Internet Marketing Resources
Free stuff, and not-free stuff. Things you’ve heard of, and insider secrets. This is a collection companies and service providers that will help any internet marketer to get to the next level, and to get their quickly. This is a good page to bookmark.
I would love to have your feedback on any of these, and ones that didn’t make the list.
FREE TOOLS
List of Blog and RSS Search Engines, Directories, and Ping Services. You need to submit your blog or RSS feed to the blog and RSS directories to get indexed by the search engines. Here’s the full list of where to submit your blog or RSS feed.
Competitive Toolbar from Compete. Read my post on this fantastic tool here. Download it for free at http://tools.compete.com/. I recommend using FireFox with this tool.
Google Insights for Search http://www.google.com/insights/search/# This tool tells you about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You’ll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, geographical trends, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.
Google Trends Read my review here. Google Trends lets you see who is interested in any given  topic, on a local or worldwide basis. You can enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic regions people have searched for them the most. Free.
Free Marketing Magazines and White Papers. Free is good. I’ve assembled a list of resources here, including Website Magazine, Direct Magazine, and Internet Retailer.
DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION
- World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com
There are a lot of places to register a domain – its a real commodity. But GoDaddy.com is the world’s #1 domain name registrar, and they make it very painless for you to register a domain, get hosting, open a store within hours, and more. I have been very pleased with the customer support as well.  Use this link and get my buy rates which are lower than GoDaddy’s.
WEB HOSTING
- Unlike domain name registration, hosting is not quite a commodity. Assume that certain things are equal – price, security, reliability. The things that matter which you should look for here include: support levels, bandwidth, storage, fees for exeeding plan limits, and ability to have one-click installs for popular software like WordPress, Ruby on Rails, and so on. I have tried several hosts (many of which were highly recommended by engineers who should know better…you know who you are….) and these are the two best web hosting companies I have found and continue to work with:
- GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans
GoDaddy.com is the world’s #1 domain name registrar, and they make it very painless for you to register a domain, get hosting, open a store within hours, and more. I have been very pleased with the customer support as well. Read my review on the GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart.
- Host Gator Web Hosting
— You have to love guys who have a big purple gator as their mascot. I would prefer that they be located in Gainesville, Florida (home of the real Gators) instead of Texas, but that really doesn’t matter. Host Gator provides Shared, Reseller and Dedicated web hosting solutions designed for both beginners and professionals. All shared plans include a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 support and a 45-day money back guarantee starting at $4.95 a month. Host Gator Web Site
EMAIL MARKETING
- eMail marketing comes in a couple of flavors – I’ll give you my best options for small business and for enterprise level eMail Service Providers (ESP’s):
- Small Business eMail Marketing – Aweber There are a lot of good choices for small businesses, including Constant Contact and Vertical Response. The email marketing that is built into GoDaddy’s business plans is pretty good too – a bit clunky but easy to use and integrated with the ecommerce platforms. But Aweber is the gold standard for small to medium online marketers with great capture tools, high reliability, fantastic autoresponder tools, and super simple to implement. Customer service is outstanding. You can’t beat it for $19.95 a month.
- Enterprise Level eMail Marketing – Exact Target Again there are many good choices here for email marketing at an enterprise level. Here you need to be more choosey looking at support, professional services, pricing, deliver-ability, reporting and analytics. In my experience, Exact Target excels on all levels, and does not nickle and dime you for support and professional services.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
- Wordtracker. Use this free version of the Wordtracker keyword tool. Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. You can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.
