Match Up Email Addresses With A Ton of Personal Data
Rapleaf lets you find out a lot of information about people on your email list. You can choose to get data in several dozen categories. This includes details about:
- Demographics
- Household Data
- Personal Interests
- Purchase Data
Cost: Minimum $50; use their pricing calculator
Preview Your Email Layouts On More Than 30 Email Clients
Litmus
Litmus will let you check your email campaigns on more than 30 email clients and mobile browsers. You can also add small snippets of code to your outbound emails to get more advanced analytics such as how many people deleted your emails (vs. just opened them) and whether someone forwarded or printed them.
Cost: $49-$299/month
Check Email Address Validity With BriteVerify
BriteVerify
Use BriteVerify to check the validity of your email addresses. According to Adam Holden-Bache of email marketing firm Mass Transmit, removing bad addresses will help with deliverability. “ISPs will mark emails as junk or spam if they see too many being sent to bad or invalid email addresses,” Holden-Bache says. “Using this system to purge bad data from your database is helpful.”
You can also use BriteVerify to validate email addresses in real time for things like free downloads (whitepapers, ebooks, etc), access to coupons, sweepstakes entries, etc. It ensures the data you collect is legitimate.
Cost: $0.01 per email address
Find And Verify Email Addresses With LeadSpend
LeadSpend
Want to know if someone’s email address is valid? Head over to LeadSpend and check it there. I do this frequently to bypass having to try to connect with someone on LinkedIn first—just email ‘em directly! If you have a big list, you can upload it. The company claims a 97% match rate.
Cost: Free to manually check addresses; bulk pricing for uploaded lists starting at $0.01 per email address.
Get The Essential Details About A Web Page
Browseo
Browseo is a web app that let’s you strip a page down to its essential information. It’s very useful for examining the structure of your web pages (or your competitors’ pages) for things like meta tags, word counts, hyperlinks, fonts and colors used and other details.
You can save a spreadsheet containing the most important data from your current session.
Cost: Free
Get Alerts With Someone Pins Your Images
Pinalerts
Got cool images or infographics on your website? Great! Now you can use Pinalerts to get notified when someone pins something from your site. This is a good way to instantly thank people and suggest other boards you have that they may want to follow.
Cost: Free
My Favorite Bookmarking Sites
I use quite a few tools to save or bookmark links to websites that I find useful. So I thought I’d run down my favorite ones.
Why I Bookmark
Every day, I probably save at least 8-10 links for future reference. My vast libraries of links have served me well. There’s a direct benefit between taking a few seconds to properly save and tag a link, and later saving time quickly relocating it vs. starting from scratch on Google.
I realize a lot of people don’t share my enthusiasm for bookmarking. However, I think there are some compelling reasons to get into this habit:
- You often can’t recreate a search you did on Google. Think about the meandering nature of a typical web search. You might go through 5-10 sites initially trying to find exactly what you need. By saving the best link or two along the way, you’ll avoid having to repeat the process for this query.
- You often won’t be able to remember exactly what you looked at or found online. However, if you take some time to add good keywords (tags) when saving a link, you can more easily jog your memory later. Google’s browser history doesn’t completely fit the bill.
- You can share your bookmarks and see what others bookmarked. This latter ability is the secret sauce behind getting human-filtered search results instead of just what Google spits back.
With those points in mind, here’s what I use most frequently. By the way, I favor saving bookmarks in the cloud vs. on my laptop. I want to be able to access these anywhere I can get online.
Delicious
This is one of the original and best bookmarking services. Now owned by Yahoo, Delicious remains one of the easiest to use. I especially recommend installing one of the browser bookmarklets. When you’re on a page, just click the button, add some keywords and an optional description and save it. You can choose to make bookmarks public or private. I do both, depending on what I’m working on.
Anytime you want to search your bookmarks, just log in to the website. You can also search everyone else’s public bookmarks by keywords. This is a great place to go if you ever want to “curate” information fast.
I also installed Delicious on my iPhone, making it easier to bookmark sites there, too.
Cost: Free
Pinboard
I found Pinboard when there was a nasty rumor a couple years ago that Delicious was shutting down. Fortunately, it didn’t.
Pinboard is essentially the same thing as Delicious, but with a paid business model. There is just a small one-time fee to use it. It’s cheap, and unlike Delicious you can count on getting tech support. (Although I have contacted Delicious a few times and they’ve been very responsive.)
Like Delicious, Pinboard has browser bookmarklets and other tools to store your bookmarks. It goes a step further by letting you automatically add links you bookmark using Delicious, Instapaper, Readability and Pocket (formerly Read It Later). If you tweet, you can also add links in tweets, save Twitter favorites as bookmarks and add hashtags as tags (pardon the redundancy).
Another neat feature is the ability to have tag “bundles” or related groups of links.
Cost: $10.08 (one-time fee)
Xmarks
As I mentioned, I don’t really save links from the browser on my local computer. However, if you like to do this, Xmarks is great. I set it up along time ago and it’s still a backup for old stuff I saved.
Xmarks is the No. 1 bookmarking add-on. It synchronizes your local bookmarks across multiple computers, and across web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.
After you install the add-on, click on the Xmarks icon to start backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks.
Xmarks also synchronizes your open tabs across computers and browsers.
Cost: Free
Diigo
I have tried Diigo sporadically, and it is a very good service. It might become my No. 1 all-in-one bookmarking tool.
Diijo is more like Evernote-Meets-Delicious, allowing you to do more stuff like add highlights to pages along with notes. Other excellent features include a quick “read later” button and the ability to take a screenshot in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Cost: Free; $20 or $40/year for premium accounts
For “Temporary” Bookmarking: Pocket And Instapaper
I typically look at a lot of sites on a daily basis, but I don’t have time to read everything right away. So I frequently will use one of several services to temporarily save the page or article. The two I like the most are Pocket and Instapaper. I use both intermittently and lately have gravitated more to Pocket. They work very similarly.
When I use Pocket, my goal is to review these “temporary” placeholders regularly (like once a week). At that point, I can decide if I really want to save the link forever. If something is truly outstanding, I will also use Evernote Clearly to grab the full text.
Cost: Free
A Couple Others To Check Out
There are some very interesting “2.0” type bookmarking services (such as Bo.lt and Keeeb). I recently started using Bo.lt and am liking it for saving whole web pages intact. See my earlier review of Bo.lt.
Cost: Free
So there you have it. I’m a confessed Bookmarkoholic.
