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 Forms: Web-based surveys and other data collection

URL:
docs.google.com

Key benefit:
Enables you to collect data from customers or others using Web forms… works great for online surveys. The best part is it’s easy to use, no web development or database skills required!

Tip:
Try using Google Forms for quick surveys where you want to poll your customers, employees [...]

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:
iGoogle

URL:
http://www.igoogle.com

Key benefit:
Great tool to help you stay on top of all new trends and industry news

Tip:
Start your day with iGoogle:  review all important industry news before you leave home. Receive updates from carefully selected  websites and blogs.

Price:
Free

Cyri:
What does Cyri think? Check back shortly. Score: TBD

Ivan:
Customize your iGoogle page to receive RSS feeds from [...]

Tool:
Google Documents

URL:
http://docs.google.com

Key benefit:
Great tool to help you upload, edit and share your documents online

Tip:
Use this tool to upload your important documents and take them along “with you” wherever you go.  No need for memory stick any longer. You can access your documents anytime, anywhere… (no wonder this is called “cloud computing” : the documents go [...]

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:
Usereffect.com’s Split Test Calculator

URL:
http://usereffect.com/split-test-calculator

Key benefit:
Quickly see whether your results from a split testing are significant and warrant action.

Tip:
You should always be experimenting when conducting any kind of online or email marketing campaign, changes to website design, etc.  Use this tool to see if the results you are getting from your experiments (i.e. changing a variable [...]

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:
Network Solutions Domain Name Tools

URL:
http://www.statbrain.com

Key benefit:
It helps you assess  the traffic volume of various websites (expressed in estimated number of visits per day)

Tip:
Use this tool to research  your competition – assess their web marketing effectiveness relative to your site.

Price:
Free

Cyri:
For some reason, it crashed on me a few times, maybe still a bit rough around the [...]

Tool:
Archive.org – Way Back Machine

URL:
http://www.archive.org

Key benefit:
To help you find “old” content on the web: the content that is no longer available live

Tip:
Have you ever looked for information on a certain website only to learn that the site had been updated and the information that you were looking for was no longer available. The good news [...]