With its intuitive and open-source platform and support from the huge mobile phone manufacturers HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, Androids year-on-year smart-phone marketshare has shown a massive growth of 886%! Just to put this into perspective, the iPhone has shown only 61% growth. These figures may give you an insight into the popularity of both platforms, but in actual fact, it shows that it is mobile app developers who are the real winners. With smartphones becoming ever more popular, there has never been a better time to jump on the mobile app development bandwagon, and especially on the rapidly growing open Android platform.

Compared to other platforms, Android does not rely on a proprietary OS that restricts the use of third-party applications (off-topic: US regulators have recently announced it was lawful to hack or jailbreak an iPhone), it is an open-source and level alternative. And this reflects in its now huge development community, were everything, from samples, tutorials, GUI downloads… all seem to be freely offered. It is on that theme in which this article focuses. We have selected our favorite 20 free to use, some open-source, tools, resources, guides and downloads that will hopefully help you with your next Android app.

Free Android Developer Ebook: andbook!

If you are just stepping into Android Development for the first time this free ebook is perfect for you. It is a 62 page PDF ebook choc-full of easy to follow tutorials that shows you how to start coding an Android app without having any Android-dev knowledge whatsoever.
Free Android Developer Ebook: andbook! →

Free Android Developer Ebook: Professional Android Application Development

The Professional Android Application Development PDF ebook is a hands-on guide to building mobile applications, this book features concise and compelling examples that show you how
to quickly construct real-world mobile applications for Android phones. It covers all the essential features, and explores the advanced capabilities of Android.
Free Android Developer Ebook: Professional Android Application Development →

Free & Open-Source Sample Applications

apps-for-android (Open Source Applications) →
This is a popular collection of useful, open source applications that demonstrate the features of the Android.

List of Sample Android Apps →
The list on this page offers a summary of the sample applications that are available with the Android SDK. Using the links on this page, you can view the source files of the sample applications in your browser. You can also download the source of these samples into your SDK, then modify and reuse it as you need.

Android Cookbook (Examples in Cookbook Form) →
This is a collection of several useful Android examples in cookbook form that you can re-use and play with.

OpenIntents →
OpenIntents design and implement open intents and interfaces to make Android mobile applications work more closely together. They freely offer prefessional and complex sample applications to demonstrate their usage.

Android Snippets (Share Useful Snippets of Source Code) →
Android Snippets is a repository of useful code-snippets for android, to share good and reusable code; thus not having to reinvent the wheel if not necessary.

Android on Windows

For those of you who want to test drive Android you can use this emulator, which is patched to run on a Windows PC as a standalone app, without having to download and install the complete and complex Android SDK. You can even install and test Android compatible apps on it.
Android Emulator on Windows →

Android Emulator from The Developer’s Guide

The Android SDK includes a mobile device emulator which mimics all of the hardware and software features of a typical mobile device (although, without the calls). It provides a variety of navigation and control keys, which you can "press" using your mouse or keyboard to generate events for your application. It also provides a screen in which your application is displayed, together with any other Android applications running.
Android Emulator from The Developer’s Guide →

SensorSimulator

Sensor simulator is a java standalone application that simulates sensor data and transmits them to the Android emulator. It will allow you to simulate sensor data from accerelometer, compass, and orientation sensors and the data can then be used in an Android application, to steer them live through the sensors.
SensorSimulator →

DroidEx: Projecting Android on the Big(ger) Screen

DroidEx displays a copy of your attached Android device’s screen on your own development machine’s screen. Mostly, this is useful for presentations, as you can attach an Android device to a notebook attached to a projector, and your audience can see what is on the device. In particular, this is good for demonstrations of things that cannot readily be demonstrated via the emulator, such as GPS access or the accelerometer.
DroidEx: Projecting Android on the Big(ger) Screen →

App Inventor for Android

The App Inventor for Android is a new tool from Google that allows non-developers to create there own app very, very easily. You can have a look at this video for an overview of all of its features.
App Inventor for Android →

Common Tasks and How to Do Them in Android

This is a collection of some of the most common tasks you will come across with Android development, and offers quick and to the point — how-to’s to help you on your way.
Common Tasks and How to Do Them in Android

Fastboot Cheat Sheet

The Fastboot Cheat Sheet is a very useful and quick list of some common tasks in fastboot.
Fastboot Cheat Sheet →

User Interface Guidelines

Here you will find links to the official articles, from the The Developer’s Guide, that describe the Android UI developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications.

