The Easy Way to Create and Send Eye-Catching HTML Email Newsletters to your List
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Welcome to our guide to the best resources for webmasters, based on the web page resources that we have found to be the most useful for our web sites over the past few years. From free counters, traffic boosters, internet marketing tips, free newsletters to search engine tips, web site templates and free content for your web site and other recommended web tools - its all here! Best of all, many of these web page tools and webmasters resources are either free or offer a free trial so you can 'try before you buy'. Why not bookmark this page now, so that you can refer back to us when you have followed the links.There are an abundance of free web tools and other items for webmasters available on the internet - the following are particularly good resources for increasing traffic and improving your web site - all of which we have tried and selected as the best on the net:
- Free Counters: Tracking your visitors is important and you can get a free counter from Extreme Tracking or Web Stat. Of the free counters we have used, these two are our favourites. If you want a counter which is not visible to your visitors and with password protected stats, you can get one by paying a $5 monthly fee at Web Stat or at Extreme Tracking. By finding out where your visitors are coming from, you will know which search engines are sending you traffic and where you need to resubmit. You will also know which keywords are being used to find your site - very helpful for meta tags and improving your search engine position. The countries your visitors are from is also useful in targetting your advertising and your site content. For more detailed stats and analysis of your web site traffic, download and try the 25 day free trial version of 123LogAnalyzer Web Stats Software.
If you are looking for an all in one marketing, tracking and statistics analysis package; Clickalyzer is a great software package which tells you which pages make you sales and which lose sales. The great thing about this software is that it can also be used to track visitors from your web site or from your pay per click ad to see where they go on the merchants site - very useful statistics. Discover which of your marketing efforts bring you quality traffic - for every website or marketing campaign you have Clickalyzer provides you with eight real-time, powerful web site traffic analysis reports to help you focus your attention on the most profitable areas. It's hard to explain all the great features in just a few sentences - the best way to see if it is for you is to try it out - a 7 day trial is ony $1.
- Clip Art, Photos and Fonts: You can get good quality clipart site at ClipArt.com (ArtToday). Instant access and unlimited downloads to 1.2 million Clipart images, Fonts, Photos and Sounds - voted 'best clip art site on the web' by PC World. Also recommended is Boogie Jack's Web Depot - a webmasters resource site with over 500 pages of free high quality web page graphics, HTML and CSS tutorials, graphics tutorials, cut and paste JavaScript, sound effects, software and software reviews, computer tips and more! Plus you get the useful '100 Cool Webmaster Tips' eBook for free just for trying the award-winning ezine about 'web design and life'.
Photographs: A good site with royalty free stock photography for use on websites is Big Stock Photos, where you can download high quality stock photos to use on your website for as low as $1.48 each. If you are a decent photographer, you can also upload your photos and earn a commission each time somebody purchases one of your photographs. There are some amazing photos here, which will make your website look very professional and with a price of $2.50 for 1 photo or $1.48 for buying in bulk, it's an absolute bargain!
Another very useful resource is the VisiBone Webmasters Color Lab for web designers - a free online tool with the entire set of browser safe colors arranged symmetrically by hue. If you need a logo for your site, try the Do-it-yourself Logo Creator Logo Creation software.
And for something a bit different, how about getting a unique custom designed caricature - you can use it for your web site, emails, business cards, business logo, stationery, greeting cards and much more! (From $37). An excellent way to stand out from the crowd and help your website visitors to remember you!
- Free Search Engine Submission: Submit your site to search engines; web directories and awards sites at the excellent Self Promotion Site or use the free search engine and directory submission service at Jims Tools, which has several other useful free tools for webmasters and is part of the Virtual Promote site.
- Search Engine Optimisation and Information: Search Engine Optimisation and Web Site Redesigns: Give your web site a BOOST! 1st Place Design can drive thousands of visitors to your web site every year. 1st Place Design can also enhance your site to make it more user-friendly, ensuring your new visitors stay longer. For more information on search engines we also recommend the excellent Search Engine Watch web site. Reciprocal linking with other popular web sites which have related content to your own is another important factor in search engine ranking - Arelis Software is an excellent tool which makes finding and creating reciprocal links much easier. A free trial version is available.
- Autoresponders and Newsletters: These useful e-mail marketing tools for your site can be had free from Send Free. If you want a lot more features, then an excellent auto-responder service can be purchased online at AWeber Autoresponders, who also offer lots of useful advice on how to create an opt in list to put on your website. Building a list is a powerful marketing method and creates the opportunity to build a relationship with your subscribers and earn their trust. This means that they are more likely to purchase products and services which you recommend and more likely to pay a return visit to your website. You can use AWebers Autoresponders for your web site newsletter as well as using them to create a series of messages which are automatically delivered over a period of time. For example if you had a site about golf, you could encourage visitors to opt-in to a free '7 golf tips to improve your game' course and send them a different tip each week for 7 weeks. By building an email marketing list you are adding a valuable asset to your business.
