Software Gems

From: Chris Charlwood <chris_at_charlwood.com>
Date: Tue 27 Nov 2001 19:17:10 -0500

One of the things that I value most from this
discussion list are the tips and suggestions for
various Internet marketing software tools. I
thought I'd summarize some of the software gems
that I use and often recommend to clients, which
I think can be effective and affordable for both
small and large businesses as well as for
agencies and consultants.

Basic Click-Through Ad Tracking
ROIBot (http://www.roibot.com) provides a very
simple and low cost ($17 per month - $1 for the
first month) tool to track basic click-throughs
on email campaigns or other online programs.
Although not fancy, this tracking provides back
absolute and unique click-through statistics and
is easy to set-up. They also offer a number of
other tools for tracking from click-through to
order form submission and a number of "spy" tools
for monitoring content changes or updates on other
sites.

Detailed Back-end Ad Tracking
Another very effective ad tracking tool is
PromotionStat (http://www.promotionstat.com) which
provides some outstanding graphical reports that
track full click-stream activity, all the way from
click to sale. At just under $100 for the first 30
days of tracking, with a 90 day money-back
guarantee, this is a good value given the amount of
reporting and detailed data that this ASP solution
provides.

Low-Volume Email Newsletter Management/List Hosting
Another area where I have done considerable research
is in the area of hosted email list management
solutions. Roving (http://www.roving.com) appears to
have the least expensive and most reliable solution,
with an extremely easy to use interface to develop a
basic visitor input form and deploy a personalized
HTML mailing or newsletter.

High-Volume Email List Hosting
If you are hosting an email database of 10,000 names
or more and conduct frequent mailings (e.g. more than
once a week) then PostMasterGeneral
(http://www.postmastergeneral.com) is likely your best
bet. I've compared a large number of email ASP
solutions, and this one is by far and away the
least expensive with the most flexibility in terms of
setting up online lead capture forms, creating sublists
as well as targeting your database with personalized
mailings.

Search Engine Listing Analysis, Page Generation and
Submission
This is another area where I've spent a consider
amount of time researching, and by far and away the
best solution for this that I've seen (they've been
around since 1996 - so this has to tell you something)
is WebPosition Gold. As any good online marketer
knows, as much as 70% to 80% of all Internet traffic
is funnelled through search engines, and beyond paid
placement strategies (e.g. pay-per-click), getting a
high unpaid listing on sites like Google and Yahoo is
simply key. The best thing about this software is
that it allows you to quickly and easily get a
snapshot of how your site ranks across all the major
search players, and then generates specific coding and
page format recommendations for a given keyword phrase
on each search site. Given that search engine listing
criteria changes almost weekly, it also provides
regular Knowledge Base download updates that tell you
the latest requirements for each search site (similar
to the way Norton AntiVirus updates Virus Definitions
in their Knowledge Base). They have a 30 day free
demo which has fully functionality for up to 5 URLs.
Further details can be found at
http://www.charlwood.com/search_software.htm

Always interested to hear about additional software
gems that others would recommend...

Best regards,
Chris.
__________________
Chris Charlwood
President, Charlwood eMarketing
t: 416.413.9196
e: chris_at_charlwood.com
w: http://www.charlwood.com
Specializing in opt-in email marketing, eCRM,
search engine strategies & performance promotions.








Received on Tue Nov 27 2001 - 18:17:10 CST