Web.AppStorm has a roundup of web apps that are particularly useful for startups. Go check it out:

With the multitude of web applications available today, it can be difficult choosing, let alone finding, an application that fits your needs and wants. There are so many fantastic apps available, many of which are bound to be beneficial for you and/or your business.

From mind mapping, design and development to collaboration, project tracking and accounting; this roundup of 101 fantastic web apps for startups and businesses are sure to reduce operating costs and increase both productivity and efficiency.

Link: 101 Apps for Your Web App Startup Toolbox

Once you decide what you want to share with your customers, you need to choose a tool that makes email campaigns a pleasurable experience. Luckily, there are no shortage of good options in this area. Here are some tools that have enjoyed success this century.

AWeber

Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, we’ve got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.

MailChimp

MailChimp will help you manage and grow your mailing list, design beautiful emails, get into the inbox, and track your campaigns.

Free + Easy = People Power.

Emma

Create, send and track your email campaigns in style.

Meet Emma, the email marketing and communications service that’s taken a unique approach to web-based software. We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue).

It’s all about email marketing in style, and it’s why 20,000 small and midsize businesses, non-profits and agencies have chosen Emma to power their email newsletters and campaigns. And we’d love to help you.

sendloop

Sendloop is a professional yet easy-to-use email marketing and mail list management service for any kind of online/offline businesses.

Newsberry

Send and track email newsletters: join the thousands of companies who trust Newsberry for the email marketing success.

iContact

The Email Marketing Service That Allows You to Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and More!

StreamSend

StreamSend is the most comprehensive and cost-effective permission based e-mail marketing suite available, and it is our honour to provide this powerful email marketing suite to marketers, entrepreneurs and online retailers around the world.

CampaignMonitor

Email marketing software for designers and their clients.

Send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Earn a tidy profit by letting your clients send at prices you set.

Campaign Monitor is one of the more popular services out there, but it’s aimed more at professional web designers. And they are so confident in their product that they allow their customers to rebrand the Campaign Monitor package and offer it to customers of their own. Great support and a flexible API make this possible.

And many of their clients have taken advantage and offer their own email marketing packages built on the Campaign Monitor engine. Some email marketing tools can be a bit intimidating to start using, so these companies have attempted to make it a little easier for the end user: some focused completely at ease-of-use or doing the design, some are focused at a niche market.

Check out these other services that may suit your needs.

AshWebMail

AshWebMail is built to give you the tools to succeed in email marketing. This means that every feature we build and decision we make is focused on one thing – helping you rock at email marketing. Happy rockin’!

Breeze

Breeze lets you create and send amazing email campaigns. And it’s really, really easy.

Broadcast

The cost-effective way to reach your target audience.

It’s simple – we do the design, you add the content, manage subscribers and track the success of your campaigns using Broadcast’s built in reporting facilities. No installation, no setup, no fuss.

MagicMail 2.0

Create stunning email campaigns as easy as 1-2-3.

mail&go

Create and deliver fantastic email campaigns. It’s so easy you can just mail&go.

ScoutMailer

The easiest way to manage your camps, councils, troops or crews e-mail mailing list.

ScoutMailer is a super simple web application designed to make it easy to send e-mails to your camp, council, troop or crew. Send messages, manage your list and monitor the results. It doesn’t get any easier than this!

Selectmailer

Selectmailer – quite simply the best, easiest and most measurable e-marketing tool! Selectmailer is being used to send tens of thousands of attractive HTML email newsletters every day.

Are you connecting with your customers as well as you can? Your users and customers should feel like the know you personally. Any of these great tools can help you to show the human side of your company or product and make your users feel more at home.

And when you have customers, you will have needs related to each of them. Whether tracking communication and interactions, remembering tasks related to each customer, making sales, or arranging meetings, you’ll be more effective at what you do if you have good tools and solid processes in place.

From personal experience with starting a business, I know this is one area that I need to improve on.

And with more focus on web tools today, many people are looking for alternatives to Microsoft’s pairing of Outlook and Exchange. Here are some of the better tools available to help you keep track of your customer relations. These applications may have a different approach, but they are all focused on tracking and improving interactions with customers.

