1. Google Analytics
Probably the best-known analytic tool out there, Google Analytics provides invaluable insight into your website traffic. It helps you identify targeted keywords and determine which pages are receiving the most traffic and yielding the best conversion rates. Trace ecommerce transactions to PPC campaigns and keywords. You can even perform basic benchmarking and compare your site with others in your industry.

2. Google Webmaster Tools
This is a great tool for maximizing your site’s visibility on the search engines. See how Google crawls and indexes your site. Identify specific problems the spiders are having accessing your site. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also specify you would like the URLs Google indexes to appear. You can connect your Webmaster Tools account directly to your Google Analytics account.

3. Yahoo Web Analytics
Yahoo’s answer to Google Analytics, YWA is a powerful analytics tool that goes an extra mile since integrating Index Tools, a recent acquisition. Its claim to fame is that it now provides insight into the demographics and category interests of your website visitors.

4. Alexa
Alexa provides free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics and a variety of other metrics about any site – not just your own site! So you can gain invaluable insights into your competitors and industry leaders.

5. SpyFu
This site enables you to legally spy on your online competitors by giving you insight into competitive keywords and AdWord campaigns.

6. Compete
Compete allows you to get a site profile for one site, or to compare up to 3 sites for free (5 if you sign up for a free MyCompete account) providing metrics on unique visitors, referring sites, destination sites and top search terms.

7. Website Grader
One of the newest free tools to hit the web, HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you a detailed look at numerous variables for an overall assessment of how well your site is working. It identifies some basic SEO problems and measures your popularity in social media.

8. Open Site Explorer (formerly SEOmozRank)
This free tool is a link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool. Run your site through it and see what you learn.

9. Smarter Stats
Bundled FREE with every Applied Innovations hosting plan, Smarter Stats from Smarter Tools is a robust analytic tool you can access right from your control panel.

And for Social Media, we have a few more to add:

10. Klout
Billed as the Standard for Influence, Klout allows you to measure the overall online influence of a given Twitter account.

11. Twitalyzer
Although it used to be completely free, Twitalyzer is now largely a paid service. You can still get some interesting, basic information for a given Twitter account, such as their Impact Score, others in their network and commonly used hashtags.

12. Tweet Effect
This free tool allows you to find out which Twitter updates made people follow or leave a given Twitter account (yours or someone else’s!)

13. Tweet Psych
This creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to others in its database. It only works if the account in question has tweeted enough to be measured.

14. TweetMeme
A service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter and organizes them into categories, making it easy to filter out the noise and find out what you’re interested in.

1. Keep in mind that appearance of the website is important to attract visitors and possible clients. However, it is no good for your website to be designed by the greatest professional out there if no one will see it.  For this reason, it is important to register your site with major search engines. Although eventually the primary search engine bots or spiders should crawl your site and index it, it will be a lot faster if you personally tell Google, Yahoo, and Bing that your site is up and running.

Give it a few weeks  and then check to see that your site has been indexed. I find that the best way to perform this is to download and install the Google toolbar, visit your page, and select the Cached Snaphost of Page option in the PageRank menu. Once you see your page left click on “text only version” to see how the spiders see your site.  The more text you see displayed on the cached text only version the better.

2. Install Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Both of these services give you website feedback and errors.  Furthermore, Google Webmaster tools allows you to submit a sitemap of your website letting Google know where all the pages for yours site may be found.

3. Keep in mind that content that you put in your website can attract visitors to your site. So, keep the content interesting, informative and more importantly, original. Do not copy the content or articles from other sites. This will be unhealthy for the online business industry. And besides, some people may have already read the article and will not be attracted to do business with you.

4. It is important to use the Google keyword tool. This tool is part of Google AdWords (not to worry, no AdWords account is actually needed to use the tool). The keyword tool allows any user to see what other people are searching for in Google and how popular the search is.

5.  If you are choosing a new domain always include the keywords that your site is targeting. This will be easier for visitors to know what your business is all about. Instead of letting others know what your business name is, let them know what you are really offering through the keywords that you use in your site. It is more important to get possible clients than to let others know your business name.  In addition, this is also Search Engine Friendly and should help you rank better for the keywords you are targeting.

