Gifts All Around

Happy Holidays all.  In the spirit of giving the topic today is .... (Drum Roll) ...Free stuff!!!  Okay, okay, there is a "horn a plenty" of free today.  How about this?  Useful free stuff for the partner ecosystem. 

I recently attended a conference that was truly packed with great info, interesting people and generally was worth the entry fee.  On the last afternoon, 4 hours listening to a wonderful speaker, Susan Sweeney educate the room on different aspects of internet marketing.  One of the sessions Susan lead was devoted to Great Internet Tools and Gadgets.  It provided me the inspiration to sort through internet tools and highlight the ones that I think have the greatest leverage in the partnering business.  I encourage you to visit Susan's site an even broader list of gadgets as well as her books and services.

In addition to Susan's talk and my experience, I surveyed colleagues and business partners to assemble the master list.  A couple of notes.  First, programs like Facebook and LinkedIn that we discussed earlier are not included and secondly this is a much edited list.

MailChimp  These folks offer free mailings for lists under 500 addresses.  The tools to create nice looking email are on the site.  They have a huge library of videos and FAQs to help you run a successful campaign and a dashboard so that you can monitor the progress.  Who doesn't need more SPAM?

Content Circles  Share files with partners outside or inside the firewall at the drop of a hat.  Content Circles allow you to work with together on documents and everyone is kept up to date with the latest version. Think about working on a coop marketing program or trying to get coordinated for a multi-company seminar or sharing working documents with clients during a consulting engagement.  Document management for the rest of us.

Knowem  This site checks a long list of web sites and social media services for your company's name and allows you to reserve it. This is a huge time saver and maybe helps you to check sites that your staff would not get to.

The Way Back Machine  Kind of an interesting notion, you can go back and check versions of web sites.  Maybe you are looking for historical information on a competitor or trying to remember who the old sales VP was for a partner.

Issuu  Very interesting site, PDF can be cumbersome on the web, especially for rich documents.  Well, Issuu will take a PDF document and turn it into a web friendly Flash file.  There are thumbnails to flip through, pages to flip like a book or pamphlet.  Make your price book or parts catalog sexy.

Google Analytics  This is the tool everyone should be using with your web site.  Got to pay attention to the site, but why pay cash to do so.  This should be more than enough for any small or medium sized business.

Free Conference Call  Don't pay for con calls, ATT is big enough.  Signup here and hold your staff meeting with your traveling staff for free.

Enjoy.