This is where digitally selling services comes in handy. So what are the advantages? Selling products with them is made as easy and pleasant as possible. All you have to do is upload your product, get the Buy Now button and watch the money roll in. These services let you focus on the product while they do the selling. The products are uploaded on safe and secure servers so you don’t have to worry about delivery and possible downtime. Most of these services provide more than one payment method so your visitors can shop in their local currency and use their preferred payment method. Want to expand your business even further? Create your own affiliate service with ease and watch the sales increase. And finally, you can track and monitor all your purchases, have a clear overview of products and all your activity in one place.

So you believe your business is ready to hit the global market? Are you ready to attract new buyers and keep them coming back? Continue reading and check out these 10 useful services for selling digital goods online.

1. Sellfy

Sellfy describes their service as the simplest way to sell digital products on your website. The process is quite simple – you create a product (design templates, ebooks, images, videos  etc), upload it to Sellfy and make money using generated ‘Buy now’ button.

Main features:

• The products are uploaded to a secure cloud drive and after the purchase is made, delivered to your clients.
• The buttons are cool looking and simply implementable into your website.
• You can offer discounts for clients who recommend your product via Twitter or Facebook.
• You will be able to see not only the sale stats but also discount campaign impact as shares and clicks.

Pricing:

• 5% per transaction.

In the screenshot below you can see the user’s control panel. Here you can drag and drop files to create the product.

Once the files are uploaded you have to specify the name of the product, the price, your Paypal email address and information about discounts if you want to offer any.

When finished with that you’ll receive the HTML code of your button. You can later access it on your products dashboard.

2. PayLoadz

PayLoadz offers a secure digital goods ecommerce service for anyone to sell downloadable goods online. They enable tens of thousands of people to sell digital goods such as videos, video games, ebooks, software and templates to a large audience of buyers from their online store. PayLoadz can service the needs of beginners as well as enterprise level partners.

Main features:

• Sell anywhere online – PayLoadz system works everywhere – your site, Facebook, Twitter, their store, blogs, etc. You are provided with simple purchase links and copy and paste HTML code to insert purchase buttons or shopping cart enabled buttons that work on all devices and platforms.
• Secure file storage and automated delivery – file security is a high priority. Files are stored on the ultra-secure Amazon S3 platform.
• Several payment systems – customer choice is what drives sales conversions. They need to be able to pay in a variety of methods. Credit cards, eChecks, ACH transfers, and existing account balances are some of the ways your customers can pay for your products.
• Turn key affiliate system – every PayLoadz account comes with a turn-key affiliate marketing system which handles affiliate management, affiliate product promotion, and affiliate payouts.

Pricing:

• $14.95/month + 5% per transaction. Payloadz also offers a free 7 day trial so you can try the platform out. What’s more, the transaction fees are only applied to actual sales, so you pay only when you get paid yourself.

Below you can see the product setup screenshot from a demo account. You can enter things like file format, category, keywords and description.

They also provide you with detailed statistics about the purchases.

3. E-junkie

E-junkie provides shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website, eBay, MySpace, Google Base, CraigsList and other websites. For merchants selling downloads, there is an automatic securing of the digital delivery of files and codes. If you are selling tangible goods, the shipping costs and inventory management is automatically calculated.

Main features:

• Store your files securely on their server, or store them remotely on your own server
• If you are selling single items, just copy-paste the Buy now buttons in your site.
• E-junkie lets you add options like size, color etc. to your products
• Calculate shipping & packaging automatically
• Manage your inventory automatically
• Create & manage affiliate program for all your products

Pricing:

• Depends on the number of products you’re selling. Starting from $5/month.
• E-junkie offers 30 day money back guarantee so if you are dissatisfied for any reason, E-junkie will refund your last month’s payment upon request.
• Unlike other services E-junkie only require payment of a flat monthly subscription fee, there is no bandwidth cost and no transaction fees. Also You only need to start a paid subscription after your first week of free trial if you decide so.
• Finally non-profit organizations are eligible for waive of monthly fees.

Below you can see the Add Product page and user admin panel.

4. Plimus

The Plimus landing page is decorated by a huge title which says – “sell more. Market, sell and buy digital goods and services around the world online and on mobile.” Indeed, Plimus is one of the largest and most serious services around offering great tools for sellers as well as affiliates. With the Plimus e-business platform, you have all the tools you need to take charge of your business and sell more.

