While creating a contest, specify details like a contest name and description, start and end time, number of entries allowed and any specific policies. You can also customize the theme to change the look and feel of your contest. If you are planning to run the contest on a WordPress site, you can install the Binkd plugin to do that within seconds. Similarly, the Facebook application allows you to create contests on your Facebook page in no time.

Features:

• Create and manage contests easily.
• Track entries and view results in real-time.
• Easy to install on FB or WordPress.

Visit Binkd @ http://promotion.binkd.com

You simply need to enter the website (e.g. woome.com) of an advertiser into the search box and press Search. The section “Active ads” shows the different ad copies for this advertiser, the websites (publishers) where those ads are running and their average ad position. You can see the total publishers reached per ad in the “Ad reach” section and see the advertiser’s best performing ad copies by clicking on the section “Best Performers”.

You can see the number of traffic sources for different ad copies.

You can also see the performance of different ad copies.

All the data can be exported into Excel files by clicking the EXPORT button on the upper right corner.

Features:

• Look into performance of Adsense ad copies of your competitors.
• Info on Adsense campaigns of 265,000 advertisers, running on more than 92,000 sites.
• View active running ad copies for an advertiser.
• View advertiser’s top traffic sources.
• Compare best performing ad copies.
• Monitor trends in real time.
• Export data into Excel.
• Free, registration needed to view more detailed stats.

Check out Mixrank @ www.mixrank.com (via ReadWriteWeb)

CampaignCog is a free to use web service that helps you track your emails and various stats about them. Using the web tool you can start email campaigns and specify the number of subscribers for it. Next you select a start date and a merge tag that helps provide reports of each individual email you send. Finally you select whether or not the clicked links in your emails are tracked. With all this done, you are provided an HTML code that you should paste into your email or sending software.

This code helps track the email and gathers various stats such as how many subscribers opened your email, read it, skim-read it, forwarded it, or deleted it.

Features:

• A user-friendly web service.
• Lets you track your emails.
• You can find out valuable information about the emails sent to your subscribers.
• Find out how many people read your email, forwarded it, and deleted it.
• Similar tools: 1and1Mail, MailChimp and Nouri.sh.

Check out CampaignCog @ www.campaigncog.com (by MOin from ThumbPress)

You can also see the name of the website where the ad was seen last along with the date. Sharing any ad with your friends is made super easy through a unique URL. Moat also has a feature where you can see ads for a random brand and keep refreshing to view a new brand.

Features:

• Search engine for ads.
• Lets you search current online ads for any brand.
• Get information like ad size and the website it last ran on.
• Share any ad through a permanent URL.
• No registration required.

Visit Moat @ www.moat.com [Via TechCrunch]

So how does a customer pay through SMS with this tool? Simple – once the pricing is set up, you can direct customers to SMS a command to your number and trigger the transaction. The customers will then be charged through their cellphone bill or phone credit, and you then get the money from Paypal, Moneybookers or any other payment method you set. You can set up different pricing based on the country the buyer is in, which they claim will meet all current regulations for all countries where the service is available.

Recursos Moviles also lets you run SMS marketing campaigns for direct conversion to sales. For example, you can generate marquee ads that you can easily embed in your website. They also have an auto-responder for inquiries and promotions.

But the strongest feature this tool offers is SMS to email. This allows you to receive SMS from users to your email and then respond to it quickly. You can also use the emails during broadcasts, much like when people text in their opinions and answers to a radio or TV show. You can create news buzz, a voting system, and individual support with this feature.

So if you are looking to start SMS marketing on-the-fly, you can try this out. SMS marketing offers a level of flexibility and a wider reach not found in smartphones allowing you to position yourself better over the competition. Recursos Moviles is especially useful for countries that have a high rate of SMS usage or in markets where micropayments makes sense.

Features:

• SMS micropayment service for businesses.
• Integrates services that works well with several payment methods.
• SMS auto-responder.
• SMS to email.
• Marquee ads.
• Available in Spanish or English.
• Monitor SMS campaigns.
• Monitor earnings.

