A good marketing tool makes your job easier without adding additional work. The following marketing tools can help you achieve more and increase your marketing effectiveness. If you can recommend a great marketing tool to add to the list, please contact us.
SEO Tools
Brokenlinkcheck.com
This free tool scans an entire website for broken links and provides a list of URLs of broken links.
Check My Links (Google Chrome Extension)
Check My Links is a Chrome extension that will quickly highlight links that are broken on any page in red. You can then contact sites with broken links and suggest your site as a replacement (as long as it is relevant).
Copyscape
A tool that helps you scan the Web for duplicate content or sites that are scraping your content.
GetListed.org
Helps local businesses find local directories for citation opportunities such as Yelp, Superpages, and CitySearch.
Google’s Keyword Tool
Google’s free tool for finding estimated search volume of specific phrases.
Google Trends
A free tool that shows search volume for a keyword phrase over time relative to its peak.
Google Webmaster Tools
A free tool that provides a lot of useful information about your website like inbound links, 404 errors, sitelinks, and more.
Link Detox
Finds toxic links to your site and exports a data file that can be uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools.
Moz
A suite of software tools to help improve SEO of sites including identifying SEO problems by scanning your site and tracking your rankings over time.
Outdated Content Finder
Use this tool to find outdated content, then offer to update the information (while including a link to your site).
Portent Content Idea Generator
Generates clever article headline ideas from the keyword you enter.
Rapportive
A powerful free Gmail plugin that provides information about the person you are emailing. It can also be used to find almost anyone’s email address.
Raven Tools
A suite of SEO campaign management tools including keyword rank tracking. It also creates great looking graphs and tools automatically from your data.
Screaming Frog
A desktop app that will crawl any site and return useful SEO data like outbound links and 404 errors.
SEMRush
A pro-membership allows you to find useful keyword data on your competitors including a list of keywords that they rank highly for in Google and keywords they are targeting with Google Adwords.
Yahoo Smush.it
This tool will “losslessly” shrink the size of images. Great for speeding up your site loading time if you have a lot of images.
YouTube Keyword Tool
This tool provides estimates for keyword phrases used in YouTube and suggests similar keyword phrases.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a simple free tool that scrapes Google suggest and provides a list of related keyword phrases.
Tynt
Tynt will add java script to your site so that when anyone copies and pastes content from your site a link will be automatically added.
Optify
SEO analysis tools that help you track your keywords and rankings. Optify shows which organizations are visiting your site and how visitors are arriving to your site in real-time.
SoloSEO Link Search Tool
A good tool that suggests advanced search queries for finding links related to a keyword phrase.
Link Research Tools
Ahrefs Site Explorer
Another tool with a large database of links that provides extensive data on inbound links and useful metrics about your link profile such as the distribution of anchor text and the percentage of sitewide links.
Bing Site Explorer
This tool is found within Bing Webmaster Tools and provides information about who is linking to any site you enter.
Open Site Explorer
SEOMoz’s tool that provides link metrics and referring URLs for a webpage or website. It requires paid membership for full details on who is linking to a website.
Majestic SEO
This tool set provides extensive data on who is linking to your site and details about these links. It has one of the largest databases of links available.
Social Media Tools
All My Tweets
This simple website allows you to view a large number (over 3,000) of the latest Tweets from an individual on a single page. This can be used to find recommendations from top marketers on Twitter or to study your competition.
FollowerWonk
A useful tool that allows you to search Twitter bios for keywords to find relevant people to follow.
Klout
Klout scores the level of influence an individual has in social media.
Learning Tools
Distilled U
Online training for learning the fundamentals and advanced tactics of SEO by reading modules. You can also view dozens of streaming Distilled conference videos. Membership is $40 per month.
Inbound Marketing University
18 free online courses on inbound marketing taught by well known online marketers. After taking the classes you can take a multiple choice exam to earn Hubspot’s inbound marketing certification.
Lynda
A great paid video tutorial site with thousands of lessons related to marketing like Excel pivot tables, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, and CSS. Membership starts at $25 per month.
Market Motive
Good online classes on online marketing that are taught by experts in the field.
Marketing Profs Recorded Webinars
Marketing webinars led by marketing professionals. Several are free with registration and most require membership.
Making it Click
Online marketing training courses taught by some of the most well known experts in the field including Danny Dover, author of Search Engine Optimization Secrets and Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz.
Moz Academy
Instructional videos by Rand Fishkin and Moz staff that explain the basic concepts of inbound marketing including link building, social media, and content marketing.
2013 Mozcon Video Bundle
37 videos of online marketing talks by speakers at the 2013 Mozcon conference in Seattle. The topics cover a blend of big picture and tactical marketing topics.
Productivity Tools
TextExpander (Mac)
This is a time-saving application that runs in the background and can output a selection of text (like a standard email reply) when you enter a keyboard shortcode. There is a one-time cost of $30 after the trial period.
More Useful Tools
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a useful tool that is named after robots that are actually human. It is great for outsourcing a lot of small tasks like filling out surveys or writing short pieces of content for a very low cost.
Boomerang
A Gmail plugin that allows you to schedule outgoing emails for a specific time in the future.
Constant Contact
Software for running email marketing campaigns with professional HTML templates.
Crazy Egg
Provides heat maps for your website to see where visitors are clicking.
Elance
Elance is a marketplace of freelancers including writers who can write content for your site.
Five Second Test
This is a great tool for gathering user feedback about your site design. People view a screenshot for five seconds and then answer a brief survey that you create. You can earn free tests by participating in tests of other sites.
Flickr
Find great Creative Commons photos to use on your blog or provide photos that anyone can use (then ask them for a link attribution).
Graphic River
A great place to buy affordable stock images and illustrations for as little as $1.
Hello Bar
Provides a script that will add a call to action at the top of your site that people will notice and click on.
Hubspot
A system for online marketing that helps you generate leads and monitor your online marketing analytics including SEO and social media metrics.
IFTTT
IFTTT creates recipes that allow you to automate tasks when a certain event occurs using “if then that” statements. For example if you post to Facebook then post the update to Twitter. There are virtually unlimited combinations that work with dozens of applications like Evernote, Gmail, etc.
Inbound.org
Recommended inbound marketing articles curated and ranked by votes by the community.
iStock Photo
A site providing inexpensive professional stock photos that are great for your website or blog.
Libsyn
A low-cost podcast hosting service that is used by some of the top marketing podcasters.
Shutterstock
Another quality stock photo site that is less expensive than iStock Photo.
Slide Rocket
An online tool for making great looking presentations that can be embedded on webpages. Recommended in the book Duct Tape Marketing.
Themeforest
A great place to buy great WordPress themes for about $35.
Unbounce
Unbounce makes it very easy to create custom landing pages that can gather lead information. You can also easily set up A/B tests to find the most effective variation of a landing page.
WordPress.org
A great open source content management system that can run blogs and regular websites.
Yesware
A simple Gmail plugin that allows you to track if an email is opened, send canned email templates, and more.
99 Designs
This service allows you to set up a contest to crowdsource a logo or design project for a few hundred dollars. There are many submissions from designers (that range in quality) and you choose the one design that you like.
To request that a tool be reviewed for this list, email csipe84(at)gmail.com.