Main features:

• Plimus offers you the most extensive set of payment methods available in the industry.
• Track and monitor your business in real-time with over 35+ standard reports and an unlimited number of custom report options
• Protect your products with our extensive licensing, piracy and copy protection options
• Plimus provides all the essential affiliate capabilities needed to help you build your own affiliates network at no extra cost.
• Your shoppers belong to you, and you can market to them at any time using the robust newsletter feature

Pricing:

• Depends on transaction amount range. Commission rates start at 75 cents.
• Payouts are generally made to Sellers and Affiliates on the 15th of each month for the previous month’s sales.You can receive your payout via Paypal, e-check and Wire Transfer.
• With Plimus you can protect your reputation by building reserves to meet refund and chargeback claims

Plimus has a very instructive getting started page where you can find useful guides for using the service together with some video tutorials.

5. Fetch

Fetch is a digital delivery application that makes selling downloadable products simple. It seamlessly integrates with popular shopping carts and payment systems like Shopify, Goodsie, PayPal, and many others. Fetch is hosted software so there’s nothing to install and works on any platform.

Main features:

• Hosted so there’s nothing to download or install.
• Uncluttered, lightweight interface for efficient user interaction.
• To ensure your data is never lost, Fetch is backed up daily and stored at multiple geographic locations.
• Associate a single file with several products.
• Allow previous buyers to download updated files.
• Revenue and download statistics are shown in real-time.
• Files stored on and delivered from Amazon S3.
• Use Fetch at no cost on the free plan.

Pricing:

• All premium Fetch plans have no restriction on the number of products, files, orders, users, or any other feature. Sell as much as you’d like without worry of costly commissions or order limitations.
• Pricing depends on the storage size. Starting from $5/month. There’s also a free plan available yet the storage is limited to 1MB.

All premium accounts have unrestricted access to everything Fetch has to offer. Unlimited products, orders, downloads, and so much more. Fetch puts you in control of everything.

6. Pulley

Pulley is a simple way to sell your digital art, music, videos, photography, fonts, eBooks, software, and other downloadable products. With Pulley you can easily add your digital products and customize your account settings, sell from any website and the money goes directly to your PayPal account, secure download links are emailed automatically to your customer and view real-time statistics as well as complete order and download history.

Main features:

• Stay focused on creating and selling your digital goods, and let Pulley handle the secure hosting, delivery, and tracking.
• Embed “Buy Now” buttons into any website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email, or anywhere else you can imagine.
• Keep tabs on who bought what, when it was delivered, and whether or not they’ve downloaded it yet.
• Speak to your customers in your own voice. Customize the emails people receive when they place an order with you.

Pricing:

• Free 14 day trial. Sign up for any plan and use Pulley free and unrestricted for 14 days.
• Unlike other services, Pulley doesn’t charge any commission or per transaction fees.
• Pricing depends on the storage size. Starting from $6/month per 100MB.

The dashboard gives you a crystal clear overview of sales, top products, and activity in your Pulley account.

See all of your order activity and customer details presented clearly and precisely.

7. DPD

DPD makes it quick and easy to sell downloads. Sell downloads, automatically deliver your products, and run your own affiliate program with DPD. Get advanced selling features and options with no programming required.

Main features:

• DPD allows you to customize your cart, delivery pages, and even emails with both simple WYSIWYG and advanced template editors.
• DPD allows you to sell your downloads on an unlimited number of websites, each with their own customizations and options.
• DPD protects your products from theft with a host of advanced security features so only the person who paid for your products gets access.
• In addition to download only products, DPD supports downloads with generated keycodes, keycode only delivery, and simple tangible goods.

Pricing:

• 30 day free trial. If you choose not to use DPD, do nothing- your account will automatically close and you won’t be charged a thing.
• DPD does not charge any per-transaction, per-storefront, or per-product fees above and beyond the flat rate pricing above.
• Pricing depends on the storage size and amount of products. Starting from $5/month per 500MB and 10 products.

8. dbox

This tool is your best buddy when it comes to selling digital goods through PayPal. Automate product delivery and keep track of customers and orders after their purchase on PayPal.

Main features:

• Customers instantly receive your product upon completing their payment. No more manual labor required and happy customers guaranteed.
• Your files are highly secure and redundantly stored on the amazing Amazon S3 network.
• Seamless integration with PayPal, the global leader in online payments with over 78 millions accounts in 190 markets and 19 currencies around the world.
• iPhone app of the Dbox webservice, which will surely make live easier for you. Monitor your products and track sales per day, week or month.

Pricing:

• Free (1 product)
• Basic: € 9.95/month (5 products)
• Advanced: € 19.95/month (20 products)
• Pro: € 39.95/month (50+ products)
• All accounts apply for 30 day free trial.

