Jaki Gaudet

Aside from the obvious (Google, Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook), these are sites that I have in my ‘favorites’ folder. They can help inspire creativy and also strengthen your marketing communication strategies. You’re bound to benefit from one (or all) of these sites.

1. www.marketingprofs.com: A site with a plethora of in-depth articles, case studies, seminars, how-to’s, marketing tools and more! It's a rich and trusted resource that offers actionable know-how to help you market strategically. They also have a newsletter series called “Get to the po!nt” which offers bite-sized advice and tactics on topics like Email and Direct Marketing, B2B Marketing, and much more.

2. www.stumbleupon.com: – Channel surf the Internet with StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon lets you discover and share great websites. They deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences and recommended by your friends or one of 8 million+ other's with interests similar to you. If you select your preferences properly then the site can inspire creativity which is useful if you need to redesign websites, or give your branding a fresh look.

3. www.monitter.com: Obtain leads from Twitter using Monitter. Monitter lets you enter a zipcode, a radius, and plug in 3 keywords. Within seconds you get live streaming Tweets from people who have used those keywords. It's a good local lead generation method.

4. www.tinyurl.com: Need your url shortened to fit on Twitter, or any direct marketing postcards you're mailing? Tinyurl is a site that lets you cut the characters on any url down to a manageable length making it easy for people to remember and enter.

Before (51 characters): http://www.thealliedgrp.com/supply/fulfillment.html
After (25 characters): http://tinyurl.com/tag3pl

5. www.websitegrader.com: – How well is your website doing? Does it have SEO problems? Is it generating leads? How popular is it within social media? Website Grader will give you these answers for free. So, if you don’t have the budget to properly have your site optimized on a regular basis, then you should be using this site. Just enter your website URL and click ‘Generate Report’.