook giveaways. Having exclusive giveaways for your Facebook fans can help spread the word about your business and increase your friends on the site. Don’t forget to read the terms and conditions of Facebook on contests.
4. Optimize Facebook Page for SEO: The text on your Facebook page does matter to search engines. So does the custom URL that you choose for your page. Some FB apps can help you even do more in this regard. It never hurts to get visitors from search engines for free.
5. Measure and track Interactions: this is a no brainer. Why would you want to set up a Facebook page and ignore things that happen on it. Treat it as your own web page. If you go through your website’s statistics on a consistent basis, you should do the same with your Facebook page (using tools such as dlvr.it never hurts).
6. Add a Like Button To Your Website: if you have lots of useful content/pages on your website, you should take time to add Facebook Like Button to those pages. It does help your pages get more traffic and go viral on Facebook.
7. Add a Like Box To Your Web Page: one of the best ways to increase the number of your friends on Facebook is by giving your visitors a simple tool to connect with you and your business. Facebook Like Boxes are a good place to start if you want to use your website’s traffic to enhance your Facebook presence.
8. Promote Business with Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads may not be as popular as Google Adwords, but it could be much cheaper and can give you a good bang for your buck (if you play your cards right). There is no reason not to advertise on Facebook, especially when it can be fairly cheap. Testing never hurts either.
9. Enable Facebook Comments: if you own a blog, you want to take time to integrate Facebook comments into your blog. Your visitors do not want to remember too many things when commenting on blogs. Everybody remembers their Facebook information. Businesses can increase their Facebook traffic by taking advantage of this functionality.
10. Link Other Social Profiles: there is a good chance Facebook is not the only place you are focused on as a small business owner. Twitter, Posterous, and other services have their benefits as well. It never hurts to link all your social media profiles and give your friends ways to follow you on those sites.

There you have it. These tips are not ground-breaking or too complicated, but they can make a big difference. Facebook is still underrated among small business owners. So take advantage your business has fallen too far behind.

The iPad is a very powerful device for business. While many may use the device as an entertainment tool, business owners can certainly use it to manage aspects of their business on the go and stay on track at all times. If you own an online business, you are familiar with all the things that you will have to address everyday to make your business work. So you certainly don’t want to waste your time on the road. Thankfully, there are lots of iPad apps that you can take advantage of to run your business like a pro. In fact, here are 5 business apps for iPad that are a must have for entrepreneurs:

Analytics HD: let’s face it. You can’t get enough of Google Analytics and neither can I. Analytics HD lets you watch your data wherever you are. It’s never too late to make changes and start optimizing your websites.

TweetDeck: you can’t afford not to be on Twitter if you are a business owner. It’s really as simple as that. With TweetDeck, you can manage your followers and Twitter accounts more effectively.

Things for iPad: your iPad wouldn’t be as much handy without a decent to-do list application. Things for iPad helps you manage your projects and stay on the top of your daily tasks.

Wordpress for iPad: if you own an online business, there is a good chance you have a companion blog for it as well. Maybe you are just a professional blogger. Whatever the case, Wordpress for iPad is a must have.

Air Sharing HD: Air Sharing is a pretty handy tool if you want to use your iPad to carry your files and even print them from your iPad. Makes sharing files easy.

There you have it. 5 essential apps for anyone who own an online business. There are of course other apps you can take advantage of but don’t expect these apps to do your work for you. They don’t do magic.

Forum software: the no-brainer way to do it is by picking up a copy of vBulletin or PHPBB and install it on your domain. Some of these solutions require you to pay for your license. There are plenty of open source forum scripts available on the market as well. So you have some options here. If you happen to own a Wordpress blog, you can use plugins to connect your forum to your blog. So you can bring it all together and build a more solid community with your forum.

Wordpress: this is my favorite way to do it. If you do not expect your forum to grow too large, you can always rely on Wordpress to host your forum. You get all the plugins and benefits of using Wordpress. Besides, it will be much easier to customize your website when you are familiar with the platform. It does help that Wordpress is so easy to use.

BBpess: if you have used Wordpress in the past, you have probably heard of BBpress as well. It’s a forum software by the same people behind Wordpress. The platform may not be identical to Wordpress, but it does have a familiar look and feel. You can pick up a decent BBpress theme and get started with your forum on your domain fast.

