Some cool tools and tricks

Well, it's been a while since my last post, but in defense, I have been a little in the busy side. Since I set up the UK Small Business Websites page, I have had a ton of people wanting my time. Not that I'm complaining, far from it. In this economic climate I'm more than happy to be busy. 

Most of the people around me are extremely entrepreneurial and take the view that in times of limited customers or more importantly limited cash, it is now that they have to stick their heads above the crowd, in other words, up their marketing.

Now that does not necessarily mean spending more money on marketing, it simply means, using the same money in a more structured way. Simply put, instead of the lazy ways of just sticking an advert in the local or national paper, they are looking to use the internet more fully than they have in the past.

I have done so many landing pages for people this month, that the tips of my fingers are actually beginning to get hard. 

Anyway, on to the post.

This time I just wanted to share a few things I found which may help with some of the social media sites like twitter, facebook, Squidoo etc and the integration which has built up between them. This means that when you update one, it shares that update with other platforms. A case in point, I just finished writing a new lens on Squidoo and this gives me the choice to connect with twitter, which I did. The weird thing is that I have also set up twitter to update the status on my facebook account.

So from writing a lens on Squidoo, I have actually added 2 additional elements of content on to the internet. Now if you have heard me speak before or follow any of my writing, you will know my opinion on Internet PR, "the more you do the more you get noticed" especially by the search engine bots. So all in all I think it's all pretty cool.

By the way, if you would like to join me all the above are clickable to my Squidoo, twitter and facebook acounts, so come along and join me there,,,

The other thing I wanted to share with you was an as yet little known web address compressor. This comes in handy when you don't have much space to get a message across and you really don't want a long web address taking up valuable message space. Most people use tiny url, which is great, but sometime when space is tight, even that's too long. So take a look at http://is.gd/ and just as an example, here is one I did earlier....

I have a page on my website which has long url which is : http://www.businessforlife.co.uk/pulse-online-january-2009.html

As you can see this is a very long address for something like twitter which only gives you 140 characters to relay your message. Using is.gd you can compress the above url, which is 63 characters long to on like this http://is.gd/jrUG which is only 17 characters long. Good little tool.

Anyway, I will be posting again soon, so until then, happy marketing

Andy