Small Business Tools | Internet Marketing for Small Business

Get free international publicity for your small business by using HARO

If you didn’t think there was such a thing as free international publicity for your small business – you’re about to be proven wrong.

HARO offers free publicity for small businesses from their website helpareporter.com.

It all started when 10 years ago, Peter Shankman started a PR firm and regularly matched reporters with people who could be interviewed or quoted for published articles. He has now founded helpareporter.com which offers free publicity for small businesses.

When you sign up you will receive emails daily with all reporter’s requests. Respond quickly and succinctly to gain the most chance of the reporter using you. Approximately 150 requests a day are received from reporters with over 30,000 reporters having signed up.

Overall a great public relations tool for even a one man company to get into global publications.

HARO have a fan page on Facebook where you can read success stories of small businesses. They are also available via twitter.

The facts about FourSquare

The fact is Foursquare may have only 16 employees but it’s certainly something to take note of. The location-based social network tool that allows you to ‘check-in’ from your mobile device is putting small businesses on the map and is likely to be another ‘Twitter’ in terms of popularity.

To give you some idea of the way that Foursquare is coming up through the ranks be aware that during this year’s SXSW festival (the interactive film and media festival) in Austin, Texas it was used over 1,000,000 times by people ‘checking-in’ to different events. Observations that I have made regarding the rise of Foursquare as a social media tool to take note of is that just last week Foursquare was featured on “The Today Show” on CNN and it also has it’s own category alongside Facebook and Twitter on the knowledgeable Mashable blog.

Foursquare are now working with small businesses to understand how they can help them more. A dashboard has been provided with analytics to understand how many visitors businesses have per day, the most active time of day, who their most frequent visitors are and a gender breakdown. This type of information can help with retaining customers and gaining new ones. Loyalty discounts and specials can be used to encourage frequent visitors who provide small business with free advertising over their twitter and facebook profiles as their ‘check-ins’ are broadcast.

To learn more about Foursquare’s business visit the Foursquare + business page.

How to Create a Tagline for your Business

If you have ever wondered how to create a tagline or even why you would want to, here is something to ponder. Creating a tagline is essential for your business. Not only does is it a marketing tool that can state clearly on your marketing efforts what you are about, but it is a chance to stand out from the crowd and let them know what you do differently. It’s especially important if it isn’t obvious what your business does from the name.

To create something that will work for you, keep these points in mind:

be clear about the purpose of your business
what value are you offering to the customer ?
what is something special that makes you stand out from others?
how can you get your message across in a clear and precise way that won’t leave others wondering what you mean?
be passionate and convey some energy if possible

For example for a bakery, you might choose something along the lines of: Fresh hot breads that make your mouth water.

This tagline brings across the fact that you supply breads, that they are made on the premises most likely otherwise they would not be hot and fresh and that they taste so good they make your mouth water.

Places that you will use your tagline are:

your blog header
your email signature
forum profile signatures
your business card
your website about page
any paper products that you use such as receipts, envelopes, letterheaded paper

In my next post we will look at the why and hows of creating your elevator pitch.

44 Free Online Tools for Small Business Owners List

This list of 44 FREE online tools will help small business owners keep their costs down until they have a software budget. I use many of these tools everyday to keep my business running to help me make money online.

Blogs and content
Google Reader-keep up to date with the best content on the web. Google reader is an RSS feed reader so that whenever a new blog is published, you can receive the latest posts once you have signed up by subscription.

Google Alerts – an automatic service that will send you any mentions of a keyword. You can also use it to monitor when there are new mentions of the name of your site or even yourself. It can also be used to monitor forums so that whenever a question is asked in your niche, you can go right to the question and be one of the first to answer it, resulting in more traffic to your site.

Blogger.com – create a free blog in seconds and you can gain traffic from Blogger’s directory that you will be listed in automatically. Beware that you won’t have full ownership of your blog though, you will need to buy a domain name and hosting for that.

WordPress – another free blog service, this one has plenty of features in the form of widgets, stats and different themes available.
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Collaboration / Sharing workspaces
Google docs – not only does this tool provide storage for your documents, they can be edited by your colleagues and peers so that you can just keep one version on the go at a time.

Exploratree – use these ready made interactive thinking guides to analyse issues or brainstorm ideas with your team. Even available in Welsh.

Scriblink – use a whiteboard and invite others to work with you by sending them the URL. You can save and print the results.

Mentat – a todo list that can be used individually or for teams. Keep on top of your shopping list or on a computer bug. Can be used by Blackberry too.
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Communicate

Skype – the popular VOIP telephone system that has chat, file sending and now a new video conferencing feature for up to 5 people. Cheap calls to landlines and free computer to computer calls.