Icon Design Guidelines →
The Icon Guidelines describe each kind of icon in detail, with specifications for the size, color, shading, and other details for making all your icons fit in the Android system. You can download the Icon Templates Pack, which is an archive of Photoshop and Illustrator templates and filters that make it much simpler to create conforming icons.
Download the Android Icon Templates Pack »

Widget Design Guidelines →
These design guidelines describe how to design widgets that fit with others on the Home screen. They include links to graphics files and templates that will make your designer’s life easier.

Activity and Task Design Guidelines →
These guidelines describe how activities work, illustrates them with examples, and describes important underlying principles and mechanisms, such as multitasking, activity reuse, intents, the activity stack, and tasks. It covers this all from a high-level design perspective.

Menu Design Guidelines →
These guidelines describe the difference between Options and Context menus, how to arrange menu items, when to put commands on-screen, and other details about menu design.

Understanding User Interface in Android via mobiforge.com
In this four part article, from mobiforge.com, you are walked through the various elements that make up the UI of an Android application. In the first part of the article, it discusses the various layouts available in Android to position the various widgets on your screen.
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 1 →
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 2 →
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 3 →
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 4 →

Android UI Patterns

Android UI Patterns →

DroidDraw : Graphical User Interface Editor for Android

DroidDraw is a User Interface (UI) designer/editor that can be used to build GUIs for Android. It is standalone executable, and its available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
DroidDraw : Graphical User Interface Editor for Android →

Android GUI PSD Vector Kit

The Android GUI Starter Kit comes with several button elements as well as different interface options for Android GUI. is based on elements of Android 1.5 GUI and has been made to help the open-source community with Android applications mock-ups. Most of the elements and phone illustration are made in vector path so they are easily resizable. For text Android Sans was used.
Android GUI PSD Vector Kit →

Fireworks Template for Android

In this Fireworks template the Android user interface elements have been redrawn as vector images. In the folders the elements have been mostly labeled according to the Android vocabulary.
Fireworks Template for Android →

Android Wireframe Templates

The wireframe PDF is Letter size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and the handsets are all to scale, so you can use these quite easily for paper prototyping and getting a realistic sense of scale. There’s a subtle 10×10 grid on the screens to help you with your pencil based needs. If you’re short on Letter paper, you can get away with printing them on A4.
Android Wireframe Templates →

With so many web and graphic designers out there, getting the attention of potential clients and landing work can be a major challenge. The portfolio site is one of the most important assets for a designer, and an effective portfolio site will be an invaluable resource for keeping the business moving forward.

For many designers creating an attractive portfolio site is not the problem, getting people to see it is often much more of an issue. In order for the portfolio site to truly do it’s job it must be well-designed and it must attract the right types of visitors. In this post we’ll look at 15 things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your portfolio site by getting more exposure for it.

1. Have a High-Quality Design for Your Portfolio Site

Not only is the quality of design of the items in your portfolio important, but the design of your portfolio site itself will also have a big impact on potential clients. Clients will expect a designer to have an attractive and usable site, otherwise they will question the work that the designer will be able to do for them.

When designing and coding your portfolio site be sure that it is getting all of the attention that it deserves. After all, it will be one of the most important aspects of your business, so it should not be rushed.

Impressive portfolio sites are great for encouraging visitors to contact you about their project, and they are also more likely to attract links and attention from other designers and bloggers.

2. Get Published in Web Design/CSS Galleries

There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of gallery sites out there that exist for the purpose of showcasing beautiful websites. Having your site featured in a few of the more popular galleries will help it to attract attention from other galleries and design blogs, which can result in a flood of new visitors and a significant number of inbound links.

Getting your site featured in design galleries isn’t easy, but if you’ve done your best work with your portfolio site you’ll probably want to submit it to some galleries. Submitting to galleries can be rather time consuming, so you may want to consider a service like Gallery Rush that submits your site to a bunch of galleries for a relatively small fee of $17.

In addition to general design and CSS galleries, there are several that focus on showcasing the best portfolio sites, including:

• Folio Focus

• Pixel Perfect Portfolios

• Foliostars

3. Start a Blog

Possibly the best way to attract visitors to your portfolio site is to start a blog on the same domain. As you maintain the blog and publish new content your site will benefit from blog subscribers and repeat visitors, more content that can attract search engine traffic, increased ability to attract links, and a platform for showcasing your skills and expertise.

