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Free Tools For Home Business Entrepreneurs
by Chris Ellington
Published on this site: June 29th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
When resources are scarce it’s important to maximize results
and stretch every dollar. As home business entrepreneurs, we don’t
have the ad budgets of Coca-Cola and Disney, we can’t afford
to throw money away.
There are a number of free resources that make building and promoting
your website a whole lot easier.
- Web Site Design - page layout
http://www.steves-templates.com
Steve provides free web page templates which are nice looking,
professional and can be used free for personal and business websites.
Check out all the variations and pick a template for your site.
Another way to use this is as a springboard for your own creativity.
Perhaps you like an element on template 1 and the navigation of
template 7. Get some ideas for creating your own site from scratch.
There are also designs you can buy for under $100 and you gain
access to a number of images, clipart, sounds, fonts etc.
- Web Site Design - graphics
http://www.cooltext.com
Cool Text is a wonderful tool for creating great looking buttons
and logos. It’s free and the combinations of shape/color/texture/font
are virtually endless. You can create professional buttons and
logos with just a few mouse clicks. I use this site any time I
want to "freshen up" my site or create buttons/logos
for my customers.
- Web Site Performance - images
http://www.gifworks.com
Nothing slows down your page like heavy graphics. Did you know
that you can dramatically reduce the file size of your graphics
without compromising the look and feel of your site? That’s
where gifworks.com comes in. Run their free “optimization”
tool on your gif images and watch as they get more and more streamlined.
Your web pages will load faster. Gifworks has a paid service as
well, allowing you to buy images, get custom work, etc.
- Web Site Performance – code
http://validator.w3.org/
Is your website correctly coded? This free validator from the
W3 examines your html and reports missing tags, missing attributes
and other errors that make your code non-standard and therefore
difficult for some web browsers to serve up. With line-by-line
validation, you can easily find the places in your code that will
cause errors. I love this validator, it makes sure my pages work
across all browsers and platforms. No more trying pages in every
browser/OS configuration. When it validates here, you can be sure
that it’s up to W3 standards.
- Web Site Promotion - blogging
http://www.blogger.com
Blogger is Google’s blogging tool. It’s free, easy to
set up, and gets your site indexed by search engines (all of them,
not just Google) faster than you can believe. If you want to increase
your search engine positioning, forget all that SEO stuff, start
blogging today. In a world where “Content is King!”,
a blog provides you a platform to provide constantly changing,
completely interesting and relevant content to your web visitors.
It gives them a reason to come back, you form a relationship with
them by providing good quality information, and you increase your
conversion rate, resulting in more subscribers and more sales.
- Web Site Promotion – marketing
http://www.articlemarketer.com
I’m not the first person to tell you that article marketing
is the number one method of driving targeted traffic to your website.
Writing articles for others to publish is free advertising and
you should do as much of it as you can. The problem is the dreadfully
tedious process of article submission. Article Marketer took that
off my plate. Their free service sends articles to over 2000 people
to be published in ezines and newsletters, and they have a paid
version that gets to over 50,000 people. It works – after
all, you’re reading this article, aren’t you?
These tools are free for the asking. You can't beat the price,
and your results will skyrocket as you improve the look and feel
of your website and spread the word about your business.
Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement marketing
strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs.
His Simplified Selling System has been a favorite of salespeople
around the world. Get your free marketing strategies at www.simplifiedselling.com
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