The Internet has revolutionized business and you need a presence to make money in the digital age. While everyone has their favorite tools, I prefer two in particular.

Most businesses build sites without really having a clue regarding how to go about it. The first step in developing a business site is not building it. Instead, you have to focus on the internet marketing aspect of the business and design accordingly. To this end, there are two tools that can be considered from my point of view.

The single best tool you need to become familiar with is Wordtracker. This tool is the proverbial golden egg of Internet marketing. Wordtracker lets you take a keyword and find out all the phrases people are using that incorporate the keyword. You can then take the list of keywords and find out how many searches are occurring on any of the big search engines Yahoo, Google and MSN. On top of this, you can also determine how difficult it will be to get top rankings for the keyword phrases through search engine optimization.

Wordtracker is great because it allows you to determine if there is a market for your idea before you waste time and money on it. It can also be used to come up with ideas for sites. You simply type in a keyword like travel and see if there is a niche with a lot of traffic and a nominal amount of competition for rankings. If you find the niche, you tailor a business idea to it and make a boatload of money.

As if Wordtracker isnt enough, there is a second tool I have come to love. Introducing the article directory. The key to being really profitable on the Internet is getting free traffic. You do this through search engine optimization or by getting publicity. With either area, this has traditionally been accomplished through link trading. Essentially, you agree to put another persons link on your site in exchange for them doing the same with yours. As you might imagine, it takes a long time to build up enough links to get high rankings and publicity. Article directories solve this problem, which makes them great internet marketing tools.

An article directory is exactly what it sounds like. You write an article and deposit it in the directory. Webmaster and editors from all over the world search the directories looking for content for their sites. When they republish your article, you get free publicity. Even better, you will create links in the author area of your article and they will publish those on their site as well. You are either reading this article in a directory or it came from one. Or someone ripped me offlol.

Everyone has there favorite tools they use to have a go at marketing and seo. I prefer these, but others would argue for others. In response, all I can say is this work for me and I am far too lazy to go find something new.