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What Do Busy SEM Professionals Keep in Their Toolkit?

Written by: Kalena Jordan

Article Overview: Kalena Jordan of Search Engine College reviews a range of time-saving tools and software relating to the search industry.

What Do Busy SEM Professionals Keep in Their Toolkit?

As a busy professional in the hectic Search Engine Marketing industry, my time is limited. Severely limited. Sometimes I feel like I need to travel at warp speed just to keep up with the demands of this industry!

To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. Here are a few of my favorites:


Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets

This little gem is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. I use it to invoice all my clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.

Staff can use the stop-watch to time the various tasks they do for certain clients and then press a button to bill those clients automatically, based on the hours logged in the timesheet. Freshbooks offers plug-ins for a wide range of third-party tools such as BaseCamp, PayPal and 2Checkout and provides the option of email or ground-mail invoicing. I've raved about this product so much that they put my testimonial on their home page!

Price: Free for 3 clients or less

Link: http://www.freshbooks.com/


XML Sitemaps Generator

For fast and easy XML sitemap creation, the free generator from XML-Sitemaps.com can’t be beaten. It not only trawls through all levels of your site, but it gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site, plus it generates the XML file for you in both compressed and un-compressed versions.

The online generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages, but there’s also a low-cost script-based version for larger sites. It can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done. The XML Sitemaps Generator also gets endorsement from Google by being included in their List of 3rd Party Plugins for Google Sitemaps.

Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less

Link: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/


Proposal Kit

I discovered ProposalKit when I was searching for a sample contract for my SEO business. Basically, ProposalKit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.

You simply flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for the initial sales pitch, the planning stage, estimating, contracting, project timelines, analysis and even invoicing. For SEO consultants, ProposalKit’s Contract Kit even includes a Search Engine Optimization Services contract.

Creating a proposal from scratch can be a real pain. ProposalKit provide the structure, layout, design, instructions and examples to get you well on your way before you even get started. What I like best about this tool is the range of ProposalPack templates and ready-made contracts you can buy as add-ons to suit certain industries, such as Web Design, SEO, Hosting and the like. The smartly designed, colorful templates also give your proposals a slick and professional edge, regardless of your business size.

Price: From USD 47.00

Link: http://www.proposalkit.com/kits/pkhelp.htm


ClickTracks

I use ClickTracks Optimizer exclusively to track the visitor metrics of my sites and those of my clients. Many in this industry claim that Google Analytics is just as good as ClickTracks, but I disagree. While it's good that Google Analytics is free and the depth of data is impressive, I personally find the interface clunky to use and not very intuitive. The reports and graphs also seem to take a long time to load, even on broadband.

While ClickTracks Optimizer is a bit on the expensive side, the depth and accuracy of data just can't be beaten, in my opinion. The ability to flag individual visitors or groups of visitors based on unique identifiers (such as all persons who visited page x or all persons who bought product d) provides a level of analysis that other analytical packages can't compete with.

The visual analysis ClickTracks provides is probably its best known feature, with statistical data overlaying actual screenshots of your web site pages. While many of my clients find web site statistics a bore, this visual display can impress even the most skeptical. The depth of referrer data is superb, with the ability to drill down to IP address and the precise keyword search that triggered the referral. The WYSIWYG interface is simple to use and gives you true "at a glance" stats. The ability to export reports into Word, PDF or Excel is another plus.

Every time I use ClickTracks, I shake my head in wonder at how I ever managed with the far inferior analytics packages I used before.

Price: From USD 76.00 per month

Link: http://www.clicktracks.com


AWeber

This is a recent discover of mine. I was tired of using two different tools to manage my autoresponders and newsletter subscriptions lists when a friend pointed out the fact that I could use AWeber to manage both.

The beauty of AWeber is that they manage ALL your mailing lists on your behalf and make it simple to send campaigns and emails to each list individually, or broadcast to all your lists at once. Members can send an unlimited number of campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of approved opt-in lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help you create campaigns. Various types of subscription web forms are created at the press of a button and you have a central control panel to access statistics so you know at a glance which sign-up forms are more effective. They even offer split testing for this specific purpose.

AWeber also have a very diligent verification and opt-in process, which weeds out drive-bys from genuine subscribers and ensures your subscribers know exactly why they are receiving correspondence from you. AWeber claim to have 99.34% email deliverability rates and I can understand why. All messages have personalization features and can be run through CAN-SPAM compliance testing prior to sending to ensure higher deliverability.

Probably the biggest advantage of AWeber is that their service is very affordable with free unlimited customer support.

