three ways to quickly compare your site with your competitors’

Easily compare sites’ social media presence, traffic and Google rankings with some great free tools, suggests Ann Smarty (great name!) at Search Engine Journal.

hello, hello – internet phoning for small business

Two new, free phone services announced recently hold heaps of promise (and cost-savings) for small businesses.

Yellow (the Yellow Pages people) has announced free Skype calls to any of its listed businesses.

(If you haven’t tried Skype, it is really dead simple to use and includes inbuilt video calling. Download the free Skype software and then all you need is a web cam and a mic, plus headphones if you don’t want anyone else to hear the person you are talking to. Visit Skype here.)

And, in the U.S (though not yet in N.Z), Google has announced a service that offers dirt cheap calls but best of all its sweet range of fancy high-tech features — such as a single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones; a central voicemail inbox that accessible on the web; text transcriptions of voice messages; and the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail.

A video explaining Google Voice is here:

six ways to make Web 2.0 work for your business

Six ways to effectively use the five main groups of Web 2.0 and social media tools in business have been detailed in a report by McKinsey.

A bit dry and jargon-heavy to read but full of good, informative stuff.

For example: appeal to people’s egos and needs—not just their wallets!

Boost the reputation of participants in relevant communities, reward enthusiasm and acknowledge the quality and usefulness of contributions. Research has found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, contributions were far higher than when the awards were given in less-public forums.

how to track yourself on the web

Here’s eight useful tools for tracking mentions online of you and your business. If people are talking about you, your products, your service, whatever, you surely need to know about it. These days, it’s a key tool in your management and PR toolkit.

three simple ways to send big files across the internet

Some useful tips here (thanks makeuseof.com): free online services that make it easier to upload, share, download and manage large files.

free web conferencing product

Need to talk to customers or clients overseas or around the country – here’s a free web conferencing tool (for up to 20 people) that lets you share voice, video, webpages, presentations and whiteboards, live over the internet. It’s called Dimdim, but it looks anything but.

turn your cellphone into an internet connection

If you’re on the road a lot and need access to your e-business, you can easily turn your cellphone into a router that picks up your broadband account and sends it to your laptop to allow you to use the internet wherever you are.

Here are two software products that do this:  JoikuSpot and wmwifirouter.

(I have not tried either product and was simply interested to know of their existence. You will need to check if they work with your phone.)

don’t leave me this way

Here’s some great information about 14 free tools to help you understand your web visitors, why they leave your site and what you can do to make them stay longer.

There’s tools that show where people go on your site, tools that show where people try to go on your site (i.e clicking on things that aren’t links), there’s even a tool that films every move a visitor makes on your site or shows you where on a form people stop entering information and leave your site.

You’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting people to your site. Now work out how to make them want to stay there!

how to use google docs to research companies

Google docs has some pretty cool technology that lets you research and easily compare large companies’ financial data and online news.

Find out more from this YouTube video.

15 free tools for web-based collaboration

In this article, you’ll find 15 free tools to help you work with clients or colleagues across the web. Whether you need basic whiteboarding or brainstorming tools, document creation/editing, or fully-featured project management applications – there’s likely a tool here for you.

We mention these types of tools quite a lot but the web really does makes it easy to work with others online in real time, and so is opening up all sorts of opportunities for small e-businesses to work with other people around the country or around the world.

Check out our other posts under the ‘Work tools’ tag to see what else is out there.