There are a number of different approaches that you can take with your blog. You may simply want to publish blog posts and content that will appeal to designers in attempt to increase your profile, build links, and establish the quality of your domain. You may want to publish case studies about your client work that will appeal to other designers who want to learn, as well as to potential clients who may be interested in knowing more about how you work. In this way you are able to use the blog to put a spotlight on your work, and hopefully the quality will lead to new clients. Or you could write posts that might answer questions that potential clients would have, or that would be optimized to be found in search results for queries of potential clients.

One of the most important benefits of blogging was mentioned briefly, and that is link building. If your portfolio site includes only a few pages of content (for example, a home page, portfolio page, about page, contact info page), it will be pretty difficult to attract any kind of significant search engine traffic. However, with a blog you will be drastically increasing the amount of content on the site, and that content will be much more likely to draw links from other blogs and from social media sites. Having a blog that attracts links will give your site/blog a chance to rank well for long tail search phrases, and in time your site should receive exponentially more search traffic than it would without the blog.

4. Pursue Freelance Blogging

In addition to publishing posts on your own blog, writing for other blogs also presents some great opportunities. Whether you are writing free guest posts or freelancing with larger design blogs that pay for contributions, you’ll usually receive an author bio at the end of the post that can include a link to your own site, and you’ll also be building up your name recognition.

Major design blogs like Smashing Magazine, Webdesigner Depot, and Six Revisions accept articles from designers and developers, and they pay for published articles. Aside from the larger blogs that pay contributors, writing free guest posts for smaller blogs can also be an excellent way to build links and gain exposure.

5. Build it to Be Search Engine Friendly

If you’re just starting your portfolio site it is unlikely that you’ll get more than a handful of search engine visitors for a while. But if you build the site to be friendly to search engines and if you work on publishing quality content on your blog and attracting links from other sites, you will be in a good position to see that search engine traffic rise over a period of time.

Having a search engine friendly website simply means that it is built to make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl the site and to determine what it is about, and to have a chance to rank well. It involves proper coding, use of page titles and headers, proper site structure, etc. (For a more detailed look at the subject see How to Create Search Engine Friendly Websites.)

6. Participate in Social Networking

Social media and social networking sites present opportunities to attract visitors to your portfolio site or blog, as well as to connect with other designers and build your professional network.

For getting visitors to your blog there are a number of niche-specific sites that are excellent alternatives to major social news sites like Digg. If you’re looking to reach a targeted audience of designers and developers try sites like:

• Design Bump

• Design Float

• DZone

• The Web Blend

• Design Related

• FAQ Pal

Aside from news/voting sites, there are excellent opportunities available to showcase work from your portfolio at networking sites like:

• Behance

• deviantART

• Flickr

• Carbonmade

7. Be Active on Twitter

Twitter is extremely popular with designers, so if you are looking for a place to connect with others you really should be active on Twitter (find us at @Vapvarun). In terms of getting visitors from Twitter, you can share tweets with links to your blog posts, or tweet links to recently completed projects, or even projects that are in process when you are looking for feedback. Like any other type of social networking, you must genuinely become a part of the community of users in order to have much impact for yourself. If it seems that you are only there for self promotion and not to interact, users will notice and the positive impacts will be minimal.

8. Distribute Freebies

Everyone love freebies. As a designer you can give away free templates, Photoshop brushes, PSD files, vectors, textures, icons, or just about any other type of resource that can be used for design. Giving items away can help to draw new visitors to your site, and maybe they’ll check out your portfolio while they are there. Freebies are also good for building links from other blogs and social media sites, and just as importantly, it gives you an opportunity to show your quality of work to the world. Just because you are giving it away for free doesn’t me that it can’t help to make you land clients or make money, so be sure that whatever you are giving away is up to your level of quality.

In addition to giving away freebies from your own site, you can also produce items to be given away at other sites and blogs, which may help to give some added exposure to your work. Many design blogs work with various designers to produce freebies to give to their readers. If you’re hoping to get your work noticed by a large audience, this may be a great opportunity.

9. Do Interviews

Designers are frequently asked to do interviews for blogs or for students. Although it will take some of your time to do the interview, they are great for getting exposure to new people and for allowing others to get to know more about you. Most people like to work with others that they know and like, so it can even sometimes lead to new clients. Even if it doesn’t lead to a new client, the interview is likely to include a link to your portfolio site and it may even include some screenshots of your work.

