Monthly Archives: June 2013

If you run a website, you know how important it is to get the most out of it. To improve your skills as a webmaster, check out any of the following 33 resources:   Website Reference Sites Mashable – Mashable is a site that focuses on the online world. With segments for business, technology and social media, it is one of the web’s leading sources of information on online marketing and a great way to stay up-to-date. Social Fresh – Social Fresh is a leader is social media marketing and technology, making it a great resource for best practices in online marketing. Copyblogger – Copyblogger focuses on content, from landing pages to newsletters to sales pieces. If you’re looking for tips on writing copy that will help you soft sell your products and services, check out this great resource.   Website Optimization Tools XML Sitemap – An XML sitemap (like the one created by this plugin) helps search engines to more easily read your site, which is crucial for ranking high in search engine results. ClickTale – Clicktale is designed to track user behavior on your site and produces professional-looking reports on visitor movement throughout your pages. CrazyEgg – This tool provides website analytics through heat mapping and scroll reports. It also offers a feature called Confetti, which allows you to segment all the clicks on your site by referral source. ClickDensity – This analytics tool is free, self-hosted and simple to use. ClickDensity provides heat mapping that you can manage completely behind the scenes, free of charge. Zentester – Zentester offers A/B testing, scroll and heat mapping, and an analytics feature as well. It’s a simple tool that helps small business owners create great landing pages for their websites. Webpagetest – Webpagetest allows you to test your web page’s load time on multiple browsers in real time, giving you a quick way to understand if your site is optimized for load time. Google Page Speed – Be sure to check out Google’s own tool for determining the load time of your website.   Website Tracking Tools Google Analytics – Google Analytics is Google’s tool for determining what your users are doing on your site. It offers some basic analytics like demographics, bounce rate and number of pageviews, and is both free and easy to install. Chartbeat – This tool offers analytics with a focus on what’s hot now. If you’re looking for real-time trends, Chartbeat offers a visually pleasing display of this type of data. Clicky – Clicky offers website analytics, including time-on-site tracking and real bounce rates. All statistics are real-time, though some detractors feel its interface is not user-friendly. GoSquared – This analytics tools also focuses on what’s happening right now, including a second-by-second analysis of what’s happening on your site. Reinvigorate – Reinvigorate offers basic analytics, like number of visitors and visit length. It also includes a basic heat mapping tool as part of its package. Woopra – This analytics tool aims to integrate analytics and CRM with the end goal of tracking user behavior across different types of devices.   Social Media Integration Disqus – This third-party commenting system integrates easily with a variety of CMSs, including WordPress and Blogger. Disqus is extremely mobile-friendly and reflects comments and responses in near real time. Livefyre – Livefyre is a new commenting system that offers many of the benefits of Disqus and Intense Debates, while also allowing users to post their comments simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter. IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate is a third-party commenting system that offers the ability to reward Reputation Points to rank comments and allow “better” comments to display above less popular feedback. Add This – AddThis is a simple social sharing tool that allows users to easily share your content to the social network of their choosing. Shareaholic – Similar to AddThis, Shareaholic offers the ability to install a tool bar with social sharing buttons to your site. Its aesthetics are different, so your preference between the two will be determined mostly by your taste. Click to Tweet – Clicktotweet advertises itself as the simplest, best way to promote your content on Twitter. The plugin allows you to generate pre-populated tweets with a snippet unique text you’ve created from your site’s content. Hrefshare – Much like Click to Tweet, Hrefshare allows you to create pre-populated content for your users to distribute. The difference is that Hrefshare integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ in addition to Twitter. Send to Kindle – Adding this tool to your website allows readers to save your content to their Kindles. This way if they want to read at a later time, they already have your content at their fingertips.   Contact Capture LeadLife – LeadLife is a more traditional CRM and contact management system. Its cost may be significant for many small businesses, but it has shown a definite impact on revenue for some companies. Constant Contact – Constant Contact is a newsletter and email capture service. Starting at $15 per month, this tool allows you to easily manage your email list and capture new leads. MailChimp – The Mailchimp newsletter service is free of charge if you have a subscriber base of 2,000 or less. This contact capture program also integrates with services like EventBrite and SurveyGizmo. Aweber – If you need better analytics and reporting features from your email newsletter service, give the Aweber list management program a closer look.   Website Survey Tools SurveyMonkey – SurveyMonkey offers both free and paid versions that can handle everything from small, informal surveys to the ability to customize surveys, skip questions and even download survey reports. SurveyGizmo – This tool is allows you to create surveys with a customizable look and feel. You can also embed videos and images into your surveys and integrate easily with your MailChimp email list.   Social Media Management Tools Hootsuite – Hootsuite (which comes in both free and paid versions) allows you to post or schedule updates to multiple social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Facebook business pages, LinkedIn, Google+ and Myspace) from one simple interface. Tweetdeck – This Twitter management tool is 100% free to use and offers the ability to view multiple Twitter streams at once. Similar to Hootsuite, you can schedule updates from this easily-accessible interface. SproutSocial – Sprout Social is a paid toolset that provides social media management features, as well as analytics. Unlike the options above, it allows multiple people to access the account, making it a great tool for larger teams.   Having the right resources on hand can help ensure you’re making the most of your online presence. Implementing the combination of the tools above that’s right for your business can help you to easily take your website to the next level. Continue reading →