BONUS: Here is a bonus tip for local business; use tools like Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. These will help you reach a wider range of possible clients by easily getting on the 1^st page of search engine results for local searches. More and more people are turning to the internet to find local business vs. the Yellow Pages.

SEO and other online skills are needed to make a business prosper through the website that you create for your online business. Do not just focus on the products or the services that you are offering. Also do an effort to make your business website as efficient and interesting as possible for you to generate the income that you want from it.

Revolver Commerce brings some much needed add-on applications to the already wonderful ASPDNSF product. These apps can save you a lot of time, and potentially increase sales. I was able to ask Chris McKellar, one of the lead developers at Revolver Commerce about their products. Here’s a couple of the questions I asked:

From customer feedback you’ve received, what might be the most important add-on if someone had to choose just one?

“Product Attributes. Search is a great add-on, but there are a couple others out there as well. Attributes is something that was desperately needed in the ASPDNSF community and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to be able to provide a solution there.”

I see that my purchase of an add-on includes a year of upgrades. Can you tell me about how often they are updated? For example, if ASPDNSF releases a new version, if there’s any compatibility issues, will there be an update to the add-on?

“Add-ons will be updated shortly after ASPDNSF releases new versions. As we add features to the add-ons, we’ll also update our clients with those features. We have no specific roadmap for feature development since it’s highly demand driven from our client base.”

AppliedI customers can log into the control panel  and check out the market place to redeem a 10% off coupon from Revolver Commerce for add-ons to your ASPdotnetstorefront website.

Firefox 3 has many other new features. Among them is a better handling on your computers resources (memory) which equals a quicker more efficient browsing experience.  Other features include a new URL discovery designed to allow you to quickly navigate to the website you want to get to. The address bar will try to find an address you’re typing based on your browsing history.

As always, our customers can purchase a Comodo EV SSL certificate from Applied Innovations at a greatly discounted rate ($349.95 as of the date of this writing).

Although Applied Innovations is an ASP.net specialized web-host, many do not realize that PHP is available to our customers. With the flip of a switch in the HELM control panel, you can enable PHP. Then, with a mySQL database which is included with VS-1 and higher plans, you can install Joomla! for free and have a huge community of PHP/Open Source developers working together to bring you free add-ons such as the famous free shopping cart “Virtuemart“. PHP runs on Windows, and it runs great especially with “Fast CGI” which is installed on AppliedI’s shared webservers. It should be noted that an advantage of Windows and IIS is that you can run ASP.net 3.5 and PHP side-by-side. Something you can not do on Linux (Well, not 100% functionally anyway; see “ASP.net – mod_mono“).

To install any of these blogs just download them, unzip them and then upload the entire folder in a subfolder in your wp-content/themes/ folder. Then select them from the theme manager in WordPress.

Free WordPress Theme #1 – Gone Fishing

Gone Fishing is a fully W3C validated theme that is also widget ready! The included PSD file is layered and labeled and easily modified if you so please.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #2 – The Awesome Blog

Awesome Blog is like no other blog design you’ve probably seen.  It should be easy to modify and tweak to your own settings. We’ve included the PSD file with this blog so you can adjust the header banner with your own text or logos.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #3 – The Sleek Blog

The Sleek Blog is a 3 column blog that is just simply sleek.  It’s a very clean design that’s easy to read and not overly colorful or overwhelming.

The sleek blog also includes the PSD file so the banner images can be modified to your needs.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

We hope you find the three blog themes easy to use and enjoy them. If you make any changes to the themes and wish to share those changes with the community feel free to drop us a line and we’ll make sure it’s posted. 

Happy Blogging!

DotNetInvoice is a comprehensive ASP.NET based invoice and billing system that allows all types of organizations to offer online invoicing and real-time payment processing. Today DotNetInvoice is commonly used by webhosting companies, web design firms,  web developers and consultants of all types.