10. Join Flickr Groups for Showcasing Your Work

Flickr groups present an opportunity to showcase your work to others, and to receive feedback on your design. There are plenty of Flickr groups that focus on web and/or graphic design (this post is old but much of it is still relevant – 99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration). While these groups are unlikely to send a rush of traffic to your site, it is a supplementary way to showcase your work and draw a smaller number of visitors.

11. Design for a High-Profile Client

Some designers have been able to get valuable exposure by designing a site for a high-profile client. In situations where the designer is not yet established, the project will often need to be done for a discounted rate or even for free, but the resulting exposure may more than make up for it.

It’s not rare for clients to ask for a free website in exchange for the “exposure” that you’ll get from it, and in 99% of cases it’s not worth it. However, there may be situations, such as designing a custom theme for a very popular blog, where real exposure could justify a discounted or free service. If you agree to this be sure that you know specifically what type of exposure you will be getting. Are they simply giving you a link in the footer or are they publishing a review of your design services on the blog?

12. Run a Pay-Per-Click Ad Campaign

PPC ads are a great option because they can work with just about any budget, they can be highly targeted, and they can be turned on and off at will. When you’re looking for some new projects you can set up a PPC campaign, and you can even target only local clients if you’d like. You set the maximum amount that you are willing to spend on a daily or monthly basis, and you’ll start reaching some potential clients that are looking for what you have to offer. When things pick up and you are not looking for work you can easily pause the campaign and then restart it when you need more work.

13. Have a Memorable Business Card

Although most of the methods that we have covered in this post involve online marketing or promotional efforts, it is still possible to draw visitors to your site from offline methods. Most designers have business cards that they give out to people that they meet here and there, and hopefully they lead to some business. Having a memorable and attractive business card will help you to stand out and give you a better chance of being the designer that is contacted by the potential client.

14. Sell Templates/Themes

More and more designers are generating income by selling premium WordPress themes or HTML/CSS templates. Selling themes or templates doesn’t have to be your only source of income, they are also great for picking up work from customers who want to get some customizations done to the theme or template. Adding some quality themes or templates for sale from your portfolio site can help to generate interest in your services, in addition to making some money from the sales.

15. Leave Comments on Other Blogs

Another way to attract visitors to your site is by leaving comments on other blogs. Instead of leaving links to your site in the body of your comment, which can lead to your comment being marked as spam or deleted, leave a thoughtful, intelligent comment and provide your URL in the proper field when entering the comment (almost all blogs allow you to leave a URL). No one comment is likely to generate a huge amount of traffic to your site, but if you are leaving a lot of comments that provide useful information and are relevant to the posts/blogs where you are commenting, it can result in a decent number of targeted prospects entering your site.

What’s Your Experience?

If you have a portfolio site, what have you found to be especially effective for gaining exposure, visitors, and new clients?

We’ve confirmed with MySpace that the company is demoing a completely redesigned version of its profile pages.

“We’re testing a new look and feel of our site among users and the response so far has been positive,” a MySpace rep said in a statement sent to Mashable. “As always, we’re interested in hearing feedback from our community as we roll out enhancements to the user experience and look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming weeks.”

Users began noticing the new MySpace profiles today. Sean Percival, MySpace’s vice president of online marketing, tweeted about his updated MySpace profile earlier today.

Here are some of the differences we’ve noticed:

• A new left-hand navigation: Profile navigation has been condensed into the left hand navigation menu under the profile picture.
• Focus on the stream: MySpace Stream — the site’s version of the Facebook newsfeed — is the focus of the the new profiles. You can view a user’s recent activity, comment on items and share content with friends.
• Follow on other social networks: There’s a new module giving you the option to follow a user not only on MySpace, but also on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Whether this is a standard module remains to be seen.
• A vastly improved UI: Without a doubt, the new profiles feature better design than their predecessors, which have been the scourge of social web app designers for a few years now.

At this time, it looks like MySpace is rolling the new profiles out to a limited number of users in order to gather feedback before a larger, site-wide launch. As our friends at The Next Web pointed out, user reaction so far has been mixed.

How to change subject of feedburner email feed?
1. Log in to http://feedburner.google.com/.
2. Select your feed for which you need to change the settings and Click on Publicize tab.
3. Click on Email Branding.

4. Change Email Subject/Title to ${latestItemTitle}.This will set name of post as subject in email.
5. If you have posted more than one post in a day then check the box saying Change subject when an email has 2 or more items.
6. Now if you want to send your blog logo to subscribers through mail, prepare a 200*200 Logo and put Logo URL in the text box. you can change HTML and customize your feed details accordingly.
7. Now if you need to change the time frame for sending the mail to the subscribers. just navigate to the Publicize > Delivery Options.
8. Change the timezone and schedule email delivery and done.