- Website Templates: If you want to get a website or mini site up and running (and earning money!) as soon as possible a template is a great way to get a professional looking site. Anyone with basic html skills can quickly make a website - just change the text and logo to your own and off you go. There is a nice selection of reasonably priced web site templates available to download at Dollar Templates. Another site with royalty-free templates for sale is 4 Templates. Take a look at Boxed Art too - rated best web template site by .Net magazine, they offer an all access membership package for those who may wish to test a few designs before committing to a particular layout for their site. For a single fee you can download everything on the site for a whole year! Also recommended is Hoover Web Design - affordable web site solutions that include professional web design, domain name registration, web hosting, and 100's of web templates. One problem with templates tends to be the large file sizes of the graphics and logos, so use Gif Cruncher to reduce these and speed up your page loading times.
- Free Traffic: An excellent free way of increasing traffic to your web site is to add a "recommend this site to a friend" service to your site by placing a small graphic; button or text link to one of several free services of this kind available on the Net. The best of these goes one better by allowing you to earn money every time somebody recommends your site - so you win both ways by earning money and increasing traffic. This is another service run by MailBits who will pay you 20c for every person who recommends your site to a friend. This is paid for by them placing a small ad for their free newsletters in each recommendation e-mail they send out. To start using this excellent traffic booster on your web site you just need to sign up for their affiliate program.
- Message Boards and Web Polls: Adding a message board to your site is a fantastic way to build a community and get your visitors to return again and again. An excellent message board is offered by VBulletin
. If you are looking for a free message board, then ezboard is recommended. Building a community is one of the key ways to get visitors to return to your site and to increase your traffic.
- Free Mailing List Manager: Starting an e-mail newsletter is one of the best ways to get people to return to your site by keeping them up to date. You can also earn revenue for your site by having e-zine adverts placed in your newsletter or placing your own ads using affiliate links. Topica offers a free mailing list manager, but for more newsletter management options take a look at Group Mail.
- Free Content For Your Web Site: An excellent way of increasing visitors to your web site is to offer interesting content and links. A good way to increase your site content with little effort is to add news headlines to your site - isyndicate offers free, dynamic content for your website, including news and weather. If your site has anything to do with technology, computing or business, then you can add technology news to your website for free at Vibrant Media
.
Photos are a very popular feature too - PhotoPost
is a full featured community photo gallery application written in Perl. It's MySQL based, very fast, and very easy to install. PhotoPost enables users to upload photos to a web site and allows visitors to submit comments, message board style. What's more, PhotoPost
There are lots of other free services that you can add to get visitors to bookmark and return to your site. Two of the most popular ones are virtual greeting cards/postcards which you can add to your site for free by going to the Digital Postcard and personals which you can add by joining the One & Only Affiliate Program.
- Other useful free tools for webmasters: Meta Tags are important in helping search engines to rank your site and you can check your Meta Tags at the Meta Medic or Meta Tag Analyzer and generate Meta Tags for your site before submitting it to the search engines at MetaGen. This tool also provides a detailed analysis of the generated Meta Tags. Make sure that your most important keywords are in your page title too!
You can analyze the frequencies of the keywords used on a web page at Keyword Count and compare 2 keywords or phrases to discover which is most popular at SpellWeb. To test your search engine ranking with different keywords on 10 of the biggest search engines use RankThis. For a free weekly e-mail report listing the top 500 keywords and keyword phrases used on the internet, sign up at WordTracker.
Keeping the links on your web pages up to date and avoiding frustrating your visitors with 'dead links' is also important. This can be a time consuming process, but an excellent service we have found that automatically checks all your links for you is LinkAlarm. This is a regularly scheduled check of the links on your web site. Every month (or more often) they scan your site testing every link on every page looking for problems. An email is dispatched to you summarizing the results, including your report URL where you can view all the problem links found at your site. Link Alarm costs just a penny per page - LinkAlarm checks every link on one of your pages for one cent (US$0.01). For example, checking a 100 page site every week is only $52 a year ($1 per week).
Making sure your website is always online and available is also essential - the service offered by Website Availability is recommended - they provide a monitoring service that checks your web site every 5 mins, 24 hours a day and notifies you immediately when your site is unavailable or doesn't respond correctly. The standard account allows you to check 3 websites.
Alert Site is another service which will monitor uptime of your site and reduce costly downtime with their website monitoring service.
It is important that your page loads quickly and if it has lots of large graphics it won't! You can speed up page loading by using the free Gif Cruncher to reduce your graphics.
