If you own a business, you need to have a blog. There are no ifs, ands, and buts. If you can’t take time to write useful content for your audience and communicate with them, you won’t have too much success growing your business. A blog for your business can help you connect with your prospects, get leads from the search engines, and gain unique feedback from your audience.
Blogging for your business is not easy. Business owners can’t just wing it. You need to have a strategy and a set of tools to help you offer more value to your visitors and get the most out of your blog. Even if you have come up with the perfect strategy for your business blog, you still need to execute at a high level to meet your business goals. These 5 blogging tools won’t come up with a strategy for you, but they do save you time implementing your plans:
Zemanta: a powerful service that enriches your blog posts and helps you add more relevant content to your posts. It can be used as a link building tool too.
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There was a time when people had to spend thousands of dollars to get a decent website up and running. Those days are long gone. Solutions such as WordPress and Joomla give business owners the chance to bring their businesses online without spending a fortune on a content management system. There are websites that sell premium themes and plugins for these open source solutions. Technically, one could start a killer website without having to spend over $1000. As a business owner, you always want to test every aspect of your website and add new features to it. But the first step shouldn’t be too difficult if you adopt WordPress or Joomla.
Whether you are interested in starting a forum, an e-commerce website, or just a corporate blog, there are premium themes/templates out there for you to take advantage. Here are 5 websites you can get them from:
Rocket Theme: while it does have templates and themes for all kinds of open source solutions on the market, its Joomla! and PHPBB templates stand out. Rocket Theme’s templates are very well designed and look professional (mostly).
Theme Forest: Theme Forest has all kinds of templates for you to download. These templates work for you no matter at what stage of development your business is. Some of Theme Forest’s WordPress themes are legendary.
WooThemes: one of the best WordPress theme membership clubs around. Since we are talking about GPL themes, you can use these themes on as many websites as possible. Great starting place if you are looking to start a blog. [click to continue…]
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There is no shame in spying on others in the business world. As long as business owners can use the data gathered to make decisions to improve their businesses, there is no reason they should not do it. In order to effectively spy on your competitors, a decent set of tools is required. Spending hours each day to keep track of what others are doing is not the best way to use your time. These 5 keyword spy tools can solve that problem.
iSpionage: iSpionage is a complete solution for all your PPC racking needs. It can help you protect your brand, measure your campaigns against those of your competitors’, and build more sophisticated keyword lists.
Keyword Spy: designed for all types of businesses, it lets you spy on your competitors’ paid ad campaigns and find out the keywords they are using to drive traffic to their business. It can give you a rough idea of how much your competitors are spending too. [click to continue…]
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Every online business needs a Twitter page. Businesses that are not taking time to engage their customers and prospects on Twitter are leaving money and opportunities on the table. I have seen many businesses that are clearly interested in taking advantage of what Twitter has to offer but do not approach it the right way. An individual may be able to get away with the default Twitter background and certain tweets. That’s not so much the case with businesses. Having an attractive and professional Twitter background for your Twitter presence is a must.
You don’t have to be a designer or pay a huge amount of money to get a custom Twitter page designed for your business. If it’s not your core competency, there is no reason not to outsource it. Here are 5 places you can pick up high quality premium Twitter backgrounds:
Twitr Backgrounds: the service has been used by many top Twitterers around the world. It promises your very first design in just 3 days. Businesses can always send back their designs for modifications to get the design that is perfect for them.
Twitart: they not only offer custom Twitter background, they also offer Twitter Avatar design too. Offer some of the best designs we have seen on Twitter.
Social Identities: your one stop shop for all your branding needs. It offers Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and landing page branding services. [click to continue…]
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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. [click to continue…]
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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. [click to continue…]
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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.
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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. [click to continue…]
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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. [click to continue…]
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