Selling in the Digital Age

 

The following is a list of useful links mentioned in the course. The nature of the Internet is that things are always changing and should you come across a link that no longer works please report it to us.
Thanks, and enjoy.
This page was last updated: August 31, 2018

 Fast Links:

 Downloads:

Find and Develop Prospects and Customers

 

Introduction and Assessment
Sales Concepts, Inc.
Selling isn’t easy. Without proper training, it can be harder than it needs to be. Sales Concepts provides sales training seminars and programs, public sales training, customized sales training, trade show sales training, phone sales training and individual training.
The video we show at beginning of the course.
The original video from 2011
Here is what the creator of the video has to say about it.
Social Media in Plain English
Methods for maximizing the power of the Internet
My Yahoo!
My Yahoo! combines your favorite parts of Yahoo! and the Web into one place. Like a Yahoo! ID, it’s free. You can choose what you want to see and hear: email, news, weather, photos, blogs, stock prices, sports scores, TV schedules, movie listings, and more. All this content is updated frequently.
My Yahoo – Help Page
Netvibes
Netvibes is taking dashboarding to the next level by empowering you to take control and program your own Internet, including all your favorite content, your social activity, and your smart devices.Create your own Potions to manage interactions between apps, devices, and events, automatically. It’s the Dashboard of Every Thing.
Learn More about Netvibes
Protopage
Protopage is your own personal page that you can access from any computer, tablet or smartphone. You can monitor news headlines from almost any website.

Your page can be private or public. Keep bookmarks, to-do lists, sticky notes, and much more.

Excite
Excite is one of the most recognized names on the Internet and among the Internet’s most personalized portals featuring a completely customizable start page. Excite features comprehensive search tools, a popular Webmail platform and robust content and resources from over 100 leading providers.
Excite Help Page
igHome
If you remember iGoogle then you will love igHome.
igHome Help Page
Symbaloo
Symbaloo is a personal start page that allows you to easily navigate the web and compile your favorite site all into one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.
Symbaloo Help Page
Top Personalized Start Pages
Pocket.com
Put articles, videos or pretty much anything into Pocket.Save directly from your browser or from apps like Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite.
What is Pocket?
Back to top of page
Search Engines – Find what you need to succeed
Google
Google Advanced Search
Google Scholar
Google Earth
Google News Search
Google Alerts
Google Maps
Google Search Tips & Tricks
More Google Info
Full List of Google Products
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Advanced Search
Bing
Ask
Blog Search Engine
Dogpile
“All the best search engines piled into one.” Dogpile is a metasearch engine that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, About.com and several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace, Inc.
Duck Duck Go
DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine like Google or Bing.• Get way more instant answers
• Less spam and clutter
• Lots and lots of goodies
• Real privacy! We don’t track you. (Illustrated guide.)

BizJournals
Business Journals features local business & industry news from 41 different markets around the nation along with a full menu of tools to help business owners and operators manage their businesses more successfully.
CaseBriefs
Comprehensive Digital Legal Content. Look up lawsuits for companies and people.
Exalead
Exalead® is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets, and the maker of CloudView, the industry’s top platform for Search-Based Applications (SBAs). Exalead’s clients include leading companies such as AFP, American Greetings, Steelcase, Yellow Pages Group, and Friendster. Every month, 100 million users rely on Exalead for unified information presentation, reporting, and search.
Gigablast
Gigablast is the leading clean-energy search engine. 90% of its power usage comes from wind energy.Gigablast also makes it easy to perform your query on the coal-based search engines by clicking links below the search results. So try us first, and if you don’t find what you want, click the others.
Ixquick
Ixquick does not collect or share any personal information! When you search with Ixquick search engine, you are searching many popular search engines simultaneously and anonymously. Combined, these engines cover more of the Internet than any one search engine alone.
An Ixquick result is awarded one star () for every search engine that chooses it as one of the ten best results for your search. So a five star () result means that five search engines agreed on the result.
This is significant because search engines choose results in different ways, and each approach works well in some cases and poorly in others. A result with many stars was chosen for many different reasons and is a consensus choice of many search engines.
Also, while irrelevant Web pages can be “optimized” to fool a single search engine’s algorithm, it is much harder for a page to fool all the search engines.
More Ixquick Info Here
KartOO
KartOO ranks among the most powerful search engines. For each query, the metasearch engine compiles a comprehensive selection of websites and sorts them by relevancy with the use of proprietary algorithms. KartOO assists users in finding the most appropriate website for a given query without delay. The outstanding quality and relevancy of KartOO’s results page is produced by our semi-automated validation process.
Newslink.org
All Your News In One Place. Sign Up Today & Read The News You Love.
Patch
Patch is a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.
Quintura
While viewing the Quintura Cloud, you can visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently!
TouchGraph
They say a picture is worth a thousand word. See the web! The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites.
Trustoria
Search by city, name, profession (e.g. Lawyer) or even a specific professional specialty (e.g. Public defender). The Radaris Professional Directory includes nearly every professional person in the US today. From local business owners and home repair contractors to national performance artists and business consultants. This comprehensive directory includes everything you need to know to find the best professional for your next project.
WOW!
According to Wikipedia, Since February 2013, the domain has served as a barebones alternate interface to AOL’s search engine, itself powered by Google Search. In 2015, a subdomain of wow.com (content.wow.com) began re-posting various articles from other AOL-owned sites, apparently for search engine optimization purposes.

