Social marketing is on the rise. From Facebook to Twitter to the network du jour, connecting with others helps you in many more ways than just finding customers. Letting your site visitors know where they can find you on various social networks is extremely important—and now you can do it with style!
Iconshock sells professional stock icons for websites, with over 1,000,000 images available in 260+ sets, and they’re offering their Social Icons Set completely free. 150+ sites, 9 sizes, multiple formats and styles…even a Christmas version is included in this set (with more holidays to follow).
Who needs a favicon, anyway? No one really needs a favicon for their website. A favicon is the little icon you see to the left of a website address in the location bar of your browser; your browser will display a default image if your site doesn’t supply a favicon.
However, you should consider adding a favicon to your site, since visitors who bookmark your site will see the icon saved with the bookmark. This makes your site stand out in their bookmarks and makes it more likely to be visited. Dynamic Drive’s FavIcon Generator makes it easy to create a favicon from an image you supply. Or use favicon.cc to create a favicon completely from scratch.
Strange that I’ve not mentioned this one until now, particularly since I’ve been using it for nearly 10 years. InternetSeer is a website monitoring service that checks your site every hour and sends email alerts when it’s down.
The standard plan is free and monitors one domain, with weekly performance reports and immediate notification of a website outage. Don’t let your site go down without notice!
Knowing that many of my readers are like me and lack the ability to create eye-catching graphics, I’m ever on the lookout for collections of graphics and tools to create them. I’ve found yet another.
With 500 styles available, XHeader lets you create amazing header graphics in minutes—with no previous knowledge of graphic design. 50 styles are yours with the free trial, the remainder are unlocked when you register (also free). Now you have no reason to have a boring website!
My friends at Max Blog Press (I’ve mentioned them before) are offering one of their pro WordPress plugins for free, but only for a limited time.
Max Banner Ads PRO usually sells for $47, but you can get it for free. The catch that you have to write a review of it on your blog, but, hey, you generate content for your website and score a cool plugin. And if you miss the offer, the non-pro version is still available for free.
Frankly, I’m not a writer. How about you? If you need articles written and you can’t do it yourself, you’ll need to pay someone to write them for you… unless you want them for free.
An interesting twist on PLR (Private Label Rights) comes to us in the form of 3LR — Limited Label License Rights. Here are quality articles you can put your name on; all you have to do to freely use them is keep intact the single link they contain.
If you’re still getting your daily dose of information by visiting site after site, stop that! Many websites publish information through RSS feeds: information streams that you can subscribe to and have the latest news delivered automatically in one place. You’ll save loads of time!
To access feeds, you need a feed reader, which will allow you to read them much like you read email. NewsGator offers readers for Windows, Macintosh, and iPhones—all of which sync with Google Reader (a web-based reader) and all for free!
If you haven’t already created your own website—well, what are you waiting for? Oh, you don’t know where to start? You don’t know how to design a site?
One of the quickest ways to put up a website (once you’ve purchased a domain and arranged for hosting, of course) is to install WordPress. It needn’t be difficult; if your hosting company offers cPanel to manage your site, the software is easily installed by using the Fantastico installer. And you’ll find that the recent release of version 3 is very easy to use to keep your site up-to-date.
You could read the Fast Company article on viral loops, but that probably won’t really help you understand how to use one to add, say, 5,000 buyers to your list in 3 months. You’ll probably be better off joining Justin Blake’s new, free Subscriber Virus membership site and see how he’s actually doing it.
This one intrigued me because of how Justin is working the signup process. But I don’t want to spill the details—I’ll just let him tell you about it.
Okay, you will have to subscribe to a list for this one, but it’s worth it. Marlon Sanders is a marketer that I respect and “The Newbie Guide” should be required reading for anyone getting into Internet marketing.
You’ll learn things like why a free offer doesn’t guarantee people respond and ten time-tested ways to get your freebie noticed. (Not that it’s all about free stuff, but hey, that’s what IMWR is about.) And you’ll get Marlon’s Marketing Minute every Saturday, too.