SalesForce CRM

A product that has been around for a while, Salesforce has focused on a more traditional approach to CRM. They offer different CRM solutions, with the ability to customize your CRM tool to fit your needs. There is a strong lean towards planning and thinking through your processes regarding your customers. That’s a good thing.

As the name suggest, this product is based on sales so it may not be the best fit for all teams.

CureCRM

And in a slightly different direction, CureCRM is an email-based CRM tool. It also provides Twitter tracking, but the main focus is on tracking conversations via email. This product also has strong integration with your calendar (Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar).

Another interesting offering from CureCRM is their automated sales scheduling assistant. Similar to the former iWantSandy application, CureCRM’s assistant feature is intended to mimic a real person and will automatically sends email reminders and update your calendars on its own.

Highrise

The newest product from 37signals, Highrise is like all of their other applications — created with a focus on simplicity. The intention of this app is to include all tasks and relevant information for each contact or client all in one place. It also is based largely on working with email via its dropbox addresses.

Another nice feature that a lot of web applications are adding is integration with other web applications. The apps from 37signals certainly lead in this area. Highrise currently interfaces nicely with support tools (HelpSpot and Zendesk), email marketing tools (MailChimp and sendloop), and invoicing and time tracking tools (Less Accounting and Harvest), just to name a few.

With reasonable pricing plans, Highrise is aimed more at small businesses than overly large corporations. It can scale to meet your needs, but has a limited feature set compared to more traditional CRM products.

Tactile CRM

Another solid option is Tactile CRM. It’s a more traditional tool aimed to help you track conversations and sales with your contacts. The feature set is very similar to Highrise, as is the look and feel.

The reason this app is included here is to list the other application that it integrates with. As Highrise does, Tactile CRM interfaces with support tools (Zendesk), invoicing tools (FreshBooks), and email marketing tools (Campaign Monitor).

Choosing between Highrise or Tactile CRM could come down to another tool your team currently uses that could integrate with the CRM application you choose.

Relenta

And in the opposite approach to Highrise is Relenta. This product is an ambitious one — it aims to be an all-in-one tool, including email, contacts, calendar, files and email marketing features.

Do you hate copy and pasting the same data between multiple software programs? Relenta puts an end to repetitive data entry. In fact, when someone sends you an email inquiry or fills out a form on your website, Relenta can automatically add them to your contact database. You won’t have to lift a finger!

Does that sound like a bit too much? It will be for some people. But there are many people who prefer to have all their tools in one place. Just look no further than Microsoft Outlook for proof of that fact. If you want a web-based tool that operates on the same level as Outlook, Relenta looks like a good option.

CoTweet

The new wave of CRM tools?

One of the newer kids on the block, CoTweet is based on the idea that many companies are moving to use Twitter to interact with their customers (or potential customers). There’s no doubt — this is an interesting approach to monitor and manage client interactions.

Designed for multiple accounts, multiple users, integrated Twitter search, and the assignment of tweets to certain individuals, CoTweet appears to be set up to lead the way when managing contacts and tasks via Twitter.

Note of caution: this app is still in beta.

It’s a Small Business Explosion

We need to recognize that we live in good times — there has never been more well designed and affordable tools available to business owners. Gone are the days of having to pay for one-size-fits-all applications because there are no other choices.

As always, analyze your needs and your processes before picking a tool. A little thought and planning ahead of time can ensure you choose the application that meets the needs of your business and fits in with the way your team works. And interacts with your customers.

As the head cheese, it’s your job to make sure your team — big or small — is supported by your infrastructure. The tools your team uses every day should increase effectiveness, not hinder it. The same goes for your processes — how you use your tools.

The way your team communicates is perhaps the most vital aspect of your fledgling enterprise. And as our culture embraces the Internet even more, people from all over the world are collaborating together in ways not previously possible. You need to use a tool that allows remote team members to communicate in ways that meet their needs. You want empowered employees? Make them feel included.

Before you choose a tool, consider the types of communication that your teammates require. Is it merely functional, requiring only information regarding tasks? Or do your people need to socialize as well? Will most of your communicating be one-on-one? Or do your people need to address the team as a whole? If you know the answer to even some of these questions before you choose a tool, you’re ahead of the game.