Still, it has a pleasant interface and will provide alternative information to the classic Google search.

YIPPY
Some web services store and utilize your personal information in ways you may not approve of, or even be aware! At YIPPY, your privacy and protection are our focus. We won’t track your activity on our platform, store your history in our browser, monitor or record your searches, store copies of your email, or collect any more personal information than you volunteer. We also won’t sell your personal information to advertisers for profit. If you’re looking for a service you can trust, look no further.
ZABASEARCH
Telephone Numbers and Addresses Revealed Free. No Registration Required. Instant Results. Three Times More Residential Listings than White Pages Phone Directory
Yabigo
Yabigo.com provides the search results from Yahoo, Bing, and Google with one simple search, and compares the results side by side.
Zuula
Search 9 search engines at once.
Search for RSS Feeds
http://ctrlq.org/rss/
The RSS search engine will help you discover RSS feeds on the web around your favorite topics. Read details here.
Ukora News Search
PR Newswire
Access releases, photos, ProfNet experts and customized feeds just for the media. This is a great place for breaking news stories released on RSS feeds.
RSS Feeds for Public Companies from Yahoo! Finance
Yahoo! Finance Company News RSS URL Generator

Enter stock symbol into the box on the right after this headline.

Go to a URL like this example: http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=SO where SO is the stock ticker symbol.

Click this link for Industry News. Visit a URL similar to this one for industry news: http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=d,duk,ed,so.

RSS Feeds for Public Companies from Google Finance
TwittRSSme – RSS Feeds for Twitter
Turn any Twitter feed, keyword, user, or hashtag into an RSS Feed and have it show up on your home page.
Google Alerts Alternatives
Talkwalker Alerts
Monitor the Web for interesting new content about your name, brand, competitors, events or any favorite topic with Talkwalker Alerts!

Talkwalker Alerts are an easy and free alerting service that provides email updates of the latest relevant mentions on the Web directly to your email box or RSS feed reader.

Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Still not enough?
A list of all the search engines!
Top 15 Search Engines
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land is a leading daily publication that covers all aspects of the search marketing industry.

The site is led by Editor-In-Chief Matt McGee, who oversees the editorial team behind Search Engine Land and its sister publication, Marketing Land. Daily news coverage includes breaking stories, industry trends, feature announcements and product changes at popular platforms used by search marketers to reach consumers online.

Directories-What’s available and how to use it.
Spoke
Spoke makes it easy for business people to discover and gain access to other business people via detailed contact information and professional networking. Spoke’s business data and detailed contact information allow users to identify, research and access the right individuals at all levels of an organization. Information on over 60 million people across more than 2.3 million companies gives Spoke members the contact and detailed background information they need to maintain and grow their network and penetrate target accounts.From Spoke “About Us” page.
Wiki about Spoke.com
Manta
Manta provides free company profiles & company information on U.S. and International companies, including market research reports, business news, and resources.
About Manta
Data.com
Formerly know as Jigsaw. Data.com isn’t just another list. It’s fresher, more-accurate B2B data designed to pump insight right into your Salesforce workflow. It’s your foundation for success—the DNA of a winning business.
About Data.com
Lead411
Lead411 provides business email lists, company addresses, executive emails, and phone numbers.
LeadFerret
Search 30+ million companies and contacts with emails and social links, view for free and only pay when you want to download.