After signing-up you need to add a new product and upload your digital file.

The product view presents you with the integration code.

In the settings section you can customize the email and adjust PayPal settings.

The Dashboard will show you the latest trends with new orders and statistics from sales.

9. Cerizmo

Cerizmo is yet another selling platform which was created to provide a simple and reliable way to sell digital goods online. After realizing the limitations of most digital product e-commerce systems, they created their own solution to address these problems.

Main features:

• Sell products from your web site, blog, or anywhere. Copy and paste buttons on your site and start selling.
• Downloads sent automatically to your customers. Make money while you sleep
• Get paid instantly after a sale. The money will be deposited directly into your PayPal account.
• The downloads are hosted on Cerizmo’s secure servers. No software to install, no servers to manage.

Pricing:

• Depends on the amount of products and storage. Starting from $8.99/month per 15 products.

10. BitBuffet

With BitBuffet, you can sell single pay-per-download products through simple links or use PayPal’s built in shopping cart and receive the money via PayPal.

Main features:

• Redirect your customers directly to the highly recognized PayPal payment page without any extra steps which can potentially lose customers.
• If PayPal supports it, you can sell in that denomination. Don’t fuss around with other services that don’t offer multiple currency support.
• With the unique “pay what you want” model, you can offer your product in return for a donation of any amount. A great technique for grabbing attention.

Pricing:

• 10 products: $6/month
• 30 products: $10/month
• 80 products: $17/month
• 240 products: $31/month
• Unlike other services, BitBuffet doesn’t withhold your money until you hit the payout limit. Get your money instantly and securely through PayPal.

Web-based project management and collaboration tools are the top choice of hundreds of entrepreneurs and thousands of small and medium size businesses. These tools will maximize your productivity, organization, and help you keep on top of your projects effortlessly. Keep track of your projects, manage your workers, set milestones, schedule your work, upload your files, send invoices, sync with your mobile – all of these features and more make these apps almost necessary.

Continue reading if you’re looking for your first project management app or just seeking to check out alternatives. With a lot to choose from it might be frustrating to find the right app for you. This article presents some of the best project management and collaboration tools out there. There are also tools for brainstorming ideas, hosting conversations and even managing a newsroom. Each of them share common general features, however each of them also has something unique to offer. Most of these tools come with a fixed monthly price, some of them you’ll have to pay for per user and month. Also a trial period is available with most of them so you’ll have the chance to examine and check out if it’s the right choice. Each description contains brief features the service offers as well as the pricing plans.

1. Teambox

Teambox is voted the best online project collaboration software for project managers, contractors, freelancers and teams. Teambox is the pioneer in joining social collaboration tools with online project management. It’s mission is to change the way people work by making it easier and more fun to get things done.

Features:

• Teambox Projects consist of conversations, task lists, pages and file storage.
• Share ideas, files, images and video. Discuss details and solve problems, stay alert thanks to email notifications.
• Simple, fast and linear task creation. Add due dates and task owners in seconds. Quickly see what is getting done.
• All of your important documents and media in one place. File storage that is simple and linear.
• Various communication options. RSS, Email, Mobile Access and Web interfaces are just the beginning of how you can communicate.

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month
• Personal : $12/month
• Basic: $29/month
• Professional : $99/month

2. Projecturf

Projecturf is the Web-based project management app that helps individuals and businesses manage projects, people, and tasks. A project can be big or small, personal or business. Once a project is created, you add team members to the project who gain instant access to it via the Web. Within a project, there are tons of features and functions that can be done, such as creating and managing tasks, events on the calendar, and discussions; uploading and storing designs and documents; and analyzing project data using the Dashboard activity history and reporting.

Features:

• Projecturf keeps you up-to-date on all your projects and stores everything in one place, that is always accessible, secure, and backed up.
• Upload your own logo, create your own custom URL, change the colors, and tailor our app to suit your needs.
• Projecturf uses the highest level of security available on all accounts at all times.
• Pay only for your consumption. Pricing charts are built on project amount per month. Unlimited users, unlimited storage.

Pricing:

• 20 projects: $39.99/month
• 40 projects: $69.99/month
• 70 projects: $99.99/month
• 100 projects: $119.99/month

3. Apollo

Apollo is project and contact management done right. Using Apollo, you will realize that it’s built to help you get things done, quickly and efficiently. With Apollo, you will always know where your projects, your contacts and your life are at and you will feel on top of everything — regardless of how hectic your schedule is.

