Last month we wrote about attracting qualified sales leads to your
website, this month we are going to talk about the necessary tools of
an on-line marketer. If you are really serious about your online
business I suggest your read this article in its entirety, and maybe
even twice. There are certain necessary tools that an online marketer
needs and even more if your maintaining your web pages yourself. Some
of the tools listed below are not absolutely necessary for all
businesses but should be considered.
1.) Submission Programs. The most important thing
that an on-line marketer needs is an auto-submission program. These
are programs that automatically submit your web pages to many search
engines, directories, and Free For All link sites (FFA). Here at RB
Associates we use 2 different programs. SubmitWolf by Trellian. This
is an Australian based company with a high quality product. The other
program we use is AddWeb Pro by CyberSpace Hq.
SubmitWolf 4.0 has a database of over 2400 search engines and link
directories where you can promote your URLs. Submission to over 1200
sites is fully automated, and a listing with these engines can
dramatically increase your web site traffic. SubmitWolf offers a very
impressive list of features such as Site Ranking to find out where you
rank on the search engines by specific keywords, an engine builder,
meta-tag generator, and many others. They also have a demo for you to
download. More details can be found here.
http://www.trellian.com/swolf
AddWeb Pro, also has a very impressive list of features but the one
that Stands out for us is Automatic Submission to Yahoo and Snap.com,
where SubmitWolf does not. AddWeb Pro is much faster than SubmitWolf
by far and cost a little more than SubmitWolf. Both have there
individual features that make them worth every penny you spend. AddWeb
Pro currently boast over 330,000 engines, directories and FFA sites
including server side submissions. They also have a free download.
http://www.cyberspacehq.com
I suggest that you download both trial programs and try them both,
then you decide which is best for you.
2.) Email and News Reader Programs. Any effective
marketer will need an email/news reader program. There are many on the
market and many of them are free. These include Netscape Messenger,
Outlook, Outlook Express, Endora, AOL, and many others. These programs
are very customizable and allow you to add signature files, reply to
addresses, Send to, Blind Carbon Copy, and Carbon Copy. I suggest that
you definitely create and add a signature file to the bottom of all
your out going emails explaining who you are, what you do and what
makes you better than your competition.
The news reader is also very important for an online marketer and
enables you to read and post messages to the NewsGroups. NewsGroups
are a very good way to bring quality leads to your site. There is
probably over 50,000 newsgroups in existence today on just about every
topic imaginable. Find the ones specific to your business and get
involved, let your signature file at the bottom of you messages do the
work for you. You do not want to just post blatant advertisements to
the newsgroups as most of them do not allow advertisements.
2A.) Bulk Email Programs. A word of caution here,
although Congress says that unsolicited email is not illegal, it is
still unacceptable netique. You can very well lose all creditability
for you and your business, be kicked off your ISP and possibly lose
your domain. You can find many bulk email programs by going to
http://www.download.com and
searching for bulk email.
If you insist on Bulk Email, do it the correct way and buy targeted
email list. These are list that contain email addresses of people who
have stated that they don't mind receiving unsolicited emails about
particular subjects. These list can be bought in different sizes of
anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 email addresses.
Be aware that there are many companies on the net that create these
list by automatic email retrieval programs and do not have the peoples
authority to add them to the list. These work by searching the net
collecting email addresses that are published on any and all websites.
Before you buy anylist, research the company you are buying from and
also ask them questions like: Are these email addressees of people who
opted to be on the list? Are these email addresses new, or How old are
the addresses? Are there any duplicates in the list, and are they
sorted?
Many bulk email programs now have a sort of "sendmail" program built
in so that you are not sending mail through your ISP's SMTP server,
however if you are a responsible emailer you should not need this
feature. I would also suggest that you talk to your ISP before you
start sending hundreds of emails to find out what their policies are
on bulk mailings.
General rule of thumb is if you are sending a hundred emails you will
not need a bulk email program, but if are sending thousands your had
better have one of these programs at your side, they have become very
sophisticated right down to personalized messages for each recipient.
