Online & Social Media
Twitter:
Mashable: Has a great downloadable Twitter guide on getting started and best practices. Everything you ever wanted to know about Twitter.
Twit Tip: Another great site with daily tips and tutorials. If your just starting, here are two links to check out: 13 Tips and Tutorials for Beginners and 20 Must Read Twitter Tips for Small Businesses
Book: Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
Blogging
Getting Started with WordPress WP Beginner – lots of tutorials and information on installation, hosting, plugins and other good info on using WordPress.
I also like Problogger. I posted about this last spring when I did the 31 Days to a Better Blog series. This is geared more towards an established blog. Click here to view more details
Also check out Mashable’s Smal Business Guide. Lots of resources and articles on social media.
Photographer’s blog theme: Prophotoblogs.com. This is the most full featured WordPress theme available for photographers, and the easiest to use. Could also be used as your main website. There is a post about the new updates here.
Mashable, and Inside Facebook are good resources for the latest on Facebook.
Website Services
I used a Flash Site for years and this year switched over to WordPress for all my websites and blogs. WordPress sites I have used and recommend are:
Graph Paper Press I also wrote a post on Graph Paper Press They have a nice full screen theme called Widescreen.
Woo Themes I have used, and I am using their new Canvas theme for another site I am working on right now.
Solostream is the theme I use for the Marketing Takeout site.
All except for Prophotoblogs have free themes available, however I really recommend going with a paid theme for the support and better theme options panel.
Online Carts and Galleries
iThink Development is a web marketing and design firm. Michael has helped me on a couple of projects and I have been more than happy with his services. He’s prompt, he returns calls and emails, and he can explain web techie stuff so it’s understandable.
Web Hosting
I’ve hosted with Go Daddy, Host Gator and Blue Host. All were good hosts, but I liked Blue Host the best. I liked Blue Host’s cpanel backend and it was the easiest to use. Plus the WordPress installation was the quickest and most seamless of the three. I didn’t care for Godaddy’s control panel and their account login panel. Host Gator has a cpanel backend as well, but their account page was not as simple and seamless as Blue Host. Price wise they are all about the same.
Web contact forms
Wufoo lets you make up to three free contact forms for your website. The service is easy to use, and you can embed the form in your website or blog, or provide a link to the form.
Email marketing
I currently use Mail Chimp for my email marketing. It’s simple to use and set up. It’s free is you have less than 500 subscribers and send 3000 or less emails a month. Aweber is another excellent service. Also check out icontact, Vertical Response and Constant Contact.
Online Survey’s
Survey Gizmo great online survey tool. Nice reporting featured and survey can be emailed or embedded in your website or blog. Free for up to 250 survey’s a month. Survey Gizmo
Online Magazine Flipbooks
These free services let you upload documents, like magazines, brochures, pricelists and create a flipbook type magazine. These magazines can be embedded and viewed on your blog or website.
SEO Tools
Seo-Browser – see how your site like a search engine sees it
Check your site’s Page Rank
Check for back links to your site
The strongest pages on your site
Hubspot has tools for your website, Facebook page and Twitter
Misc Tutorials
Creating An Online Presence for Photographers Workbook
Video Services
