Internet and Web Marketing Tools

Web Marketers like other new business owners often struggle with financial issues and their business credit. There are many expenses that simply must be paid, from marketing tools such as customer leads and advertising, to licenses and certificates. If the company sells a product, then inventory must be bought, and if it hires employees, they must be paid. By the time these nonnegotiable bills are paid, the new business owner may not have much money left. He may be unable to spend hundreds of dollars on office software.

Yet there is always a tradeoff, as quality must not suffer. Documents that appear unprofessional send a message that the company is small, broke, and untrustworthy. It is critical for the new business owner, who does not yet have a solid list of references, to exude professionalism in every aspect of his business.

Enter freeware. The concept of freeware has its history in the early days of the personal computer. At that time, computers were hulking machines, much more impressive for their sheer size and mass than for what they could actually do. The self-taught engineers of Silicon Valley were much more interested in perfecting the hardware than in ensuring practical usability for the home market. This opened up a niche for self-taught engineers in other parts of the country who, having invested in the machines, were eager to see what they could make them do. So they wrote programs and released them to their friends and acquaintances. As they acquired modems and began logging into BBS’s (the precursor to modern internet forums), they began to distribute their programming more widely. Shareware began to develop, in which a program was released for free with certain features disabled, and by sending a small amount of money (usually $5-$10) to the programmer, the user would receive a code to unlock those features.

Freeware and shareware went underground with the explosion of the modern PC. Software became big business, with thousands of titles released every year by large companies, with price tags ranging from $40 to several hundred dollars. Most of these programs work more or less on standardized protocols, allowing software from different manufacturers to communicate with each other and providing a reasonably seamless computing experience. However, as software companies became giants, quality began to suffer. New software began to be released before it was ready, and programs shipped with significant numbers of bugs. This phenomenon continues today.

An underground revolution has begun, with a new market created by those tired of spending ever more money on software of ever decreasing quality. Freeware designers have stepped up to meet the new demand and their work is admirable, often superior to the paid alternatives. Most freeware is now released as “open source,” meaning that the code is available to anyone who cares to use it. This allows any user to infinitely customize his experience, and even to release his adaptations for public use.

Freeware programs that are useful for home-based businesses are numerous. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) packages a word processor, spreadsheet and database program with a multimedia presentation program and even a truly stunning graphics package. Mozilla’s offerings (www.mozilla.com), notably the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail, are superior in innumerable ways, particularly in stability and safety. Gimp photo editing (gimp-win.sourceforge.net) and Free Accounting Software (www.freeaccountingsoftware.net/default.aspx) round out the list of what the average home-based business owner should need.

Freeware offers a reasonable alternative to costly software options. The programs are comparable, and freeware allows the user almost unlimited flexibility to customize his experience. For the new business owner, who is struggling to appropriately allocate limited resources, freeware is often the best choice.

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Most of the people who use Internet services agree ? when there is a new technology out there it should be implemented on websites ? and this is why you should use RSS feeds for your site.

The most important reason to use RSS feeds is to keep visitors to your site abreast of any changes that may have taken place on your page. If you have the type of site that will be changing frequently, such as a news site or blog (or any sort of personal diary type site), an RSS feed can help keep people in the loop about what is going on with your page. RSS, really simple syndication, is the perfect way to get new information out to your website’s visitors while allowing them the most convenient way possible to read your content.

When a site implements RSS, it is said to be ’syndicated’, and that is a good thing. Visitors to your site will know right away that with the click of a button, they can subscribe to the content on your site and view it at their leisure in any one of several RSS readers. Viewers can, and will, still come back to your site to check on its updates and graphics, but for text and news, RSS can get the information out quickly to everyone interested in your site.

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Here is an introduction to building rss feeds. By creating an rss feed from your website you can communicate with subscribers regularly without waiting for them to visit your website.

How To Build RSS Feeds

You can easily build RSS feeds if you know how. RSS is a method that you can use to syndicate or distribute your content. So for example if you have a web site with useful content it is a way of distributing those links to your content that will allow others access to it. People with RSS readers can easily read your content without actually visiting your web site. The way this works is that they subscribe to your RSS feed using the RSS reader and they view the content directly from the RSS reader.

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