Working for yourself is great, don’t get me wrong – I love it. The only problem is that most entrepreneurs start out having to do everything themselves. And I do mean everything. I’ve held every job in my company from a web designer to a publicist.
I’m sure every Internet marketer knows the feeling.
With everything we need to be good at and with so little time to do it all in, we need all the shortcuts we can get. With that in mind, here are the top five Firefox add-ons every Internet marketer should know and love.
These add-ons will speed up everything from promotion and content creation to web design. And they’re all free which is always a plus.
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The Twitter Bar – this add-on will allow you to post to Twitter directly from your address bar. And while that is a nice feature, it’s the speedlinking aspect that I really like.
Any time you’re reading something you think your followers would enjoy, you can press a button and have it instantly tweeted to your feed. That’s instant Twitter content just by surfing the net. Ah, multi-tasking.
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IE Tab – I started out online by building my own websites and teaching myself HTML for the fun of it, so I’ve been through a lot of code in my time. If you’re like me, you’ll know what an absolute pain in the ass Internet Explorer can be to code for.
Having IE Tab doesn’t make that any easier, but it does let you check your page to see how Internet Explorer will load it up by creating an Internet Explorer Tab (clever name, huh?) within Firefox. This way checking your progress is instantaneous.
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Zotero – this is a great add-on for content creation. Zotero is an add-on that allows you to store webpages, links, info and screenshots for easy access later. It makes reasearching articles and videos an absolute snap because all it takes is the press of one button to save and organize everything you’ll need for later use.
Zotero and the Twitter Bar are two of my favorites because they integrate content creation with the normal, time-wasting web surfing I’m already inclined to do. Turning my normally unproductive time into “work” time is always something I’m after.
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Firebug and Y-slow – these two work together to allow you to audit your web pages. Firebug allows you to not only inspect your HTML, CSS and Javascript live, it also lets you live edit the code and see an instant result on the screen. Y-Slow will load your site and audit the load speed, detailing things you can do to speed it up.
What I like about these add-ons is that they allow me instant feedback and a blueprint to follow for web design. They let me head problems off before they ever have the chance to get too far and waste too much time.
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SEO for Firefox – whenever you do a Google search with this add-on, you’ll see instant SEO-related info that can reveal weak spots in your competitions armor. You can discover the important steps that they may be missing and make sure your site is better covered.
SEO for Firefox is like giving yourself a battle plan for getting organic traffic. You can see how your competition got there and follow in their foot steps. It’s like being shown the exact steps to take to get to a #1 ranking on Google.
Now of course there are a million more add-ons that would be perfect for entrepreneurs like us, but I chose these five because they are the ones I use the most frequently. I’m sure a second and third list will follow these.
But what add-ons do you use the most? Which Firefox add-ons help your marketing the most?