Professional ASP.NET Invoicing software features

DotNetInvoice includes a large number of features that can be found on their features page and some of the features that really stand out for us include:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Application Integration – DotNetInvoice uses the standard ASP.NET 2.0 membership and roles providers so it can easily be integrated with your existing ASP.NET 2.0 based web application for seemless integration.
  
• Automated Hands-Free Recurring Invoicing – DotNetInvoice supports the ability to setup recurring invoicing on any period of time you wish, days, months or years and then will automatically email your clients their invoice when it comes due.
  
• Support for PayPal Website Payments Pro, Paypal and Authorize.net – Real-time online payments for your invoices, no phone calls, no checks to deposit just setup the site, email your clients and let the payments get submitted and best of all since it’s online your clients can submit payments at anytime, night or day, that’s convenient for them.
  
• Globalization - Out of the box, DotNetInvoice supports the following countries and currencies: Australia (AUD), Canada (CAD), China (CNY), Great Britain (GBP), India (INR), Ireland (EUR), Japan (JPY), New Zealand (NZD), USA (USD).
  
• Graphical reporting - A pictures is worth a thousand words:
  

These are just a few of the features we found most useful in DotNetInvoice and we believe our hosting partners will enjoy. We recommend you visit the DotNetInvoice site and the DotNetInvoice Demo to experience all of the power of this great application.

Special Offering: $40 Off Coupon for DotNetInvoice

DotNetInvoice is compatible with all of our hosting plans but we recommend the VS-1 Small Business hosting plan since it includes 250MB of SQL database spac, full support for ASP.NET 2.0, the ability to run your own SSL certificate (which you’ll need if you’re taking credit card information over the Internet) and starts at just $22.50/month. 

In addition, DotNetInvoice is making a special offering to all Applied Innovations hosted customers and offering $40 off their normal price. Deploying DotNetInvoice will save you time and money and with $40 off you’re already ahead. To access this special offer and any of our other great offers, remember to log into your control panel and select the Marketplace icon.

Today I’ve been introduced to Windows Live Writer by a colleague and thought about sharing this magnificent tool with you.
Basically, Windows Live Writer is a very small application that will allow you to manage your posts directly from your desktop.

This is extremely practical because you don’t need to log into your blog’s admin page anymore. Windows Live Writer stores your admin details so all you have to do is to run the application and start posting!

Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard:

(this is actually how it starts up)

As you probably noticed on the top-right corner, there’s a WordPress logo and our Blog Title there.
This helps you to identify the blog you’re currently posting to (very helpful if you work on multiple blogs).

Windows Live Writer is compatible with the following platforms:

»» Windows Live Spaces
»» SharePoint (Supported by AppliedI)
»» WordPress (Supported by AppliedI)
»» Blogger
»» LiveJournal
»» TypePad
»» Moveable Type
»» Community Server
»» dasBlog (dasblog hosting is offered by appliedi.net)
»» BlogEngine.NET (blogengine.net hosting is offered by appliedi.net)

One of the things I like the most on this small application is its built-in WYSIWYG Editor.
So no more HTML coding for highlights, links or anything else. You can just do it there, using its simple and effective interface.

Did I also mention that it also has its own Spell-Checking engine? It does!
So this is great news to all of you that were worried about that. Not to mention that you won’t need any extra plugin in your blog platform to check for grammar errors.

Another feature that has impressed me is the fact that you can blog without being online.
So now I can comfortably write my articles while watching TV or even on the kitchen while I wait for my pizza to be ready. Impressive, isn’t it?
It will basically save your posts on the local hard drive, and it will publish them as soon as you connect to the internet.

So I guess we won’t have reasons not to update our blogs anymore.

Windows Live Writer Beta Download page:
http://get.live.com/en-us/betas/writer_betas

NOTE: During the installation, the InstallShield Wizard might appear to have crashed during the "Checking for Installed Products" step.
While I don’t believe this is normal (most likely a bug), it didn’t really crash. I personally had to wait almost 5 minutes for that step to complete; so don’t panic.