TestiPhone is a handy way to test out your mobile-ready (you hope) WordPress theme to see how it looks on a small form factor.

Having commissioned my own help desk software years ago, I know what’s involved in creating an app that’s state of the art: a lot! I also require web-based solutions because I only see my support people, oh, every 10 years or so. If you’re a one-person shop you can’t do better than uservoice. For the unbeatable price of nothing you get a helpdesk software, a knowledgebase, a  forum, and even free branding. They have additional features you can pay for (most obviously, a multiuser version), but the base version is plenty to start with.

There are a few marketing gurus who are enormously successful because they give away content of great value, then stack the value with their for-pay published work, and David Meerman Scott is one of them.

Scott’s free ebooks are all worth the read, so grab those babies right away. Even the oldest has easily withstood the ravages of Internet time. They come with a less obvious payload, which is a masterclass on ebook design. They are lavishly beautiful and have gorgeous typography. I try hard to make my ebooks look good because the reader may well spend hours with them. In Scott’s case, it makes them all the more attractive for viral spread.

This post by Terry Kyle on his always-good Sunday SEO shows how to start from zero and be making money in a week with little or no experience in the internet marketing world. It’s strong, well thought out, and presented simply and clearly. The idea is to obtain a group of inexpensive, reliable outsourcers on sites like Fiverr, Zeerk, and others, then offer your services on sites like WarriorForum using your “team”.

It’s a good idea, with one catch. Kyle lays out the options cogently. He includes a compelling introductory email you can use when prospecting. He emphasizes how to build this kind of business for the long term by communicating well and by assembling a good group to back you up. That’s the catch. I think it would be a stretch to obtain a reliable team inside of a week. Other than that his post is a golden ray of hope in a world with increasingly gloomy prospects for so many.

At the moment I am conducting an ambitious and somewhat costly comparison of free press release distribution sites such as PRLog vs. paid ones, like marketwire. Having done informal comparisons before, I know there are some advantages to the paid sites.

Need the fastest possible press release distribution for reputation management? Go free

But there’s a surprising case where the free ones can be much better: you can set up a new account and get published on an authority site fast. The paid sites very often won’t even let you create, much less publish, a press release without going through a cumbersome signup process (What area is your business, how many employees do you have, family medical history for the last three generations, etc.)

Why would this matter? In a word: Reputation management. OK, two words. Or simply, the fastest possible response time to begin getting a message out to the world. Suppose someone with a name identical to yours in the same business is involved in a scandal (don’t laugh-this happened to me) and you want your site to be  understood as soon as possible.

First you’d hit Facebook and Twitter, obviously. They rank high in search results and are the first place people will look. Next you may wan t to update your company blog. But one of the most effective things you can do is to write a press release and get it out there as fast as you can.

If you’ve never done this before, or if you’ve never used one of the paid distribution sites, there will necessarily be a lag while the paid sites process your “inquiry”. This could take days if the emergency hits on a Friday afternoon.

Or you could just hit some of the free sites, such as  PRLog, Articlesbase.com, and Scribd.com. These are authority sites, they show up high in search results fast (obviously, the more targeted the keyphrase, the better–they won’t help for “coffee” but they’ll help for “angelo’s coffee newark”), and they’re free. There are other effective free sites, but these are the best when you need to strike a balance between speed and effectiveness.

One of the great pleasures I had working for other companies early in my career was reading the print edition of AdAge, a high-end, high-quality marketing magazine. (AdAge was expensive so I couldn’t afford to subscribe for myself, and I didn’t want to lie about being a marketer to get a free subscription.)

For reasons I don’t quite understand, their digital edition is free for the signup and it is very, very good. A typical example is this interview with marketing pioneer Regis McKenna, in which he discusses misconceptions about Steve Jobs and McKenna himself, and offers some highly relevant observations about branding and young companies (hint: he says it doesn’t work with new companies).

This is a Web Marketing Strategies Best of Breed publication.

iMarketing Insider publishes an occasional newsletter that I look forward to. They seem to be reporting from actual experience. They also have good original reference material.

The article at http://www.imarketinginsider.com/internet-marketing/videomarketingscript/ represents both. It discusses what’s working (for them-your mileage may very) at the moment, and the same post has an excellent little PDF on how to script a promotional video.