Useful Tools for Your Small Business

This short post is to tell you about 2 tools that you may want to take a look at. They may work for you or may not. Finding something useful online can take some digging, lucky for you I'm a software junkie.

The first one was an immediate buy for me because it never occured to me. Do you download those free mp3 telecourse replays? I do it all the time, have about 30 so far and yes, they are great for shortening the learning curve. Terry Dean is my favorite, but that's beside the point.

If you have downloaded any of them, including free music you may have opened your computer to spyware. We all know about the pop-up thing, stop those at the source - your browser. But spyware in an mp3?? That brings me to this new software on my computer - NoAdware. It removes all the gunk that comes with being online - adware, spyware, dialers and more.

If you think your computer may be infected, it's running a bit slower than usual or there's a persistent pop-up that won't go away no matter what you do - get a PC check at the site. Since I have a PC, didn't check if it runs on a Mac.

The next little thing I wanted to tell you about is a service - Links Manager. Before you go there, it starts at $19.95 a month. If you have a website with questionable links or worse, none at all, this service is worth the money.

Why do you need links? Other sites that link to your site tells the search engines & your customers you mean business. Search engines use relevant links to rank your web site which means more traffic you don't have to pay for.

In case you didn't know this, search engines do not rank individual pages - they rank the entire site for relevancy. When you are not paying for traffic (yes, I am somewhat on the frugal side), you need all the help you can getting traffic to your business. Having incoming links from other sites and having your links appear on theirs can give your site quality traffic without spending half your profits to get it.

Now here's the thing I like about Links Manager:

No download. You can put it on your own domain on your hosting servers, but you don't have to.

Complete Control. You pick and choose who links to you. None of that 'we'll give you 1,000's of links' junk. You can delete anyone who asks for a link after you review their site. No surprises works for me!

No generic pages. I'm just now building my link directory and it looks exactly like all the other pages on my site.

Faster than doing it by hand! Sorry, but I had to throw that in. I spent all day Saturday adding a "links" page to my content site. It wasn't difficult, it was time consuming!

If this will fit into your plans, maybe not right now but in the future, go to Link Manager and bookmark it. Guaranteed, once your business gets going really well - you're going to need this.

That's it for today and I'll leave you with this

Nothing lowers the level of conversation more than raising the voice. Stanley Horowitz