LinkedIn – build your network and catch up with past acquaintances on this powerful networking tool. Forums and groups enable you to network with others in your niche.
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Copyright
Copyscape – you can use this to check to see if anybody has copied content from your webpage and to put an ominious warning with a Copyscape banner on your page.
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Documentation
PDFill – PDF files are often seen as the standard for electronic documentation. This free tool offers editing, forms, drawing, annotation and saving without needing to use the file’s ‘mother’ Adobe Acrobat.

PDFSam – an opensource tool for merging and splitting PDF files. Good for merging large files together, that other editors don’t seem to be able to handle.
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Files including storage
Zamzar – use this online tool to convert files from one format to another without having to download anything. Good for ebooks, images and music files.

Filezilla – free ftp software that I use to upload to my websites. Very easy to use and you can keep the login information registered for quick and easy access.

Gigasize – a great free tool to send large files online. For free you can store up to 600 mb for 45 days too.
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Forums
Big-boards - Big-Boards is a directory of the busiest forums online. You can filter through to find your niche and start networking immediately.

And check out Linked-In for this too. They are very strong on their forums.
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Images
Gimp – Gimp is a fantastic image tool that has almost as many features as photoshop but you don’t have to spend out. I use it for resizing my images as it’s very easy to use.

Picresize – another image resizing tool that is easy to use and web based.

Stock.XCHNG – if you need images to spruce up your webpages, visit this site that supplies images that are mostly royalty-free.

Picasa – Google’s downloadable image gallery with tools for minor editing and online album building. A must for people with a lot of images.
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Invoicing
Invoicejournal – send as many invoices as you like to your customers with this brandable free service.
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Marketing / Promotion of your content / backlinks

Stumbleupon toolbar – using this free toolbar can bring you more traffic by hitting on the little ‘thumbs up’ icon. You can network and make friends and then they may stumble your posts and build up your traffic.

Onlywire – with the click of one button, you can send out your blog content or any other web page to over 30 different sites – good aid for backlinks and promotion for your site.
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Organisation
RememberTheMilk – an online to-do list that will email you, send you an SMS text message or mark them onto your google calendar. You can even share the tasks.

Wesabe – this online tool gives you guidance on how you are spending your money. It will also give you advice on where you can save, how and has coupons available. Reach your financial goals with the help of the Wesabe community.

GTDInbox – turn your Gmail emails into to do tasks so that you can have better control over your email. The product’s mantra is ‘in-box zero’ and email overload is a thing of the past.

Scheduly – allow your clients to schedule appointments with you from your free slots online with just one click.

Mindomo – organise your thoughts with this mind-mapping program that will allow you 7 mindmaps under the free trial. I think mind-maps can be very useful to organise marketing strategies and business plans.

Wisemapping – another mind-mapping tool that is completely free.

Clickbook – ideal for massage therapists, hairdressers or anybody who takes appointments or has many meetings this tool will take the place of a receptionist and you won’t have to call anybody back.
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SEO
Good Keywords – this download that aids your keyword research. The site also provides some educational material about how to choose keywords, but it is a little out of date now.

Google Analytics – check your web site statistics with this tool, you can check visitor numbers and their behaviour on your site.

Alexa.com – useful resource to find out information on sites, they have a great tool that will tell you where a site is on the Alexa ranking scale. Also tells you who owns a site, the top sites and

Traffic Travis – Traffic Travis is one of my favourite tools. It is a free download and you can find out how many people are searching on a particular keyword in Google, Bing and Yahoo, and then you can also discover how easy it will be for you to compete against your competitors. I just love it.

SEO Book Keyword Tool – to perform well in the search engine results pages (SERPS) then this tool will aid with keyword selection and it uses Wordtracker. One of my favourites too and the site has free SEO tutorials.
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Following trends
ebay pulse – check to see what is hot on ebay with this tool that will show you the top searches. You can check what people want to buy. Remember all these buyers have money they’re willing to spend.

Blog Pulse – track conversations in blogs and keywords over time with this tool.

Google Trends- Google trends is a fantastic tool that will allow you to compare a keyword over a period of time and see if it’s gaining in popularity.
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Video
Camstudio – this tool can make desktop videos for you to share on youtube. A very powerful marketing tool.
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Making or hosting web sites
Alleycode – a free html editor that gives good results. I use Dreamweaver as that was my first experience with html code tools. However alleycode does the trick.

Weebly – if you want a quick website online, Weebly can do this for you. It has a drag and drop design dashboard and will host it for you – all for free.

Squidoo – this is not a tool to make a website, but pages that you make will perform very well in the search engines and you can use them to link back to your own site or to sell your products. There is also a feature that will earn you money for yourself or as a contribution for your favourite charity.

Hubpages – again not a website for yourself but pages, but this again performs very well in the search engine result pages as the search engines seem to like it’s good page ranking. Use to bring traffic to your own site from sharing something.
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Writing
Thesaurus – this tool will tell you synonyms for words and it has a dictionary feature in case you need to check how a word is spelt.