Check out Recursos Moviles @ www.recursosmoviles.com

Fortunately, they are now offering a beta service of PhpList Hosted, which is basically the cloud-based version of this email campaign manager. PhpList Hosted is ready-to-use and it will allow you to access and manage your email campaigns easily and conveniently, from any computer.

Once you have signed up for an account in phpList Hosted, you will be automatically provided with a trial account of the service. This will let you send up to 300 messages per month with a daily limit of 50 messages. If you wish to send larger volumes of emails after trying out the free service, you may then sign up for a paid account that will let you send from 2,000 messages per month up to 100,000 messages per month (depending on the subscription), which also allows attachments.

Aside from being a very convenient email campaign manager, PhpList Hosted allows you to experience the latest developments in PhpList without doing constant upgrades. This tool is a great, cheap, and powerful alternative for popular e-mail marketing tools.

Features:

• Open source email list manager online.
• Access you email campaigns from any computer.
• No downloading, installation, and configuration required.
• Automatically processes message queue and bounces.
• Manages whitelisting and deliverability of your email campaigns.
• Secure managing of account.
• Experience first the latest developments from phpList.
• Similar Tools: MadMimi, Minimalist G-mail, and Gtriage

Check out Phplist @ www.phplist.com

The built-in WYSIWYG email editor lets you create HTML emails without worrying about the code behind it and many annoying formatting issues. You can add text, create hyper-links, insert images, align your content with a few clicks and if too adventurous even edit the actual HTML code.

The software lets you create multiple groups targeted towards different sets of audience, and send emails to these groups as desired. You can give each group a name, enter addresses manually, or even import them from a CSV or a delimited text file. Similarly, you can also export groups and customize their mail settings. The software allows you to pre-defined fields that you can quickly insert in your newsletters. You can send a different reply-to address and send emails by setting even your Gmail account as the senders account. You can setup multiple accounts in the software and select the one you want while sending emails.

For a nominal fees, you can remove the 50 recipients per email cap and send emails to unlimited users.

Features:

• An easy-to-use email marketing software for Windows.
• Create groups and populate by adding or importing contacts.
• Design HTML emails and newsletters without any coding.
• Insert custom fields in newsletters and set default settings for each account.
• Send up to 50 recipients per message for free.
• Works on Windows Vista, 7 and XP

Download 1and1mail from  www.1and1soft.com

You can manage your mailing list and send all of them a link to your video, clicking on which will take them to a custom created video landing page. You can even track the number of views your videos have received, stream videos to platforms like smartphones and tablets and brand your videos by inserting logos. The free account lets you receive 1,000 views on your video and send it to a maximum of 200 people.

Features:

• Create customized video ads and video emails online.
• Choose form thousands of templates.
• Create a custom landing page and track views.
• No additional cost for streaming and hosting.

Visit VideoCustomizer @ https://www.videocustomizer.com

Paperlinks is a web service that lets you create a mini-website intended for cellphones; the site contains information about your services or products. You are provided with a QR code for your site. You can publish this code on items or share it online with others. When smartphone users scan the code, they are taken to your site. The idea can not only be used by businesses; you can simply create a “˜Paperlink’ for party invitations with all the information on the page.

For iPhone users, the site has a dedicated iOS application. Other smartphone users can scan the QR code as they regularly do. The free account of Paperlinks lets you create only 1 paperlink and add only 4 modules to your site.

Features:

• A user-friendly web service.
• Lets you create mini websites.
• Provides  a QR code for the site.
• Helps easily reach out to smartphone users.
• Similar tools: Qrnote, QRcore, BeQRious and QRJumps.

Check out Paperlinks @ www.paperlinks.com (by MOin from ThumbPress)

As you can see in the second screenshot, you can select a size, and then also preview and customize the product before ordering it. They don’t mention anything about international shipping on their site so be sure to check on that before ordering.

Features

• Order custom stickers and skins from the web.
• Select from a range of different designs for different products.
• UPS ground shipping free in the US.
• Similar tools: StickerYou.

Check out Sticker Mule @ www.stickermule.com (By Abhijeet from GT Mobiles)