BuddyPress: another innovative solution by the folks behind Wordpress that lets you start your own social network without having to spend too much money. It goes beyond your everyday forum software. This piece of software can be used to create highly sophisticated user-driven websites fast.

Adding a forum to your website is only the start. Managing it is much more complicated and challenging. At least, you can get a head start with your forum by using the above scripts.

Your Website Spokesperson is one of those services that lets you add a male or female talking figure to your website fast. The website enables you to choose from various models that are available through the service. You can choose the size, look and feel, and your model’s wardrobe. You can even choose to add your own script or choose the professional quality service offered by YWS.

You also get to choose whether you want to brand your talking figure and host it yourself on your blog. The length of your script is your choice as well. The longer your script, the more your cost will be.

Should you get a talking figure for your website? It really depends on the type of your business and your conversion rates. You never know how your audience are going to handle you adding a talking figure to your website. Talking figures could work in certain situations, and services such as YWS do make it easy to come up with the figure that fits your website the best. But don’t forget to do your research before adding your own spokesperson to your website.

As a business owner, you want to make sure you pick the right outsourcing partner to manage your e-mail lists. That means you want to choose a service that doesn’t life difficult with its interface and provides you with appropriate support. Of course, you can always manage your newsletter yourself if you have the resources. But problems will arise from time to time, so you want to be ready for it.

If you are looking for a newsletter solution for your business, here are 4 business e-mail marketing services that can come in handy:

Aweber: we may be a bit biased here, but Aweber has been a service that we have been using for years, and it continues to be a great partner for our business. The interface is very easy to get used to and the service gives us a lot of control over our forms and how we manage our lists. Managing subscribers couldn’t be easier. Besides, the service is very affordable too. If you are going to have a lot of lists, you are going to enjoy working with Aweber.

iContact: very similar in features to Constant Contact. I do prefer the interface to Constant Contact. The service comes with some innovative features to help you better target your audience and also stay away from those spam filters. You can use it to create newsletters from your existing website. If you are a beginner and don’t want to spend time thinking about how to manage your e-mail newsletter program, iContact is another good option.

PHP List: before moving to Constant Contact, this was a script that we used to manage our list. It’s not for everyone as it requires you to have your very own team. But you can easily create sophisticated email newsletter programs with this script without having to rely on the above services. It’s free too. If you have your own IT and marketing team, PHP List is a nice script to try.

What’s your favorite business newsletter service?

With that in mind, here are 4 exciting social/business card services that can help you better promote your business and take it to the next level:

Card.ly: an exciting social networking card service that lets you create a card based on your online profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and … It’s free and very flexible as well.

Retagger: if you happen to be a power player in the social media, you are going to love this social card generator. Lets you integrate most of your online presences and share them with the world through your e-card.

BusinessCard2: a simple to use service that lets you create your business e-card online. You can share your external links and even embed the card as well.

CardBoard: it’s a business card directory that lets you post your business card online under the right category. Just in case you want to get your business card out there.

What’s your favorite online e-card service?

To prepare your business taxes, you are going to need a decent accounting software as well as a good office suite. It would also help if you have a legal reference to go with those. With that in mind, here are 5 software kits that let you prepare your business tax more effectively:

TurboTax Business Federal + efile 2009: designed to help you prepare your business tax fast. It helps you maximize your business deductions too. It’s not perfect so don’t get too aggressive with your write offs.

Quicken Home & Business 2010: Quicken has helped me a lot with my business. It helps me keep track of incoming and outgoing funds. Of course, it’d be nice if we could get the updates for free once in a while. But the software is constantly improving, so you’ll have all you need to keep track of your business transactions.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 Business Edition: you can’t run a business without an Office Suite. You can always use Google Docs, which is a free service. I am personally not ready to make the jump. That’s why I still use Microsoft Office.

Home & Business Lawyer 2010: it doesn’t replace a lawyer or an accountant. But it gives you an easy way to find out answers to some of your legal questions without having to go to you lawyer. Quicken Legal Business Pro 2009 is a good alternative here.

Business Plan Pro Premier: my favorite piece of software on the market. It works with Quickbooks and lets me keep track of my business’ progress. May not be a tax software per se, but it fits in the big picture if you happen to be using Quickbooks.

Your turn: which one of the above software kits are you using in your business?