WordPress on a site that is decided non-blog like.

1. Pick a Good Non-Blog Theme

This one might seem obvious, but you don’t want to create a non-blog site using a theme designed for a blog. WordPress has a growing selection of magazine-style themes that can work well for a business site or even just a non-traditional blog. There are many themes designed to work with static home pages and, in some cases, themes designed to work without any posts at all.

If you choose a theme that looks like the type of site you’re trying to create, you’ll have a head start. Even if it isn’t perfect, if it’s close and serves as a good “jumping off” point, you’ll have made a lot of progress very quickly.

2. Ignore the Posts/Pages Paradigm

Thinking of posts and pages as posts and pages is only useful if you’re running a blog and you need a clear distinction between static content (about, contact, etc.) and your actual news items. The truth is that posts and pages are both pages and both can be used for static content.

The only significant difference between the two is how themes treat them. Since posts can be placed into categories and pages can be children of one another, themes put them in specific places. However, that doesn’t mean you have to use them as designed.

For example, on CopyByte, the individual areas of business are actually separate categories, each with one post. If I posted a new item in the category, it would bump the previous one off the page. However, since I’m not adding content to those categories, the posts remain statically fixed to the front page, exactly as if they were pages. On CopyByte, the pages are actually across the top, representing the about page, contact page and so forth.

Though it isn’t how posts and pages were meant to be used, it certainly works well for the purpose.

3. Alter Your Permalinks

If you’re not using WordPress to power a blog, you’re most likely going to have only a very small number of pages/posts. As such, you can afford to be much more tight with your permalinks.

Under Settings/Permalinks, use the custom permalinks option to change your URL structure to this:

/%postname%/

What that will do is make it so that your URL is just your domain followed by the title of the post.

However, we’re not done there. You then need to go into your individual posts and pages and further whittle down the URL, especially if you are using long titles.

Looking below the title on your edit page, you can convert the permalink to whatever you want. For example “contact-us” can become just “contact” and so forth. This makes the URLs easier to remember and makes the site look much more clean and professional.

4. Use Widgets

Widgets are already a powerful tool in WordPress design and development but they become even more useful when building a non-blog site.

The reason is that widgets are an easy way for creating custom navigation elements that can’t be easily replicated using traditional theme design. For example, if you need to create a custom list of your services or product areas, it might be difficult, especially if you had to mix posts and pages, do this the traditional way. However, you can do it easily with widgets and a few minutes of patience.

It’s also worth noting that widgets don’t have to live in your sidebar, they can also be in other parts of your site including your footer (as with CopyByte) and even your header. Any part of your theme can be widgetized if needed.

This is much easier than trying to hard code custom link lists or other into your theme as there is less code to mess around with (and screw up) and you can trivially move the elements around as needed.

5. Use Category Feeds

Though the primary function of your site is not a blog, that doesn’t mean you won’t want to have some blog-like elements, such as a news section. However, if you’ve used some of your blog categories as static pages, as per item 2, you probably won’t get much good use out of your RSS feed as it will also have unrelated and non-blog content.

The way around that is to use category feeds. Simply add the following code after the ? in your feed URL and replace the “#” with the actual category number for your news category.

cat=#&

Once you do that, you should have a new URL that only displays content in that one feed. You can provide this URL to FeedBurner or just put it as is into your HTML. You can even place it in the header of your site by replacing the following code (or anything similar) with your full feed URL.

< ?php bloginfo('rss2_url') ?>

This will set it up so that browsers and RSS readers will default to this category feed rather than the site’s main feed, which includes all categories.

Bottom Line

WordPress is designed for blogs. However, it is flexible enough for just about any kind of site to get some benefit out using it. I’ve seen WordPress on everything from personal blogs to sites for large nuclear engineering firms. From someone’s first home page to a major newspaper using it for a significant portion of their site.

The biggest problem with using WordPress for non-blog sites is that the terminology and structure that WordPress uses is designed primarily for blog sites. This makes sense as it is the most common use for the platform. However, that does mean that using it for a non-blog site requires putting things into a different context.

But, with just a little bit of rethinking and retooling, you can trivially use WordPress to manage just about any kind of site (within reason) and, if you’re already familiar with it, there is little reason to learn another CMS for the purpose.

