Search Engine of Independent Retailers and Small Business Resources

Okay, we’re ready and we’re rolling! Although it shouldn’t have mattered, I was reluctant to do regular posting until I got the blog portion of our site rebuilt. It was a mess. I got the “theme” from some free directory (it’s ordinarily a reliable place, so I won’t mention the name or link to the site). Anyway, it just didn’t look as clean as I wanted it to and it kinda mucked with our Adsense ads. Adsense revenues have been steadily increasing for us and I really didn’t need anything to muck it up for us.

Well? Take a look around. What do you think? Of course, if you weren’t with us from the beginning, you won’t have a point of reference. So, take my word for it. Our blog is now a lot cleaner looking and much better organized. Now we can move on to other features.

One such feature is now our Resource Center! We’ve added the link on our header navigation as well. Our Independent Retailer Small Business Resource Center is divided into two sections. I’m thinking we’ll add a third after a while. However, right now we have “Software” and “eBooks.” Each section will be filled with software and ebooks that will be personally reviewed by us in some capacity or another. At this point, I wanted to get at least a couple things in there before we started bragging about how fantastic this Resource Center is.

As of this writing, we have two software programs and one ebook. The first software program is Forum Fortunes. For a long time, I’ve participated in a couple of business related forums, message boards, and discussion groups (before you ask, ‘no’ there’s not much difference in any of them). My participation was sparse. A post here, a post there. Until this software came to us for our review. Now, Goodness Gracious! What a fantastic idea. This is a forum management system. It runs centrally from your desktop as long as you have an open Internet connection. Now, I’m able to actively participate in many forum discussions all from a single location without having to navigate all over the web. This software also tracks my posts, logs me in, archives my messages, and tracks my responses. If you haven’t ventured much into online forums yet, this would be a great tool to get you going. Forums are an excellent way to get yourself known in your industry as an expert in your field by contributing helpful and/or informative posts. You’re also able generate a link back to your site with every post and the more you post the more people will respect your expertise and click on your site. Forum Fortunes has done just that for us. Not to mention it’s just fun.

The next piece of software is Article Submit System. This is an excellent tool especially for those running a blog or if you simply like to write articles. You may well know by now that writing articles is also another very good method of establishing yourself as an expert in your field and getting you a good deal of traffic to your site. If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, click here and take a few moments. It’ll explain everything. Now if you are familiar with this awesome little business strategy, then again, take a look at this software. It’s another very handy management tool. It will hold all of your articles, place them in a queue with your title, content body, and author resource box. When you get rolling, it will navigate you from article directory to article directory and you’ll be able to submit your article to each one as you go along. This is far more efficient than, again, going to your Internet browser and navigating all over the web looking for sites to submit to. Here it is, all in one location driven right from your desktop.

We’ll have more software, a lot more, coming at a steady pace.

The eBook we’ve decided to start with is, “A to Z about RSS“. RSS is RSS, the simple, easy to use publishing tool for marketers and publishers allows easy and effective delivery of your online content to your subscribers and other web media. This eBook will show you how to use RSS to reach new heights and discover the undiscovered depths in your business or marketing field. Give a remarkable face-lift to your web site by taking advantage of the salient features of RSS. Carry your ideas and thoughts to tens of thousands of people on the Internet along with any advertisement you wish them to see!

Well that’s it for now. Personally, I think it’s an awesome start and should keep you busy for a little while. Until you get proficient at the software anyway, because it really is a breeze!

I mentioned adding perhaps a third section to our Resource Center. My thoughts were to name this section “Partner Resources” and display some of the affiliate programs that we participate in. Some of them are excellent programs and very worth while mentioning. For example, many times in the forums that I participate in, people will ask for advice on a good shopping cart system. My response has always been XCart. We use XCart on all of our ecommerce sites and have had really good results with it. It’s very easy to use, installation is fairly easy (they’ll even do it for you for a small extra fee). Their support is very responsive and they also have a user’s forum that you can get help from other users.

Anyway, there are other such programs that we use, or have heard of, that would be very worth while for our independent small business colleagues.