Targeted Bulk Email can very effective for your online advertising
campaign if done responsibly.
3.) FTP Program.
FTP stands for File Transfer
Protocol, what the heck is that you ask? An FTP program is a piece of
software that allows you to move files on and off of the internet. FTP
is how you publish your files to the internet so that everyone can
access them. FTP allows you make up to the minute changes to your
pages (with an HTML editor) and then instantaneously publish your
changes to the net. The FTP program that we use here at RB Associates
is WS_FTP Pro by Ipswitch http://www.ipswitch.com although there are many on the internet as
free downloads such as CuteFTP and a host of others.
4.) Site Tracker. I highly suggest adding a Tracker
to your website. Trackers will tell you where your visitors found your
website, keywords they used, what country they're from, day of the
week, time and a many other statistics that will allow you to tweak
and change your website and really know what advertising is working
for you. There are many Free Trackers available but the one I suggest
is http://www.extreme-dm.com
5.) HTML Editor. As with many of the suggested tools
there are as many HTML editors on the market as there are marketers.
However there are certain things that that you should look for in an
editor. Make sure the one you select is a WYSIWYG editor. For those of
you who do not know what this is, it stands for "What You See Is What
You Get". This will insure that what you see in the editor is what
your visitors will see when they view your pages on the net. Another
feature that is very important is easily viewing the actual HTML
source.
HTML actually stands
for Hypertext Mark Up Language because is all just text that is
created with normal ASCII characters. Sometimes you need to access
this text to make the necessary changes that some WYSIWYG can not do
in WYSIWYG mode. Another feature that you should look for is Preview
Mode, this will allow you to actually view the changes in your default
browser before you FTP your pages to your web server. Another feature
that is a must have, is a Spell Checker, and always use it before
publishing your pages to save yourself a lot of embarrassment. Many
editors can be found at http://www.download.com by searching for HTML editor.
Just a short note: An alternative to FTP and an HTML Editor is
Microsoft FrontPage. This is a very nice Publisher, Server, Editor
package that keeps track of your hyper links, pages and a vast variety
of other things on your pages. FrontPage also includes some real nice
features like page counters, time stamps, pre-made websites, frames
pages and many others.
One draw back to
FrontPage is that your hosting ISP must have FrontPage Server
Extensions installed on your domain in order for the publisher and web
bots to work. However, if your ISP does offer FrontPage hosting I
recommend FrontPage highly as it is a very simple way for the newbie
to maintain and publish their pages.
6.) Graphic Programs. You should have a couple of
good graphics programs. One program that I would suggest for the
newbie is a shareware program called Paint Shop Pro and it can be
found at http://www.jasc.com, this
program has a lot of nice features for the buck. If your budget
allows, another excellent program we use is PhotoShop by Adobe and is
also available as time limited trial at http://www.adobe.com, they also have some other nice graphic
programs such as ImageStyler, ImageReady and some Animation software
that is out of this world. If your into 3D I suggest obtaining a copy
of FontFX http://www.erain.com
and/or Xara 3D http://www.xara.com,
both these program are relatively inexpensive for the features they
offer. Last but not least, if GIF animation is your thing try
downloading Ulead's GIF Animator http://www.ulead.com. Just a word of advice, go easy on the
animation as too much animation can spoil the whole effect your trying
to create.
Above, we have discussed only a few tools, there are many available
today but we feel that these are some of the essential tools for the
online marketer. If you have a tool that you current use and feel that
it is an essential part of your online marketing efforts, please drop
us note. Please note: All the
tools mentioned above are available as downloads either as a time
limited trial, shareware or freeware.
About the Author:
Robert Boilard is a professional developer, marketing strategist
and one of the principals' at i4Market, LLC. Since 1993 Robert has
been producing successful website and marketing campaigns for
companies from the 2 person office up to the Fortune 500's. Visit us
today! http://www.i4market.com
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The
i4Market Team
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