Price: From USD 19.95 per month

Link: http://www.aweber.com


JROX

After months of searching for the perfect affiliate software that did everything we wanted it to for our Search Engine College affiliate program, we finally chose JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) for the job. We first heard good things about it via webmaster forums and then read user reviews on Tucows. After a couple of days integrating it into our site, testing, tweaking and testing some more, it pretty much runs itself.

JAM is a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up email tools, mass email broadcasting, custom URLs and the ability to create up to 10 affiliate downline levels. It offers affiliates groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying their referrals and commissions and an organized marketing tools area for storage of banners, links and promotional materials. What’s particularly useful is that it integrates with both PayPal and our 3rd party payment gateway 2Checkout, meaning that whenever a course sale is made via one of our affiliate links, the commission is automatically calculated and communicated from the payment gateway to JAM. Overall, the features of JAM are very impressive compared to similar products on the market.

Price: Free for 50 affiliates or less

Link: http://jam.jrox.com


I use all of these tools on a daily basis and I truly don’t know how I’d function without them. Which got me to thinking, what “must have” tools do other busy SEM professionals keep in their toolkit?

To find out, I surveyed a few of the busiest industry rock stars that I know and asked them to share their favorite tools. I sent my request to:

1) Andy Beal, Owner of Marketing Pilgrim
2) Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide
3) Jill Whalen, Owner of HighRankings.com
4) Karon Thackston, Owner of Marketing Words
5) Kim Krause-Berg, Founder of Cre8asite Forums
6) Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOMoz

Here’s what they came back with:


Andy Beal

Owner, Marketing Pilgrim - http://www.marketingpilgrim.com


Andy likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

2) Google Analytics - http://www.google-analytics.com

3) Backlinkwatch.com - http://www.backlinkwatch.com

4) All of Jim Boykin’s tools - http://www.webuildpages.com/tools

5) QuickBooks for accounting - http://quickbooks.intuit.com

6) Ranks.nl for density checking - http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

7) Rex Swain for checking server stuff - http://www.rexswain.com

8) FireFox plugin - http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

“This is not all, but just some quick picks…”



Jennifer Laycock

Editor, Search Engine Guide - http://www.searchengineguide.com


Jennifer likes:

1) ClickTracks - http://www.clicktracks.com

2) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

3) EditPlus - http://www.editplus.com

4) Microsoft Excel - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

5) GoogleReader - http://www.google.com/reader/view/


“Then of course Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type since those are the three blog platforms I use…”


Jill Whalen –
Owner, HighRankings.com - http://www.highrankings.com


Jill likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

2) Basecamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com

“Plus a bunch of Firefox extensions that come in really handy…”


Karon Thackston

Owner, Marketing Words, Inc. - http://www.marketingwords.com


Karon likes:

1) Marketing Experiments – http://www.MarketingExperiments.com

“All the rest of my favorites are books...”



Kim Krause-Berg

Owner and Founder, Cre8asite Forums - http://www.cre8asiteforums.com


Kim likes:

1) BaseCamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com

For accessibility testing:

2) Web Page Analyzer - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

3) Colorblind Web Page Filter - http://colorfilter.wickline.org

4) Web Accessibility Toolbar - http://www.wat-c.org/tools/

5) Opera Mini for mobile web browsing - http://www.operamini.com

6) Sizer for resolution testing - http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

“My tools are a bit different because I no longer do SEO and for my own sites…”



Rand Fishkin –

CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
http://www.seomoz.org


Rand likes:

1) Indextools for analytics - http://www.indextools.com

2) Wordtracker for keyword research - http://www.wordtracker.com

3) Keyword Discovery for keyword research - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

4) Google Webmaster Central for all sorts of yummy data - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

5) Yahoo! Site Explorer - possibly my number one tool; I love the link & URL information they provide - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

“In terms of tools, at SEOmoz we almost exclusively use our own stuff…”


So there you have it; a few old favorites and a few new time-saving tools to try. Warp speed, here we come!



Contributor photos available from:

Andy Beal photo at http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/andy-beal-online-marketing-expert/

Jennifer Laycock photo at http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/bio.html

Jill Whalen photo at http://www.highrankings.com/av-2.jpg

Karon Thackston photo at http://www.marketingwords.com/aboutus.html

Kim Krause Berg photo at http://www.usabilityeffect.com/about.html

Rand Fishkin photo at http://www.seomoz.org/team/randfish

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Article Tags: collaboration staff, free generator, google, ground mail, html sitemap, invoicing, little gem, marketing industry, paypal, plug ins, professional image, project management tools, search engine marketing, site upload, stop watch, third party tools, time tracking, warp speed, xml file, xml sitemap



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