Another factor that is becoming increasingly important in search engine ranking is link popularity (how many sites link to yours) and you can find this out at LinkPopularity. To increase your link popularity, do a search for your web site's topic at a high traffic site. (At Yahoo, for example). Then e-mail sites which rank highly in searches for your topic and ask them very nicely for a reciprocal link. If you need free web site templates, then take a look at http://ifaces.radicalweb.net/templates.html or take a look at the list of sites offering this service at the brilliant Jim Tools web site, where you will also find many other useful free tools for webmasters. Finally, make sure you check your site by submitting it for a free 'check-up' at the Web Site Garage who will also send you a free monthly e-mail report on your site with lots of suggestions on ways to improve it.
Search Engine Submission software is also a good way to ensure that you are well ranked in the search engines. We recommend WebPosition Gold (tm) as one of the best (although it is expensive) and the software can be downloaded for a FREE trial.
- Domain Names : Buying a domain name and finding domain name ideas: Having your own domain name is essential if you are serious about doing business online and is a prerequisite for joining many of the best affiliate programs. The cheapest place we have found to buy a domain name is at the UK based 123-reg who offer .co.uk and .com domain names, as well as other extensions, such as .net and .info. Most importantly they do not charge to transfer your domain name - so if a domain name you want is available you can buy it now and sort out hosting later. They also offer free email and web forwarding, so you can have a domain which forwards to a page or directory on your current site, saving you money on web hosting. The prices are a bargain too - only £2.89 per year for a .co.uk domain name or £8.99 per year for a .com domain name. If you want a US based domain registration company, try Hostway who offer .com Domain Names with url forwarding and email included for only $6.95 per year.
If you are searching for ideas for your domain name, take a look at LocalWhois.com or Unclaimed Domain Names who publish daily/ weekly lists of unclaimed, deleted and expired domain names. This is a great way to grab a good domain name - some of the names even have existing traffic from search engine listings. Another site to try to get the Domain Name you really want
is NameWinner
, a new service from ICANN accredited registrar Dotster, which provides customers with an easy, reliable, risk-free way of registering expiring domain names the instant they expire.
Another expired domain name service - Expired Traffic - uses link popularity to help you to find and profit from the daily search engine and link traffic a previously developed, yet currently expired, website may be getting.
Another good tip is to try and include your most important keyword or keyword phrase in your domain name.
You can also back-order the Domain Name you want with SnapBack™ - Currently, 90% of domain names registered are not being used, so it's no wonder 25,000 expire daily — ready to be picked up by you. How do you get the domain name you've always wanted when it becomes available?
Until now, watching, waiting, and checking with registrars has been the only way to get "next in line" to buy an expired name. But beating the sophisticated speculators with their powerful computers is difficult or impossible. Now, patent-pending SnapBack™ technology will stand in line for you. If the name expires and becomes available, they are the best chance you have to get it registered, in your name, before anyone else can get it.
And if they don't get the first name you wanted, the $69 SnapBack (registration included) can be transferred to another name, so you risk nothing. So reserve the domain name you want now before someone else does. There's even a FREE version called SnapShot.™ Check your name now!
- Web Hosting: So you have found your perfect domain name - the next step is to find somewhere to host it. This will depend on a number of factors: your budget and what requirements you have. Do you need web hosting with autoresponders; multiple POP3 Email Accounts, pre-installed CGI scripts and CGI-Bins, Streaming Audio/Video, web hosting with shopping cart facilities for your own store, etc. There is no point in paying money for features you don't need, but most good web hosts will include many, if not all of the above features.
So, how to find a web host - there are thousands of web hosting companies out there - so how do you choose a reliable host for your domain? Word of mouth is a good way - speak to other webmasters, see who they recommend and find reliable. We have heard very good reports of FutureQuest Web Hosting, they are currently offering a number of good hosting freebies & discounts for new site owners. Other web hosting services worth looking at are iPowerWeb Web Hosting
as well as Host4Profit and Your Choice Budget - the latter offers reliable budget web hosting solutions at a low yearly fee, free from monthly hosting costs. Server locations are in Europe and North America.
You may also want to take a look at Ken Evoy's Site Build It product which includes web hosting as part of a comprehensive website building package. To see how other people have been using Site BuildIt to build top ranking web sites, click here.
- Free Web Hosting: Most free web hosting providers are not reliable enough if you are running a commercial site and usually have restrictions such as banners or pop ups on your page. Some also do not allow affiliate links on your pages. Needless to say a site on www.somefreewebhostservice.com~yoursitename does not look very professional either! However, there is a good alternative if your budget is limited - a good place to try for 'free web hosting' with no banners is at Dot Easy
- ideal for creating affiliate 'mini sites'. As long as you purchase your domain name through them, the hosting is 'free'. The domain costs a bit more than other places ($25) but the hosting is fairly reliable and $25 for a year of hosting and a domain name is a great bargain!