And while I can’t answer them for you, I thought I’d share a list of communication-based web applications that vary in both complexity and intended usage. Each has their strengths — knowing what your needs are will enable you to choose one that fits for you and your crew. Enjoy.

Focused on Function

The following two apps are focused on the functions your team performs.

Backpack is full of good features.

Backpack

Designed to be an informal team intranet, Backpack contains a lot of functionality. Built upon the premise of creating pages for various types of documentation, Backpack also excels at communication and collaboration due to the messages, comments and Journal features.

Any item on a page can be commented on by the team. Correspondence on the group level can be accomplished via the Message Board (not available on all plans). And finally, the Journal allows team members to set their current status (think Twitter) as well as document work completed throughout the day. Add to these the ability to share files, access shared calendars and set reminders and you’ve got a powerful tool to meet almost any needs your team might have.

Huddle - workspaces for small teams.

Huddle

In a similar vein, Huddle was built to be the one tool for your team. Rather than pages, Huddle is based on the concept of workspaces. A workspace can be focused on a particular project or be used as a working group for a particular subset of team members. Or, it could be used to include all the necessary information for a particular internal process.

To illustrate, you could create a workspace to manage the new design of a site for a client (Project) or use a workspace to document the process your team follows every time they hire and train a new employee. However you put it to use, Huddle also offers collaborative features such as file storage, discussion boards and wikis, as well as document management (versioning and approvals).

Gather Round the Water Cooler

These two great applications are based more on the social needs of your team and communication with one another.

Gather round the fireside.

Campfire

Long heralded as the best way for remote teams to keep in daily contact, Campfire is basically a group chat on steroids. And although it has not received as much attention as the other apps from 37signals — in terms of development and upgrades — it still stands tall when compared to its competitors.

Campfire gives your team to stay in touch via a real time group chat. You have the ability to create multiple rooms as well, which many people use to break out conversations on a particular topic. For example, you may want a general Water Cooler room that is loose and gives your team the freedom to discuss whatever is on their mind. But you may also want a separate room to discuss a particular topic or project.

That alone would make a great tool, but you can also share files right in the chat, which enables you to make edits or updates while talking about it. Imagine how much faster that can be as opposed to sending emails and attached files back and forth. Campfire also archives all your transcripts and files and gives a solid search function to find that exact piece of information that was discussed.

Campfire is a great addition to any team.

The digital water cooler.

Co-op

Built by the team at Iridesco, Co-op also focuses more on socializing than on doing work. And like Campfire, you can create different groups on Co-op for different projects or subjects.

This tool is fairly focused, not offering a large number of features. In Co-op, your team has a place to update their current status, similar to the Journal feature in Backpack. It also gives you the ability to chat, but in more of a Twitter-ish style than a traditional chat. This is referred to as the Workstream. As you knock off tasks or receive updates from clients, just let your team know with a short message.

But Co-op also offers two extra features not seen in these other tools. One is the ability to set an agenda. So you can update your current status — what you are doing now. But you can also set your agenda for the day so your team knows what you plan to be doing.

And lastly, Co-op is built on Harvest, the time tracking tool offered by Iridesco. So you have the ability to track your time right within the Co-op workstream. This can also be helpful for your team.

If you are already using a project management of document storage tool, Co-op can be a nice addition to improve your communication.

A Little of Both

A different way to organize your chatter.

Staction

This is the new kid on the block, only becoming available early in 2009. Staction aims to focus on working together, rather than spending time in email. It was designed to handle both your flow of internal discussion as well as manage your project related tasks. But in a different way.

The interface is somewhat spartan, but don’t let that throw you off. This is a powerful tool. Consisting of two columns, Staction sticks your discussion on one side and your tasks on the other. The power here comes from the ability to categorize – or tag — both types of items. Then you can create saved views which only contain items that meet your criteria.

This give you the ability to keep all your communication in your Full Stream. But if you are disciplined with adding meta data — again, the tags — you can instantly narrow your view down to one project or subject.

This ability to switch between all information and a particular topic from within the same space takes some time to get used to. But once you do, it can enhance the way your team works.

