by Robert Boilard

Last time I wrote about attracting qualified sales leads to your website; now I am going to talk about the necessary tools of an on-line marketer. If you are really serious about your online business I suggest your read this article in its entirety, and maybe even twice. There are certain necessary tools that an online marketer needs and even more if your maintaining your web pages yourself. Some of the tools listed below are not absolutely necessary for all businesses but should be considered.

1.) The most important thing that an on-line marketer needs is an auto-submission program. These are programs that automatically submit your web pages to many search engines, directories, and Free For All link sites (FFA). Here at RB Associates we use 2 different programs. SubmitWolf by Trellian. This is an Australian based company with a high quality product. The other program we use is AddWeb Pro by CyberSpace Hq.

SubmitWolf 4.0 has a database of over 2400 search engines and link directories where you can promote your URLs. Submission to over 1200 sites is fully automated, and a listing with these engines can dramatically increase your web site traffic. SubmitWolf offers a very impressive list of features such as Site Ranking to find out where you rank on the search engines by specific keywords, an engine builder, meta-tag generator, and many others. They also have a demo for you to download. More details can be found here: http://www.trellian.com/swolf/. SubmitWolf Pro $95.00

AddWeb Pro also has a very impressive list of features but the one that Stands out for us is Automatic Submission to Yahoo and Snap.com, where SubmitWolf does not. AddWeb Pro is much slower than SubmitWolf by far and cost a little more than SubmitWolf. Both have their individual features that make them worth every penny you spend. AddWeb Pro currently boast 989 engines, directories and FFA sites. They also have a free download. http://www.cyberspacehq.com/. AddWeb Pro $129.00

I suggest that you download both trial programs and try them both, then you decide which is best for you.

2.) Email and News Reader Programs. Any effective marketer will need an email/news reader program. There are many on the market and many of them are free. These include Netscape Messenger, Outlook, Outlook Express, Endora, AOL, and many others. These programs are very customizable and allow you to add signature files, reply to addresses, Send to, Blind Carbon Copy, and Carbon Copy. I suggest that you definitely create and add a signature file to the bottom of all your out going emails explaining who you are, what you do and what makes you better than your competition.

The news reader is also very important for an online marketer and enables you to read and post messages to the NewsGroups. NewsGroups are a very good way to bring quality leads to your site. There is probably over 50,000 newsgroups in existence today on just about every topic imaginable. Find the ones specific to your business and get involved, let your signature file at the bottom of your messages do the work for you. You do not want to just post blatant advertisements to the newsgroups as most of them do not allow advertisements.

2A.) Bulk Email Programs. A word of caution here, although Congress says that unsolicited email is not illegal, it is still unacceptable netiquette. You can very well lose all credibility for you and your business, be kicked off your ISP and possibly lose your domain. You can find many bulk email programs by going to http://www.download.com/ and searching for bulk email.

If you insist on Bulk Email, do it the correct way and buy targeted email lists. These are lists that contain email addresses of people who have stated that they don't mind receiving unsolicited emails about particular subjects. These lists can be bought in different sizes of anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 email addresses.

Be aware that there are many companies on the net that create these lists by automatic email retrieval programs and do not have the peoples' authority to add them to the list. These work by searching the net collecting email addresses that are published on any and all websites. Before you buy any list, research the company you are buying from and also ask them questions like: Are these email addressees of people who opted to be on the list? Are these email addresses new, or How old are the addresses? Are there any duplicates in the list, and are they sorted?

Many bulk email programs now have a sort of "sendmail" program built in so that you are not sending mail through your ISP's SMTP server, however if you are a responsible emailer you should not need this feature. I would also suggest that you talk to your ISP before you start sending hundreds of emails to find out what their policies are on bulk mailings.

General rule of thumb is if you are sending a hundred emails you will not need a bulk email program, but if are sending thousands you had better have one of these programs at your side, they have become very sophisticated right down to personalized messages for each recipient. Targeted Bulk Email can be very effective for your online advertising campaign if done responsibly.

3.) FTP Program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. What the heck is that you ask? An FTP program is a piece of software that allows you to move files on and off of the internet. FTP is how you publish your files to the internet so that everyone can access them. FTP allows you make up to the minute changes to your pages (with an HTML editor) and then instantaneously publish your changes to the net. The FTP program that we use here at RB Associates is WS_FTP Pro by Ipswitch: http://www.ipswitch.com -- although there are many on the internet as free downloads such as CuteFTP and a host of others.

4.) Site Tracker. I highly suggest adding a Tracker to your website. Trackers will tell you where your visitors found your website, keywords they used, what country they're from, day of the week, time and a many other statistics that will allow you to tweak and change your website and really know what advertising is working for you. There are many Free Trackers available but the one I suggest is http://www.extreme-dm.com/.

5.) HTML Editor. As with many of the suggested tools there are as many HTML editors on the market as there are marketers. However there are certain things that that you should look for in an editor. Make sure the one you select is a WYSIWYG editor. For those of you who do not know what this is, it stands for "What You See Is What You Get". This will insure that what you see in the editor is what your visitors will see when they view your pages on the net. Another feature that is very important is easily viewing the actual HTML source. HTML actually stands for Hypertext Mark Up Language because it is all just text that is created with normal ASCII characters. Sometimes you need to access this text to make the necessary changes that some WYSIWYG can not do in WYSIWYG mode. Another feature that you should look for is Preview Mode, this will allow you to actually view the changes in your default browser before you FTP your pages to your web server. Another feature that is a must have, is a Spell Checker, and always use it before publishing your pages to save yourself a lot of embarrassment. Many editors can be found at http://www.download.com by searching for HTML editor.

Just a short note: An alternative to FTP and an HTML Editor is Microsoft FrontPage. This is a very nice Publisher, Server, Editor package that keeps track of your hyper links, pages and a vast variety of other things on your pages. FrontPage also includes some real nice features like page counters, time stamps, pre-made websites, frames pages and many others. One draw back to FrontPage is that your hosting ISP must have FrontPage Server Extensions installed on your domain in order for the publisher and web bots to work. However, if your ISP does offer FrontPage hosting I recommend FrontPage highly as it is a very simple way for the newbie to maintain and publish their pages.

6.) Graphic Programs. You should have a couple of good graphics programs. One program that I would suggest for the newbie is a shareware program called Paint Shop Pro and it can be found at http://www.jasc.com/, this program has a lot of nice features for the buck. If your budget allows, another excellent program we use is PhotoShop by Adobe and is also available as time limited trial at http://www.adobe.com; they also have some other nice graphic programs such as ImageStyler, ImageReady and some Animation software that is out of this world. If you're into 3D I suggest obtaining a copy of FontFX http://www.erain.com and/or Xara 3D http://www.xara.com/; both these program are relatively inexpensive for the features they offer. Last but not least, if GIF animation is your thing try downloading Ulead's GIF Animator http://www.ulead.com/. Just a word of advice, go easy on the animation as too much animation can spoil the whole effect you're trying to create.

Above, we have discussed only a few tools, there are many available today but we feel that these are some of the essential tools for the online marketer. If you have a tool that you currently use and feel that it is an essential part of your online marketing efforts, please drop us note at tools@rbdesigns.com. Please note: All the tools mentioned above are available as downloads either as a time limited trial, shareware or freeware.

Robert Boilard is a professional developer and CEO for RB Associates (http://www.rbdesigns.com). Robert is also a Chapter Chairman of the International WebMasters Association and an International Co-Chairperson for the IWA Awards Committee, member of the HTML Writers Guild and the Microsoft SiteBuilder Network.

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