- Other sources of free stuff: Of course there are dozens of other sites on the internet offering these and other services for free, however the ones just mentioned are the best we have come across in their respective categories. Another good site is Grantastic Designs which offers some excellent website design and online marketing tips.
- Keyword Research: Finding the right keywords (the keywords that people are using to search for the products and services you are offering) is essential for increasing web site traffic, both for pay per click advertising (ppc) and SEO (search engine optimization for free traffic). These are some useful sites for researching keywords:
The best keywords tool is WordTrackers Keyword Generator - it's not free, but you can subscribe for a little as one day for just a few dollars / pounds and there is a limited free trial too. An excellent keyword research tool for finding keywords to use for search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, Word Tracker is a great resource. To find typing errors and misspelled words the Spelling Error and Most Commonly Misspelled Words web sites are also very useful. Keyword tracking is the best way to ensure maximum profitability from targetted keyword bidding on pay per click advertising - to discover which are your most profitable ppc advertising keywords try Clickalyzer.- Useful software: Adword Analyzer is a keyword research tool which finds non-competitive search terms - see if an idea is popular based on the number of searches; how much competition exists based on the number of ad words campaigns under way now; and finding keywords you can bid on at low prices to maximize the return on your pay per performance web traffic.
- Web CEO Web Promotion Software - Maintains and analyzes websites to increase web traffic. Download the free trial of this comprehensive SEO software which researches keywords; optimizes your site for high rankings in search engines; finds who links to your site and your competitors; pinpoints broken links and other errors on your site; edits your web pages in the WYSIWYG mode; uploads HTML and other files to your server; monitors your website to know if it is up or down; and also tracks and analyzes your visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, revenues, etc with more than 120 live analytical reports. Free trial offer.
Other Useful Web Sites: Sites for webmasters that you may find useful include: Virtual Promote which is an excellent site on web promotion and also includes a free search engine submitter - submit your site to over 35 top search engines and more than 400 directories; with one form - for free! They also have free tutorials and advice on web site promotion and search engine placement as well as an excellent free newsletter and dozens of free tools for webmasters. All in all, a very impressive site which is highly recommended.Every webmaster wants more traffic for their site - the trafficology newsletter of unique web promotion and traffic-building ideas has now published an ebook of all their back issues with over 200 unique ideas and contributions from 188 leading internet entrepreneurs.
Also recommended is WebMasterEngine.Com - a comprehensive webmaster resource aiming to list links to everything a webmaster could need.
Another excellent site is Search Engine Watch which contains just about all you ever wanted to know about search engines. For information on recommended affiliate programs, take a look at our Top Ten Affiliate Programs.
There is also an abundance of internet marketing advice available on the net - much of it free - but one very worthwhile source of information is the Internet Marketing Challenge Web Site which is highly recommended. Subscribe to their excellent free weekly e-zine. You can also find experts willing to answer your Internet marketing problems for FREE. All you have to do is post your question at Neil Shearing's Internet Success Forum.
Need some content written for your website, a logo designed or perhaps you need some programming done - you can post your projects at elance and you will get bids from freelancers - you simply choose the best offer to get the work done.
Last, but not least, take a look at the Make Your Site Sell Web Site where you can sign up for an excellent free e-zine and also download a free book on affiliate programs, which is useful if you join their affiliate program but also contains valuable advice that applies to all affiliate programs and earning money creating websites. The Make Your Site Sell Web Site also has the excellent book of the same name for sale at a very reasonable $17 US dollars (or just over ten British pounds) - this is without doubt the best value for money internet marketing book on the net. A free sample chapter can be downloaded here. Finally, from the same site, the e-book Make Your Content PREsell is about writing for the web and will show you how to write to communicate, how to develop your own "voice" with flair and substance, how to spin your website/biz/self into a unique position and how to honestly convince people to trust and like you. Amazing value too at only $9.95.
Webmaster Quick Links:
# HTML Editors: Dreamweaver is the html editor of choice - available from Macromedia #
# Domain Names: 123 reg - Buy Domain Names at Low Prices - .com .co.uk .net etc #
# Hostway - .com Domain Names for only $6.95 per year with free forwarding and email #
# Web Hosting: FutureQuest Web Hosting - High Quality Web Hosting with lots of features. #
# FTP Software: WS_FTP Pro from Ipswitch. Excellent ftp software - Try the free trial download. #
# Internet Merchant Accounts: Accept Credit Cards on your web site - Low rates and no set-up fee. #
# Web Design / Usability: 'Don't Make Me Think' - An excellent book on web site design and usability. #
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