Yammer-time.

Yammer

Last on our list is Yammer. Another relatively new tool, Yammer has a lot of similarities to some of the tools above. It mainly functions as a Twitter-like interface to tell people what you’re currently up to. And, like Twitter, it can be used to carry one one-on-one or group conversations.

With Yammer, your team can also create groups for particular subsets of your overall team or for a specific project or process. Where Yammer is unique is that it allows you to create an org chart. How helpful is that to your team? It would depend a lot on the size.

And lastly, Yammer has desktop tools available rather than the web version. Built on Adobe AIR, this tool allows you to access the functions of the web in a widget style interface. And since AIR apps run on Windows and OS X, you’ve got a tool that your entire team can use.

Overall, Yammer is basically an internal Twitter. And the popularity of Twitter speaks for itself, so there’s a good chance your team will appreciate this tool.

Take Some Time to Find the Right Fit

Depending on size and personalities, one team can vary greatly from the next. Take some time to ponder the needs of your team. And although there are plenty more options out there, chances are one of the tools above will fit in great with your team. If you’re already using a different product that I haven’t mentioned, leave us a comment and tell us about it!

While many tools for analysing things like traffic are only approximate, when you are watching competitors any information is useful. So today I’ve rounded up a list of tools I use regularly to add to your toolbox of website espionage! My main reasons for using these tools are for:

1. Assessing Partnership Opportunities On a fairly regular basis companies will contact us about partnership or business development opportunities. I must say hardly any of these seem to pan out, but at least with a traffic tool I can assess whether the site has a shot at providing something useful in return.
2. Investigating new markets Whenever we launch a site in a new area the first thing we do is go hunting for competitors. While its good to take every competitor seriously, there are some who are perhaps more serious. Analysing sites is a good way to separate the wolves from the sheep.
3. Comparing Performance I regularly watch and compare traffic between our sites and competing sites. I’m usually looking to see if we’re slipping behind, surging ahead or going neck and neck. This might give me an idea of whether our marketing is effective, if we are missing some crucial traffic sources and what the overall trends are.
4. Monitoring the Competition It’s a good idea to know what your competition is up to. Using feeds, alerts and searches you can track mentions of them on the web to see when a new feature, bit of press or even disgruntlement arises. You have to watch out for information overload, but setting an occasional monitoring schedule can help with this.

Traffic Analysis

Given how vital traffic is to web work, it’s no surprise that traffic estimation tools are probably the most useful of all the sites listed in this post. They aren’t necessarily accurate – in fact they are notoriously inaccurate – but you can still get some good information out of them.

• Alexa’s Traffic RankingsAlexa.com/siteinfo
  Despite being widely and often panned, Alexa is my favourite tool. It’s quick and I love the browser add-on. A couple of weeks ago they redesigned and updated their algorithm because of late our Envato sites have risen far in the rankings. On the whole Alexa isn’t great for figuring out small traffic trends and often shows random fluctuations which have no basis in reality (when you check your own sites you can see this pretty quickly). Nonetheless Alexa has a few strengths. First, it estimates traffic for even tiny sites. Second, it seems to be improving continually. Third, it looks at global traffic. On the whole I think it’s a useful tool and I make use of it regularly.
• Compete Traffic EstimatorCompete.com
  My second favourite traffic tool is Compete. It only estimates US traffic and isn’t so great for smaller sites. However it feels more accurate on traffic trends than Alexa often does. Also it actually gives you a traffic count whereas Alexa provides things like ranking and reach (the latter of which I still don’t understand!) There are some premium options on Compete, but being the cheap guy that I am, I only ever use the free options
• Google Trends for WebsitesTrends.google.com
  Google Trends launched last year and has proven quite useful. It has two modes, one being to display trends in search terms and the other to measure websites. My feeling is it’s a relatively accurate traffic measurement, though it only works on reasonably large sites. Given the amount of information available to Google, I’d hazard a guess that Trends will only get better and better in the years to come.
• Also Ran: QuantcastQuantcast.com
  In my opinion Quantcast sucks pretty bad. Most of our Envato websites are listed with traffic numbers that are as much as 50 to 200x off. That’s a pretty huge factor to be off by. I guess Quantcast might be good for really big sites, but that’s not that useful. There is an option to let Quantcast actually measure your traffic (by installing a script) but not that many sites do it. On the whole, I avoid this tool, though I mention it here for completeness sake.

