Tools and Resources
Do you like to try things yourself?
When I started my e-commerce business, I always wanted to learn how to do things myself. While this isn’t always the best strategy if you’re not going to turn that knowledge into a full-time profession, there are many tools available to help you along the way. I’ll continue to update this list as I find different tools and resources that may be helpful to you.
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Tool – This is the best free tools available, and often it’s all you’ll need. After you search for your keywords, try un-checking ‘broad’ match and looking only at ‘exact’ match. This will give you the best information about what your potential customers or clients are actually typing in when they search. Click on the top of a column to sort by that criteria.
Market Samurai – You do need to purchase this software, but it does a great job.
Social Media Apps
HootSuite – This is a great tool that allows you to manage multiple accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – all from one easy dashboard.
Photography
Mike Martin Photography – We partner regularly with Roseville photographer Mike Martin. He is available for on-site photo shoots at your place of business. This is a great way to get some shots for a visual tour or slideshow on your website, as well as photos of your staff. At his Roseville studio, he offers professional headshots as well as product photography. You can schedule your shoot through Satin Web Solutions, or contact Mike directly. Please let him know Kristin sent you!
E-Mail Marketing
iContact – I’ve always loved the flexibility and feature-rich services at iContact. Now that they’ve launched their new page creator, it’s easy for anybody to take advantage of their inexpensive all-inclusive packages. Their strengths include flexible list management and segmentation options, built-in survey and autoresponder features, as well as a high Pagerank online community to publish your messages to (resulting in strong backlinks to boost your site’s search engine rankings).
aWeber – aWeber has been in the email marketing business for a long, long time, and they know what they’re doing. They are specifically geared towards internet marketers who would like to implement longer auto-responder series, sell informational products, and test various marketing strategies, such as pop-up sign-up boxes or one-time follow-up offers. (This is an affiliate link, but feel free to navigate directly to www.aweber.com if you prefer not to be tracked as my referral.)
Web Hosting
Bluehost – Economical yet powerful web hosting service. For most business sites, shared hosting offers everything you need. I use Bluehost for my own sites, as well as for many of my clients. They offer reliable, flexible hosting, keep their servers up to date, and offer 24/7 phone or chat support. (This is an affiliate link, but only because I use them and love their services!)
A2 Hosting – Some businesses may grow to require, or simply prefer, more than shared hosting can offer. Maybe you anticipate a website with a high resource demand, either from phenomenal traffic or high-bandwidth activities, or maybe your site will involve complicated custom applications that require more personalized control over your server. In these cases, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server might be your best options.
Since Bluehost does not offer VPS or dedicated servers, I found myself in search of a new host to recommend where you could start out with an inexpensive shared hosting account, then upgrade to a more powerful solution as you grow – without changing hosts. After much research, I chose A2 Hosting as my scalable host of choice. Key factors in my decision included reliability and uptime, 24/7 US-based customer support, breadth of technical services supported (such as programming languages, auto-install scripts, and databases), timeliness of upgrades to these services (most current version), as well as customer reviews. In addition to excelling in all of these areas, A2 Hosting offers Green Web Hosting, as well as PCI Compliant eCommerce Hosting.
As with Bluehost, I did sign up as an affiliate, however the affiliate program NEVER plays a role in my decision whether to recommend a particular service or not. If you prefer not to use my affiliate links, feel free to navigate to A2 Hosting directly yourself.