LeadFerret now comes in 3 flavors. In addition to the standard business data sourcing and management platform, we now offer LeadFerret Enterprise and LeadFerret API. Both work with a standard free LeadFerret account, so create your free account and find out more about these exciting new ways to leverage the ever-growing LeadFerret business+social database.

Hoovers
D&B Company puts you on the fastest path to business. We deliver comprehensive insight and analysis about the companies, industries, and people that drive the economy, along with the powerful tools to find and connect to the right people to get business done.
Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
Thomasnet
ThomasNet.com is like no other supplier discovery resource out there. And it can help you meet your unique sourcing challenges in ways you never could before — whether its adding quality certified suppliers to the supply chain, meeting diversity goals, identifying local job shops, finding specific products or accelerating the design process. Find out how to put it to work for you.
Websters Online
WebstersOnLine.com is a user’s free leading online business to business search engine/directory accessible worldwide at www.webstersonline.com, www.webdir.net or www.siccodes.us. Currently, WOL attracts over 30 million visits mostly by procurement or buying agents a year and growing. WOL is highly advertised and has links and banners in over 1500 major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. We also attract users/buyers by direct marketing efforts and word of mouth. WebstersOnLine.com is used daily to transact business.
About Websters Online
Whois.org
Look up any registered web site. See who owns it and registered it. Usually includes email, address, and phone information.
Wikipedia
The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
List of Wikis
WikiMedia
Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.Through various projects, chapters, and the support structure of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
Wolfram|Alpha
Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—
not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.
Peekyou
PeekYou is a free people search site that places people at the center of the Internet. It lets you discover the people most important and relevant to your life.

PeekYou collects and combines scattered content from social sites, news sources, homepages, and blog platforms to present comprehensive online identities. PeekYou brings a new perspective to people search.

About Peekyou
Zoom Info
Founded in 1999, ZoomInfo is a Web-based service that extracts information about people and companies from millions of published resources on the Web. Using an advanced natural language processing technology, ZoomInfo scans nearly every news article, press release, company Web site, and SEC filing published on the Internet, every day. The information is then processed into a usable, searchable database of people summaries.
Wiki about Zoom Info
Using social networks to find and develop prospects
What is a Social Network?
LinkedIn
LinkedIn strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn is a networking tool that helps you discover inside connections to
LinkedIn “About Us” Page
What are LinkedIn Connections?
What does “your network” and “out of network” mean?
LinkedIn Tools
LinkedIn’s Official Youtube Channel
Wiki about LinkedIn
LinkedIn for Dummies
Facebook
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
About Facebook
Facebook Fact Sheet
Wiki About Facebook
Guide to B2B Facebook Pages
Groups vs. Pages – What’s the difference?
How to set up friends lists on Facebook
Additional resources and trends
alexa.com
Free web traffic metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more…
List of More Social Networking Sites
For the Analytical People
All the Web 2.0 Stats you can handle.
Mashable
Social Media news blog covering cool new websites and social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube. The latest web technology news, via RSS daily.
Magntize
Magntize provides you a free, slick website that acts as your digital business card.
Wrapping up-Individual training and workshops

Strengthen Ongoing Customer Relationships

Review
Blogging – How can it help you sell? Should you do it?
Why Blog?
WordPress
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. To host your own WordPress Blog go to WordPress.org
Blogger
Google’s blogging platform. Create a blog. It’s free.
Problogger.net
New to Blogging? You Need ProBlogger’s Guide to Your 1st Week of Blogging.
Your personal brand. How do your customers see you?
What is a brand anyway?
There’s lots of talk nowadays about brands. We’re told that organizations and even people have brands and that if you’re not building your brand then you’re so 1998. With all the hubbub surrounding the concept, you may be wondering what exactly a brand is?
Copyblogger.com
Copywriting tips for online success.
Click here for examples of blogs
Other useful branding sites
Canva
About Canva
Easily create beautiful designs and documents

Use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics.

