BizTech101.com -- "the best social media and web tools for business"

Tool:
Google Trends: Trend-discovery and Trend-Tracking Tool

URL:
google.com/trends

Key benefit:
Being able to discover new trends and opportunities and stay ahead of the game.

Tip:
Discover how popular certain products, product categories, people or events are. You can also use the tool to compare interest for up to five products or concepts. The underlying assumption here is that the trends can [...]

Tool:
Google Wave

URL:
wave.google.com

Key benefit:
Great new tool from Google. I will try to describe it in two words only: HOSTED CONVERSATION. According to Google, Google Wave is “an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and [...]

Tool:
Keyword Popularity Estimator by Google

URL:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

Key benefit:
Just like Yahoo! tool described earlier on this blog, this keyword tool helps you identify the most popular keywords. This is extremely useful when designing your website, naming your website pages, doing SEO (search engine optimization) or when buying keyword ads. Even more importantly, the tool can help you estimate the online demand for your [...]

Tool:
Twitter

URL:
http://www.twitter.com

Key benefit:
“Microblogging” tool that helps you stay connected with your clients and other organizations or individuals that you want to “follow”

Tip:
Use Twitter to brand yourself / your business and position yourself as the leader in your field.  Present only very useful content: great news, insights, tips, URLs or other relevant information. Then start following others, [...]

Tool:
Google Site Optimizer

URL:
http://google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Key benefit:
Try A/B Split testing or multivariate testing to optimize your website

Tip:
Start out with the easier A/B Experiment and once you feel comfortable with that, move on to the Multivariate Experiment.  If you don’t feel comfortable copying and pasting the HTML code into your test and control pages, ask an IT support person [...]

Tool:
AWStats log file analysis

URL:
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Key benefit:
Get accurate results for your website analytics

Tip:
Page tag web analytics programs (e.g. Google Analytics) are handy and provide a rich graphical interface but they don’t always capture the complete picture as accurately as a true log file analyzer. Try using both… AWStats and Google Analytics then compare the difference.  For [...]

Tool:
Domain and website value tool: dnScoop.com

URL:
http://www.dnscoop.com

Key benefit:
Assess the value of your domain name / website

Tip:
Use dnScoop to assess the value of your site, but also to quickly learn your (or your competitor’s) Alexa traffic rank, Google page rank and number of incoming links.  

Price:
Free

Cyri:
What does Cyri think? Check back soon! Score:

Ivan:
DNScoop.com calculates the value of  domain name / website  based [...]

Tool:
Search Engine Saturation: MarketLeap

URL:
http://www.marketleap.com

Key benefit:
Identify how well search engines “know” your website

Tip:
Go to Marketleap.com, then choose Search Engine Saturation link. Enter your URL, then learn how many pages of your website have been included in various search engine indexes. If the result is zero or very low, make sure to fix this either by removing [...]

Tool:
Business Networking: LinkedIn

URL:
http://www.linkedin.com

Key benefit:
Leverage your business network you have developed over the years

Tip:
Make sure you fully complete your profile, apparently you are 40 times more likely to be contacted for your expertise if you do so. This involves filling in your work, education history etc. as well as having at least three recommendations. [...]

Tool:
Job Search: SimplyHired.com

URL:
http://www.simplyhired.com

Key benefit:
Save a lot of time… instead of searching dozens of job sites, you can go to one place that aggregates the results from the major job sites.

Tip:
SimplyHired.com is good for looking for a job or contract work but also good to see what your competitors are up to with their hiring. [...]