Wicked Widgets for Internet Marketing
What are the cool web marketing tools of the prosperous niche marketer? Just as any artist needs tools to do his work, so the web-based entrepreneur must have proper accouterments to get their tasks accomplished.
The IM toolbox has a lot of categories — web site tools, traffic tools, communication tools, and payment tools, among others. And one could say this tool or that one should be classified as this that or something else. But let’s not focus on the ways in which they’re classified and just zero in on what they do and why they’re good.
Wordpress — the Internet marketer’s publishing platform of preference
Clearly you’re not a true online entrepreneur unless you’ve got a web site, complete with your “dot com” domain and web host. So the first tool we’ll talk about is the blog, the fastest and cheapest way to start a website. And if you want to get a full-blown blogging web site up and running in a day, you have no choice but to know about Wordpress.
Why Wordpress? First of all, all blogs are by definition dynamic, data-driven web sites, as opposed to plain-ole HTML. So all pages are continually fresh. Search engines prefer fresh, dynamic web pages over static, stale, HTML web pages.
Wordpress software, which you can install on your hosting account fast and easy, delivers hot and toasty fresh web pages by default. So Google will love it.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since you administer the host server and the blog software, you can change the look and feel of your blog with any of thousands of color schemes and column formats, called “themes.” Your internet site can be totally unique in minutes, even though it’s completely template driven. Nice!
But the real reason to use Wordpress is that’s its so easy to beef up functionality. By adding small pieces of functional software known as scripts, plug-ins, or widgets, one can do some pretty impressive and complex things quickly and easily.
You can add advertising such as Amazon affiliate products. You can add traffic maximizing tools. You can add stats tracking to track where your users are coming from. You can add a combination of useful scripts. The list of what you can do is nearly endless.
In addition, you never have to exit the admin interface of Wordpress, because you can ferret out, find, install and activate these scripts all right there in the WP dashboard. Easy peasy!
Now let’s dig into some cool web marketing tools for Wordpress.
Sociable — the indispensable sharing tool
You need traffic, right? Add sociable to your Wordpress site and instantly all of your posts, pages and even your RSS feed will automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites. If you’ve ever read a blog post with those little icons at the bottom and wondered what that was for, well, here it is.
The net result is when someone reads something on your blog and they like it, with the click of a mouse button right there on your page they can instantaneously share your site with their social network. You can choose among any or all (not recommended!) of around 100 different social bookmarking sites! Way cool! Very much recommended!
Pretty Link — the ultimate link shrinker
If you’ve ever hovered your pointer over a link and saw something a mile long with all kinds of funky characters and wondered just where in the heck it would take you — and maybe decided against clicking — then you understand the reason behind Pretty Link.
This add-on will shrink, track and share any URL and display it on your WordPress website using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition, Pretty Link also tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser used, and more.
Pretty Link is an outstanding tool for hiding affiliate links, tracking clicks from emails or Twitter tweets, and so much more. There is a commercial version, but the free one does all you need all on its own!
All in One SEO Pack — do this first
This one has emerged as something of a standard, it’s almost hard to call it cool any longer. If you are doing online Marketing with a Wordpress blog, you get started with this one.
It automatically optimizes your titles for the search engines, generates and includes all the appropriate and correctly formatted META tags automatically, and even helps you avert the typical duplicate content often found on WordPress blogs. And that’s just for starters.
If you’re a novice, you don’t really have to much more than install it, it operates efficiently out of the box. As you get better with SEO and learn what does what and how and why, you’ll like that you can adjust just about everything.
Google Alerts — stay tuned in to the world
Regardless of your chosen niche, regardless if you’re blogging with Wordpress or not, regardless of almost everything else, if you want to stay on top of your product, your competition, your industry, your favorite fill-in-the-blank-here, you really want to know about Google Alerts. Seriously, this is how the experts or gurus develop into — and then stay — experts or gurus.
It’s easy to find the setup page. You’ll need a gmail account, which is free. Login, then add an alert on any search term you like. I suggest choosing the option to to be sent email “as it happens” to begin with, to test the volume. If you get too many alerts, scale it back down to one a day or one a week. Now, whenever anyone writes, blogs, tweets or comments on your chosen topic, you will know about it. Not recommended, because it’s a “MUST HAVE.”
That’s plenty of cool web marketing tools for this article. Look for more on my website at www.coolwebmarketingtools.com.