In the interests of this post, I am going to start listing the 5 Common Online Business Tools For Small Business Owners straight-away, evaluating them on my criteria, and giving you a link to where you can access 5 Common Online Business Tools. Unfortunately, I may not be able to put up your favorite tools, but it’s a good start for anyone who is thinking about seriously competing online with other online vendors.
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WebCEO
This is a great all-around tool for webmasters and people who market online. It helps you to find keywords, see what your competitors are doing, and more importantly for this category, it helps you to automatically submit your pages to multiple search engines.
Tool Category: Traffic
Features
- Easy To Use: There is some learning that you have to do with the interface; although, it’s not highly intuitive, but it’s easy enough to learn. It’s not a simple point-and-click tool. It’s very feature-rich, and well worth spending time learning it.
- Solves A Customer’s Problem: It helps to grab traffic from specific demographics by helping you generate keywords that will attract that traffic.
- Consistent Performance: Very effective and efficient tool. There is no doubt, as you will love this tool after trying it out.
- Simple Registration: It only requires your email to get you started.
- Great Customer Support: If you are like me; I buy tools based on customer support efficiency; as you will not want to buy a tool without real people to understand and help you when the need arises. Fortunately, they have an excellent customer.
- Creates Excitement/Interest: This tool is more for the background, and can generate interest through keywords, but it won’t be obvious to the customers. It will be obvious to you when your traffic surges in the right demographics.
Cost
There is a free and a paid version. Download the free version and give it a go. Make use of the webpage submission service to help you get better search engine ranking and exposure. This will increase traffic. Then, see if you want to some money on the paid version.
Metrics
Comparison to your competitors’ stats and keywords is also available, making it easy to measure metrics to see how the tool is working for you.
Download: Webceo
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2. Aweber
This is an online service that starts at $19.99/month, but comes with multiple tools to free up your time and help you market yourself better. It can help you generate and manage contacts and then go on to market them further with tools ranging from autoresponders to newsletters.
Tool Category: Contact Management
Features
- Easy To Use: Since it’s a service, the people you hire do most of the work for you. They will walk you through things you need to do to optimize your direct email campaigns too.
- Solves A Customer’s Problem: It solves the problem of communication between you and the customer, without taking an inordinate amount of time out of your day.
- Consistent Performance: It is highly rated by Internet marketers.
- Manages Multiple Users Efficiently: It excels at managing multiple subscribers, readers, fans, contacts, etc. They do charge more for managing more people, but that’s what they do best.
- Great Customer Support: You are a valued client and thus they do try to keep you happy.
- Creates Excitement/Interest: A good newsletter, sales promotion, email campaign with good attractive templates, all create excitement and interest from the people who want to stay in contact with you.
Cost
First 500 subscribers that they manage is $19.99. After that, the service charges more.
Metrics
The service comes with testing tools and reports that help you see what’s working in your campaigns and what isn’t. With metrics like this, it can really help you fine-tune your campaigns to get the most sales out of them.
Download: Aweber
3. OpenOffice
This is a desktop publishing suite that is free to download. If you don’t want to pay for Microsoft Office and you don’t do much other than creating content for online websites, then OpenOffice takes up less room on your personal computer, and it has enough features to make it sufficient for most Internet Marketers.
Tool Category: Income
Features
- Easy To Use: Installing OpenOffice takes less time than Microsoft Office. It is very easy to use if you know how to use Microsoft Office too, as it has many of the same features.
- Solves A Customer’s Problem: It has a built-in PDF converter so that you can generate ebooks and reports easily, without having to save the file first, download a converter, and then convert the file. There is an option to save as a PDF file instead.
- Consistent Performance: Very stable and gives consistent performance. However, some functions aren’t as elegant as those within Microsoft Office.
- Simple Registration: You don’t have to register if you don’t want to.
- Manages Multiple Users Efficiently: Even if some of you use OpenOffice and others use Microsoft Office or some other product, there are multiple ways to save in various formats, so you can still share files.
- Great Customer Support: Not a whole lot of technical support available as it is an Open Source product.
- Creates Excitement/Interest: It’s not a flashy product and isn’t meant to create magazine style documents. For higher level desktop publishing you would have to buy a commercial product.
Cost
Free, and that’s why it’s very appealing. No more upgrades, no more license fees. If you have several people on your team, you can save quite a bit of money using OpenOffice.
Metrics
It does come with a free spreadsheet, database, presentation, and drawing functionality. If you want to create metric spreadsheets for other things you can, but there’s nothing inherently that measures metric of saving money with this product, other than the difference you pay with MS Office and OpenOffice.
Download: Openoffice.
4. Socialoomph
Who has time to sit and tweet all day? And, yet, that’s the way you maintain interest on twitter and get followers. And, who wants to send replies to followers who sign up, especially if you’re not on all day? It seems impossible until you find out about Socialoomph. This tool helps you organize your Twitter accounts so that you can automate tweets to go up several times a day. It will also let you automate replies for people who follow you and automatically follow them too, as a courtesy. This way, you don’t have to be stuck to your pc to use the power of Twitter all day.
Tool Category: Promotion
Features
- Easy To Use: This online service is very easy to use. It comes with an instructional video that shows you the two parts to getting started: setting up your account and then automating it.
- Solves A Customer’s Problem: Keeps you in front of the customer, other Twitter users, even when you’re not around.
- Consistent Performance: It goes down at times, but nothing too dramatic so far.
- Simple Registration: Easy to register, just need a Twitter account.
- Manages Multiple Users Efficiently: This is the strength of this tool. It lets you manage tons of followers who may sign up, adding a personal touch even when you’re not online.
- Great Customer Support: Good customer service.
- Creates Excitement/Interest: If you use this right, it can create great excitement. There are numerous ways you could use Socialoomph to keep people glued to your feed.
Cost
Free!!!
Metrics
Under automation, it keeps track of the number of followers and replies sent out to followers since you last checked.
Signup at Socialoomph
5. Google Keyword Tool
This tool lets you research keywords to help you develop niches, pay-per-click campaigns, and online strategies to get better traffic. You can see search volume, the average CPC payout, and competition for different keywords. It will suggest other keywords too, as synonyms, by checking that box, helping you to brainstorm potential profitable niches and keywords.
Tool Category: Income
Features
- Easy To Use: Very easy to use. You just load a keyword or phrase and hit the button to return a list.
- Solves A Customer’s Problem: You have some actual values of how that keyword phrase is performing online.
- Consistent Performance: An extremely consistent tool.
- Simple Registration: No registration necessary.
- Manages Multiple Users Efficiently: N/A
- Great Customer Support: Not really necessary since it’s been used consistently for quite some time with no problems.
- Creates Excitement/Interest: Can create interest from targeted streams of traffic if used correctly.
Cost
Free!!!
Metrics
Gives you detailed metrics on how keywords or potential niches might perform based on past performance and the level of competition in the marketplace. It’s one tool that all Internet marketers should get to know in depth.
Check out Google Adwords Keyword Tool here: Google KeywordTool.