Over the years I’ve trawled the Internet for great resources to help me improve as an Internet Marketing expert. The following are the best free resources for anyone that wants to learn or improve their online marketing skills. Bookmark this page now! These links will help you get better at online marketing!
They will help you grasp critical concepts like why authority is so important, why you need to understand your customers and why setting meaningful goals is so important to your success.
1. Conversation Marketing – Ian Lurie
This free book is available online and is concise and easy to interpret. The overall concept underlines exactly how important social networking is and will continue to be in future. The key is engaging with your audience in a human voice and removing business speak. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are all very important platforms to enable these conversations. The books foundation is “select don’t accumulate”, it is vital that budding online marketers understand this.
Find out more here: www.conversationmarketing.com/cmonline/intro.cfm
2. Authority Rules – Brian Clark
I found this book recently, it is an interesting read and will shock you (literally!) into how and why authority is so important to internet marketing. Don’t worry if you are not the offline authority on your subject, you can outperform your peers because of “perceived” authority. This is an important concept and well worth a read. Especially as it is free!
Find out more here: www.authorityrules.com
3. SEOmoz Ranking Factors – Rand Fiskin et al
I remember the first version of this (2007) and it is a great way to get straight to the bits of SEO that matter and will help improve your visibility and position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The updated version will help you hit the ground running when setting up or maintaining a websites SEO strategy. Really easy to read and filled with valuable SEO information as recommended by the best in the industry (Including my old boss Richard Baxter!).
Find out more here: www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
4. UseIt.com – Jakob Neilsen
I’ve been reading up on Jakob’s Alertbox material for ages now (Since I started in website design in 1999…) and it is always straightforward and easy to apply. A lot of the posts go way back to 1996 and some of the issues discussed are no longer a problem, so avoid the really old posts and you can’t go too far wrong. The post on navigation and Information Architecture is particularly good for online marketers: www.useit.com/alertbox/ia-mistakes.html
Find out more here: www.useit.com
Hope you find these as useful as I do. I often return back to these for ideas and solutions for any particular online marketing challenge I have. If you know of a great free resource for budding online marketers please add a comment, if I like it I might add it!
