Small Business Sales & Marketing Resources
We thought it would be useful for other small business owners to know about some of the best resources we have found for running our business. Our goal is to create this page as a reference that you can come to for all your sales & marketing needs. We recommending bookmarking this page for future reference.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links, which means at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase of the products listed below. We recommend these products because we either use them and find them extremely helpful or we have been notified by other business owners that they are extremely effective and we have done extensive research on them. If we do not use them for our business it will be stated clearly. Please do not spend any money on any of the below products unless you feel they will help you accomplish the specific goal you have in mind.
Our Most Recommended
| Free Guide To Starting Email Marketing - Are you new to email marketing, trying to find the right software to use and have questions about how to do email marketing? Or are you frustrated with the high costs, difficult learning curve and time-consuming email system you are currently using? Are you happy with your email marketing system and just need help knowing how to get more people to open your emails and get more sales from the emails you send? The Profitworks Free Guide To Starting Email Marketing has everything you need to accomplish your email marketing goals. The guide includes answers to all the most common email marketing questions and challenges, a review of the leading email marketing software providers and step by step instructions for how to get started. |  |
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Blue Host - is a great place to host your website as they have excellent prices and all there services come with free 24/7 live technical support. The live support can be accessed by phone, email, live chat or by submitting a support ticket. The technical support is very good and they are based out of Utah in the United States. It also come with a content system installed such as wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and 50 others. Note: we do not currently use Blue Host but are looking to switch to them in the next 6 months. |
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| Acymailing - this is the best email marketing program on the marketing because it comes with live customer support that is incredibly fast and helpful. They are so helpful they will even take product improvement/capability ideas and build these into the software. It is also incredibly inexpensive as it is only about $130.00 initially and then only $40.00 a year (most programs a that much per month). The program tracks opens, reads, clicks, bounces and fails and all these stats are downloadable to excel. It also gives you the ability to set up autoresponder email campaigns. The challenge is that this software only works on Joomla websites. If you don't have a Joomla website I would look at Aweber instead. |  |
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Aweber - behind having a website the next best return on investment marketing you can use for your business is email marketing. Aweber is a great service because it is easy to use, has a higher delivery rate than many other solutions, allows you to easily build email newsletter signup forms for your website and they have good customer support. Note: we do not currently use Aweber but would if we were not using Acymailing. |
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Marketing & Sales Insights - this is a free resource that keeps you up to date on things we are learning about sales and marketing. Things like what the ROI is on different marketing methods, how to improve the ROI of marketing methods and how to increase sales meeting closing rates. Again this service is completely free so we would suggest this will probably have the greatest return on investment of anything on this page. If you choose only to use one of the products on this page for your business, use this one. |
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Website Tools & Resources
Website Visitor Identifier - Our Web Visitor Identifier allows you to view which businesses have been visiting your website, how often they've visited and also will provide you with a number of different available options to get in contact with them.
ClickTale - is a great free service that provides heat map, click map, scroll reach, attention maps and form exit analytics. There are paid packages as well but for the average small business free accounts will be sufficient. This information is very useful in understanding how people interact with your site, what is working on your website and what is not. With this information you will be able to make improvements to is that will lead to more website sales.
Clicky - is a website analytics program that tracks much of the same data as Google Analytics. We use clicky to get to what individual users are on our website, what individual users are doing, understand what time of day users are using our website and double check Google Analytics data. Clicky is very good at (and better than Google Analytics) time of day tracking and for looking at individual website user behavior. In addition with their paid service you can spy and watch users mouse moves as they are on your site, track downloads, video watches and other events.
Session Cam - is a great service you can use for free to record what people are doing on your website. There are paid services as well that give you most features and more capacity to keep more recordings. For the average small business the free plan will be sufficient. The recordings of how people are using your website can be very useful in understanding how people interact with your site, what is working on your website and what is not. With this information you will be able to make improvements to is that will lead to more website sales.
7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tasks Free Report - is a great overview of the most important steps any business owner should take with their website to rank higher in search engines. The report clearly outlines how business owners can do these tasks themselves. For businesses that get assistance with their search engine optimization it provides a check list to verify your SEO provider is doing what they should be.
Blue Host - is a great place to host your website as they have excellent prices and all there services come with free 24/7 live technical support. The live support can be accessed by phone, email, live chat or by submitting a support ticket. The technical support is very good and they are based out of Utah in the United States. It also come with a content system installed such as wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and 50 others.
Note: we do not currently use Blue Host but are looking to switch to them in the next 6 months.
Email Marketing
Free Guide To Starting Email Marketing - Are you new to email marketing, trying to find the right software to use and have questions about how to do email marketing? Or are you frustrated with the high costs, difficult learning curve and time-consuming email system you are currently using? Are you happy with your email marketing system and just need help knowing how to get more people to open your emails and get more sales from the emails you send? The Profitworks Free Guide To Starting Email Marketing has everything you need to accomplish your email marketing goals. The guide includes answers to all the most common email marketing questions and challenges, a review of the leading email marketing software providers and step by step instructions for how to get started.
Acymailing - this is the best email marketing program on the marketing because it comes with live customer support that is incredibly fast and helpful. They are so helpful they will even take product improvement/capability ideas and build these into the software. It is also incredibly inexpensive as it is only about $130.00 initially and then only $40.00 a year (most programs a that much per month). The program tracks opens, reads, clicks, bounces and fails and all these stats are downloadable to excel. It also gives you the ability to set up autoresponder email campaigns. The challenge is that this software only works on Joomla websites. If you don't have a Joomla website I would look at Aweber instead.
Aweber - behind having a website the next best return on investment marketing you can use for your business is email marketing. Aweber is a great service because it is easy to use, has a higher delivery rate than many other solutions, allows you to easily build email newsletter signup forms for your website and they have good customer support.
Note: we do not currently use Aweber but would if we were not using Acymailing.
Constant Contact - Constant contact is also another good email marketing alternative. I like Aweber over constant contact because with Aweber it is easier to build email list opt-in forms for your websites and the delivery rate is a little higher. Constant contact does have an easy to user interface. The other downside with constant contact is that the amount of emails in an autoresponder campaign is limited to 10, where as with Aweber and Acymailing there is no limit to the number of emails in an autoresponder campaign.
Note: we use Constant Contact for one of our clients and it works very well.
Sales Training
Profitworks Sales Training - our sales training provides great return on investment as it provides training that will have an immediate impact on your sales growth and it is at a fraction of the cost of other sales training programs or courses. Our program also comes with our 60 day money back guarantee.
Other
NetTalk - is an excellent low cost phone service for small businesses that only need a single phone line. It requires that you have a good internet connection (Packetworks is a great option for this). I would not recommend Nettalk for larger companies, for larger companies I would again recommend they go to Packetworks for their phone an internet service. For smaller business though Nettalk can not be beaten on their price and features.
Zipcloud - is a very cost effective cloud storage service. If you have been using Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive or Dropbox and run out of space Zipcloud is a good option. We have not used Zipcloud but the pricing looks very good and backup precautions they take are excellent.
Note: we do not currently use Zipcloud as Google Drive is currently enough space for our business.
Profitworks Easy To Use Accounting Software - this software is both the lowest cost (it is free and will always be free) and the easiest to use (it is in excel so if you know how to use excel, you will know how to use this software)..period. It is so easy to use the entire manual is only 6 pages long. If you are small business you can't find a better solution. We use this program for our business and it is one of the best decisions we ever made.
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