It's that time of year again. The new year, with heaps of New Year's resolutions and on how 2014 could be the year where everything is better than the last. If you're looking to improve your online presence, then this is definitely the blog for you. In October, I mosied on down to SearchLove and came away brimming with ideas and tools to try.... A few months on, while I still bang on about storytelling, I've not quite got round to testing all of the tools and apps suggested...

So my New Year's resolution is to try and get through as many tools as possible in the next twelve months and find which ones work. If you fancy giving it a go too, then take a gander at the list of tools to try, that will hopefully make you and I even more AWESOME online!

Social Media & Outreach

• Social Crawlytics - This free tool lets you find stats on the most shared content from any of your competitors’ blogs and also allows you to research your own blog to determine which posts have gotten the most shares across the social platforms.
• Buzzsumo - Provides daily insight into the topics, stories and influencers with the highest engagement. It will help you find influencers in your industries and find people with whom you should start building relationships.
• Find bloggers to outreach to using Group High & Inkybee
• Need to find a tweet sent ages ago? Not a problem any more thanks to backtweets
• Research and compare mentions and links while setting up alerts to notify you when your site is mentioned or linked to with Fresh Web Explorer

Research

• Find information that's already in the public domain at gov.uk or make a freedom of information request (or use WhatDoTheyKnow.com to do it for you.)
• Help get your content discovered with Outbrain, Taboola, nrelate (but make sure to start small and test - one may work better for a particular target audience but not for another)
• Image Raider - Will automate your reverse image searches to find out who is using your images (and see if they're using them without accreditation), a bit like dragging an image into the search box of http://images.google.com/ but they do it all for you.
• Want to run a survey? Try Quick Surveys, Google Consumer Surveys or OnePoll

Testing

• Crazyegg allows you to fully track and A/B test your website. They provide a number of reports like heat map analysis to help you analyse user behaviour. Also you can identify and convert opportunities with Qualaroo
• Not sure what title to use for your latest blog? Try Title Split Testing for WordPress
• Cromonitor - If you’re curious what kinds of tests your competitors are running on their websites, Cromonitor service can notify you when it detects them.
• Do you run Google ads and have a product that is influenced or weather dependent? Why not try Weatherfit? It will only show your ad when the local weather matches your requirements.

Improving your website

• The hreflang Tags Generator Tool - This tool will help you to generate the correct hreflang annotations for a multitude of languages.
• Flang Dejan Tools - Validates the implemented hreflang annotations.
• SEO Chat Tools - Is a developer site where people can share the tools to help others whether it be social media or SEO. Most are in beta so may not be perfect but might help you solve a problem you couldn't find the answer to elsewhere.

Media & PR

• Want to find publications from your industry? Try subscription sites like magazinesubscriptions.co.uk or www.allyoucanread.com
• Need a journalist? Try journalisted.com

(Having not tried all of these tools, I cannot guarantee that they all work but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are if you have any experience with them)

BONUS LINKS

(because you can never have enough tools or tips right?)

- How to be pin savvy on Pinterest

- 15 Free Content Creation Tools Marketers Shouldn’t Live Without via Hubspot

- Become a social sharing and scheduling guru with Bufferapp

- Shareaholic share buttons for Wordpress

- twazzup - Real-time Monitoring and Analytics for Twitter

- Analytics on your phone

Image credit: Facebook cake, PR scrabble, Test Dirt & Tools