Site Analysis

There are quite a few other ways you can analyse a site beyond its traffic. Information on how a site has looked in the past, its optimization for search, the whois information for the domain and so on are easy to get and useful in different situations.

• Web Archive – Competitor’s Site HistoryWeb.Archive.org/web
  The Way-Back-Machine is a non-profit site that has recorded some 85 billion pages in an archive of the web. It’s pretty amazing and can make for some entertaining looks at how sites used to look. When it comes to established competitors, it’s great to look back and see how their sites used to look, often with revealing information about how they’ve grown, membership numbers at different times in history and so on.
• Website Grader – General Site InformationWebsite.grader.com
  Hubspot’s Website Grader is a neat little tool that runs a whole lot of different services and queries over your site to return a score out of 100. I’m pretty dubious about the score (a lot of our sites seem to get 99.99) but the information below is really useful. Not only are there recommendations on what could be improved but lots of stats. There’s also a feature to compare with other sites, perfect for seeing how you line up against the competition.
• Yahoo Site Explorer – Find Out Who’s Linking to a CompetitorSiteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
  Finding out who links to a competitor is a good way to find sites to try to get links from yourself. This is particularly true if you are just entering the market and aren’t sure what sites might be interested in your offerings. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is a good way to find “inlinks” to any domain.
• Xinu Returns – General SEO InformationXinureturns.com
  When it comes to general SEO information, XinuReturns is a neat little page that pulls data from a whole ton of sources. Some of it is replicated in the Website Grader above, but there are lots of other services it polls for data as well.
• Domain Tools – WhoIs Look ups and MoreDomainTools
  DomainTools is a handy set of services for getting information about a domain. The most prominent tool is a WhoIs search to find out domain owner details. If you pay a subscription you can even get historical WhoIs data – useful for domains that are privacy protected but didn’t used to be! There’s also a lot of other neat services like an alert service for when people use your trademark in a domain, and a tool to find misspellings of your domain name and who registered them.

Feed Analysis

If you operate a blog or a competing with blogs, then there are two neat tools for monitoring/analysing feeds.

• PostRankPostRank
  Previously called AideRSS, this tool lets you quickly analyse a given RSS feed to find what items are popular, handy for figuring out what people are interested in so you can immitate!
• FeedCompareFeedCompare
  This is a simple tool for tracking how a feed has grown over time. The feed needs to be through the Feedburner service and given how flakey Feedburner can be you can expect to see some pretty wild fluctuations, check out this comparison of ZenHabits, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb for a graph showing some crazy lines.

Monitoring

Tracking what happens online is a lot easier than you might think thanks to a host of tools available. It should be mentioned that this sort of monitoring should not only be done for competitor brands but for your own brands. When you do it internally this is called Online Reputation Monitoring.

• Google Alerts & Yahoo AlertsGoogle.com/alerts and Alerts.yahoo.com
  Both Google and Yahoo Alerts let you set up email digests of news and links from around the web. Yahoo gives you a huge variety of options for creating alerts allowing you to create alerts specific to different services. Both take keywords to look out for and email you whenever they appear on the radar.
• Monitor ThisAlp-Uckan.net
  MonitorThis lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds in one aggregated feed. It’s easy to use and very convenient – though it can generate an awful lot of feed items!
• TweetBeepTweetBeep.com
  TweetBeep is an external service that provides an Alerts service for Twitter’s Search. It’s great for keeping track of mentions of your name, brand, and URL (even if it’s been shortened).
• Twitter …Twitter.com
  OK well I think everyone knows Twitter, but nonetheless I’ll mention it anyway. These days it seems like everyone is on Twitter, including your competitors. Create an account, follow them all and pay attention to what they say. I know personally I’m constantly leaking information about Envato. Often its deliberate, but I’m pretty sure I’ve said things in the past that give insights into our operations.

Know Any Other Tools?

So that’s my list of tools for staying on top of the competition. Do you know of any more for the list?