Knowem
KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. Grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does.
Paper.li
Create your online newspaper in minutes.
Automatically find, publish & promote engaging articles, photos and videos from across the web.
Bugherd
Your clients report issues by making annotations right from the site being worked on. BugHerd turns these into full bug reports with all the info you need to fix the problem.
Gravatar
Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
QR Codes
QR Code Generator
We advise and support you in all aspects of your QR code campaigns, from tracking to analyses and creating mobile landing pages.
Staying in touch with Twitter, its true strength.
Twitter
Tips for getting started with Twitter:
  1. Create a new twitter account. Save your unique password and user ID where you will be able to find it later.
  2. Remove the predetermined accounts that you don’t want.
  3. Find your company on Twitter. Follow it. If your company is not on Twitter find respected industry leaders and follow them.
  4. Look through the accounts your company follows.
  5. Follow helpful accounts.
  6. Look at who those accounts follow. Find and follow helpful accounts.
  7. Go back to your company and look at its followers. Follow worthwhile accounts.
  8. Do the same for them. Look at who they follow and follow them.
  9. Find and follow your competitors. Add their followers as well.
  10. Search for your products using the search features and Google advanced.
  11. Repeat this process for each of your products.
  12. Put the $ sign in front of stock ticker symbols to find information about publicly traded companies.
  13. Use Twitter Lists to organize your feeds depending upon Customers, Products, Competition and your Company etc.
Using Twitter Lists
Get help with Twitter Lists from Twitter
Twitter for B2B Marketers
Understanding what Twitter is, and more importantly, why you’re using it. Twitter can be a platform to develop yourself and your company as a knowledgeable outlet within your industry.
Twitter Small Business Blog
The Twitter Small Business Blog

Your resource for the latest news, product updates, tips and success stories to help your small business succeed on TwitterThe Twitter Small Business Blog

Your resource for the latest news, product updates, tips and success stories to help your small business succeed on Twitter.

Oneforty.com
A Better Way to Discover Twitter Apps oneforty is your Twitter outfitter, with tons of resources for all things Twitter. Currently tracking 1990 apps that make Twitter even better.
Counting Twitter Messages
Twitter 101
Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.
StockTwits
Receive information regarding the stocks you choose as soon as it happens via Twitter. StockTwits is an open, community-powered investment idea and information service.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck: a simple and fast way to experience Twitter.
Hootsuite
Save your time and your sanity. Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard.
Bitly
Bitly helps you share, track, and analyze your links.
50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
Twitter for Business – Best Practices
Build your following, reputation, and customer’s trust with these simple practices
YouTube can help you sell.
YouTube
The Official YouTube Blog
Wiki about YouTube
How To Set Up A YouTube Channel or YouTube Account
Vimeo
Vimeo is a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make. We provide the best tools and highest quality video in the universe.
Staying in touch with Email
Cooler Email
Cooler Email was the first to make it easy to “build, send and track” emails and we’ve led the way in email marketing ever since. We serve tens of thousands of clients around the globe and deliver millions of permission-based emails each and every day. With an award-winning system, unmatched ease-of-use and courteous customer service, Cooler Email looks forward to serving your email marketing needs.
Constant Contact
Email marketing software that makes it easy to create professional HTML email campaigns with no tech skills. Sign up for a 60-Day FREE trial
Get Response
GetResponse is the World’s Easiest Email Marketing platform. It enables you to create a valuable marketing list of prospects, partners, and clients, so you can develop relationships with them and build a responsive and profitable customer base.GetResponse includes all the capabilities you need for creating effective email campaigns.
MailChimp
MailChimp makes it easy to design and send beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign’s performance. We take fancy–schmancy tools like segmentation, a/b testing and ROI tracking, and we turn them into something anyone can use.
Mad Mimi
Mad Mimi is the easiest way to create, send, share and track email newsletters online. Mad Mimi is for people who want email marketing to be simple. Every day, over 40 million emails are sent, shared and tracked using our delightful and powerful service.
Etiquette on the Net – Some Do’s and Don’ts
Email Etiquette
How to make a positive impact with email.
Course Summary, Trends and How To Stay Informed
Top 6 Social Media Marketing Goals
Optional Workshop
Interesting Things You May Like to Know…
The 101 Most Useful Websites
Here are the 101 most useful websites. The sites mentioned here, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can easily learn by heart thus saving you a trip to Google.
Social Networking Your Next Tradeshow
Here is a neat infographic on how to use social media before during and after your next trade show.
Internet Wayback Machine
Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.
Gethuman
Need a company phone number? Other tips or information?GetHuman is the ultimate consumer tool with phone numbers, shortcuts, reviews, tips, and more for companies worldwide.
History of the Internet in a Nutshell
Have a favorite page not represented here? Tell us about it and why you like it and we will post it.