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.

Urtak: a unique poll tool that enables you to create multi-question surveys (yes and no questions) and share them with your followers and visitors. Your visitors can ask their own questions too.

Twtpoll: many small business owners underestimate the power of Twitter polls. Twtpoll gives you an easy way to ask your followers questions and get their feedback instantly. Those of you who have a strong presence on Twitter can get much value about of this service.

Fotoll: another interesting tool that can be used to create photo polls. Very easy to use and can be used to gather useful data about your visitors.

Some of the above tools may not have too many bells and whistles, but they do help you gather useful information from your visitors. If you are willing to listen, the above tools can help.

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.

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.

ProStores: Plenty of people have made a decent business for themselves by taking advantage of eBay stores. If you have a small business and want to manage your operations more effectively, ProStores can give you a leg up. These stores can handle lots of products too (great for small to medium size businesses).

Shopp Plugin: a very versatile and powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress. A great way to integrate a shop into WordPress without changing too many things around. Since it’s a plugin, you won’t have to install a new instance of WordPress to take advantage of it.

Starting an online store may be easy, but you will still have to spend time to manage it. The above solutions help you save time and run your store in a more effective fashion.

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.

RankSpeed: a powerful search tool that ranks results based on sentiment. It searches through Twitter and blogosphere.

Trackur: a premium social media monitoring tool that lets you track trends, setup alerts, monitor keywords, and track influence. Its dashboard makes it easy to organize and analyze data.

Twittorati: brings the blog and Twitter worlds together. Lets you keep track of top blogs and links that are going hot in the social web.

Which tools are you using to monitor top blogs and the social web?

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.

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.

Compete: needs no introduction. It can dig up all kinds of information on your website and your competitors. Works great for those of you hoping to customize your website for the search engines.

SpyFu: an underrated keyword tool that gives you all kinds of information about what your competitors are doing and what the trends are in your niche. It even compares your website against others and identifies areas you need to work on.

SEOmoz Tools: has a bunch of tools that can keep track of your rankings, help you find new areas to target, analyze your website, and find out more information about your visitors’ website.

Which tool(s) are you using?

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.

ZumoDrive: similar to Microsoft Mesh in many ways. Just download it on your Windows, Mac, Linux computer or a smart-phone to upload and manage your files. Lets you access your files wherever you are.

GLADINET: designed for those of you who want to make your move to cloud computing. It works with your existing IT infrastructure and uses the all familiar Windows Explorer interface to enable you manage your storage more effectively. Great solution for making a backup of your server too.

What online storage service are you using for your business?

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.

Fantasy Name Generator: another easy to use name picker that can create all kinds of names (people, location, …). Worth playing with if you still have not found a name after using the above tools.

Company Names: does not give you too many options other than a list of randomly generated names for your start-up. All you have to do is go through the list.

The above name pickers can help you find a more decent name for your startup. But don’t go for some fancy name. You just want a name that is short, memorable, and brandable. You also want to own your domain too. The above tools can save you some time. The rest is up to you.

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.

The Business of iPhone App Development: a very informative book that shows you how to maximize your opportunity with each app. Covers social media and PR as well.

If you are a hardcore developer or have never marketed an iPhone or iPad app in the past, the above books can give you a good head-start.

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?