In short, it is much easier to tweak what you know about your existing CMS than to try and learn a whole new one. It’s that simple.

I recently covered improving non-fiction writing through the use of studying fiction structure. Today, I’d like to continue with another writing style; writing instructions.

Your website may not be a how-to website, but writing out instructions can help you to grow your writing skills in general.

Writing instructions includes giving step-by-step details of how to do something, procedures to follow, operating machinery, or a computer, etc. These are written as commands using an active voice.

Before you write instructions you need to understand what it is you’re giving directions on, so choose something that you’re extremely familiar with.

Second, focus on the audience, just as if you were writing a blog post; the audience is always the reason behind most of the writing you do.

Instructions are generally written in a specific style–like an outline. Practicing this will help you pinpoint key components in your writing and cut out the wordiness that some writers tend to use–I’m guilty of this one.

Instructions are written as commands and not in story or narrative form. They should be clear and concise with each direction or step having its own line.

Example:

1. Research material.

2. Take notes on important aspects.

3. Consider your audience.

4. Use commands.

5. Use steps.

6. Be concise.

7. Define difficult words.

8. Include cautionary items or statements.

9. Follow chronological order.

10. Use visuals when available or necessary.

The above examples are actual guidelines you can use to practice writing instructions. If it were written in story or narrative style it would not be as clear or concise and could lead to misunderstandings. It would also be too wordy.

Example:

You begin by researching the material you want to cover and taking notes. Once you’ve gathered your notes you should consider who your audience will be. Write your instructions in command form and break it down into steps so it’s easier to understand…

You get the idea.

Using structured writing can seem boring at first, and I admit it may not be the most exciting thing in the world. But it does have purpose and will help you learn to be precise in your writing.

One way to work on this is to find an instruction manual and rewrite the instructions. This is an excellent way to practice new writing skills or styles.

Offline Promotions

1. Always put your URL on letterhead, business cards and in e-mail signatures–wherever potential visitors are likely to see it.

2. If your employees wear uniforms, put your URL on them so every one of your customers sees a walking advertisement of your website.

3. Include your URL on all promotional items you give away–coffee mugs, T-shirts, key chains and so on. A daily reminder is a good way to get people to visit your site.

4. Be sure to include your web address in all press releases you send out to members of the media. By having it at their fingertips, they may be more likely to include it in articles they write about your company.

5. Don’t forget to put your web address in your Yellow Pages ad. That’s one place people see it every day.

6. Do you own any company vehicles? Be sure to put your URL on the side of any car or truck that’s out there delivering your products.

7. In addition to listing your toll-free number, put your web address on the bottom of every page of your catalogue so customers have easy access to your online store.

Online Promotions

8. Process so you can get the best exposure possible.

9. If you’re still itching for more exposure, you can explore search engine marketing, wherein you pay to have a text ad appear when visitors search for certain keywords.

10. Launch a sweepstakes that offers anyone who registers on your site or subscribes to e-newsletters within a certain time frame the chance to win a free gift.

11. Send out a weekly newsletter to registered site members that offer tips and news related to your company or industry with links back to your site.

12. Offer content to other sites. It’s a win-win situation: The other site gets free articles to beef up their offerings and you get a link back to your site and the cachet of being an expert.

13. Send a well-planned, customer-focused promotion to a targeted list of potential visitors and offer a credit toward the purchase of anything from your site. Spend time on your e-mail’s look and content: You want to offer value to customers and not have it appear to be spam.

14. Create your own exchange by asking sites complementary to yours (but that don’t compete) to put your link on their pages and you’ll do likewise.

15. Hook up with web affiliates–hundreds of sites that all link their traffic to yours–and get visitors from sites with related content.

16. Get active in online discussion groups and chats and always include your URL in your signature. (Don’t do any hard selling, though. Most groups frown on such behaviour and will think you’re spamming the group.)

17. Any time someone orders a product from your site, include a catalogue with their order to get them coming back for more.

18. Inspire your visitors to spread the word for you with viral marketing techniques, from the aforementioned newsgroup participation to including an "e-mail this link" on every page of your site.

19. Not sure what your customers want? Try creating an survey to get their crucial opinions on how well your site is selling to them.

20. When creating your own ads, make sure you understand who you’re targeting, the goal of your campaign, and how to creatively use the ad confines to get viewers to click on your ad, not away from it.

21. Use other selling venues like online classified advertising or online auction sites to increase exposure to your site and products.