Features:

• Keep everything under control – use the overview to keep track of what’s going on across all of your projects, calendars and personal tasks.
• Start interactive timers – with interactive timers, you can start a timer and keep track of how long you are spending on a task.
• See your project’s activity – in the activity screen you can see who did what on your project and who is allowed to access it.
• Set your milestones – you can assign a task list to a milestone, to divide your project into stages and throw a party when you complete a full stage.

Pricing:

• Basic: $23/month
• Plus: $48/month
• Premium: $96/month
• Max: $148/month

4. Basecamp

Basecamp is the top choice for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, and groups inside big organizations. Projects go well when people talk to each other, discuss issues openly, and communicate clearly. Basecamp is focused on making this easy.

Features:

• No more messy email threads. Post messages to Basecamp instead.
• Easily share files, documents, images, and designs with your clients or team.
• Assign to-dos with deadlines. Making to-do lists and adding to-do items literally just takes seconds.
• Templates jump start your project. Instead of creating new projects from scratch every time, use Basecamp project templates to set up standardized projects ahead of time.

Pricing:

• Plus: $49/month
• Premium: $99/month
• Max: $149/month

5. Huddle

Huddle is the world’s leading cloud-based collaboration platform, used by 90,000 businesses and government organizations in more than 180 countries.

Features:

• Online file storage – Huddle encrypts all data exchanged with the server to industry standard levels as well as authenticating the server itself to the user.
• Discussions – quickly start discussions with team members and keep all conversations and comments in one central place.
• Tasks & files – immediately track deadlines and milestones for your projects. Attach files to specific tasks.
• Permissions – set granular permissions against each workspace or folder, controlling who can view specific items.

Pricing:

• $15/per user and month

6. Lighthouse

Lighthouse will simplify your workflow so you can do the job you were hired to do. Collaborate effortlessly on projects. Whether you’re a team of 5 or studio of 50, Lighthouse will help you keep track of your project development with ease.

Features:

• Keep up with your project on the go – no matter where you are, we have the tools to keep you up to date on your project.
• We’ll organize. You work – Lighthouse has given you all the tools you need to organize your tickets – custom states, a powerful tagging system, an advanced search, saved searches (we call them ticket bins), and a mass editing tool.
• Setting your project goals – milestones help you group your tickets in timely releases.
• Plays well with others – thanks to Lighthouse’s robust API, there are already dozens of useful services that integrate with Lighthouse.

Pricing:

• Bronze: $25/month
• Silver: $50/month
• Gold: $100/month

7. Goplan

Goplan lets you keep track of your projects and collaborate with your colleagues securely through an intuitive user interface. Goplan was developed to scratch developers own itch – they needed a better tool to manage our projects, communicate with clients, and organize our personal lives. Goplan has become a consumer-facing product ever since then.

Features:

• Everything in its right place – the Goplan dashboard gives you an overview of everything that’s happening with your company and your projects.
• Task management – organize your projects into tasks and milestones. Tasks can have any number of sub-tasks, with sub-tasks of their own.
• Issue tracking – if you’re running a software project, you’re probably aware of the notion of tickets and issue tracking. Tickets capture project defects, which can then prioritized and filtered.
• File management – upload files and documents directly to Goplan and have all your projects assets in one secure place.

Pricing:

• Startup: $10/month
• Professional: $35/month
• Unlimited: $80/month

8. Action Method

Action Method by Behance is a task-management methodology designed to help creative thinkers push their ideas forward. Based on the power of capturing and managing tasks you need to complete, Action Method ensures ideas are executed. From beautifully designed paper products, to Action Method Online, to Action Method for iPhone, this system of products works together to maximize productivity, organization, and accountability.

Features:

• Capture Action Steps – action Steps are tasks that need to be completed. Each Action Step should start with a verb: “Call Y,” “Follow up with X,” “Buy a gift for Z.”
• Delegate tasks – you can delegate Action Steps to anyone with an email address. Once an Action Step is delegated, you can monitor its progress.
• Manage projects – all of your items in Action Method online are organized by project. A project could be a client, a project at work, a party you’re planning.
• Sync with mobile – automatically sync with your mobile device to manage your tasks wherever you are. No wifi required.

Pricing:

• Introductory: free
• Premium: $12/month

9. Rule.fm

Rule – one application to make your business simply productive. People, CRM, Projects, Documents and more- all interacting and coexisting with total transparency online in an activity stream — so you can finally manage your business under one rule.

Features:

• The stream – know what’s happening in your business up to the moment. View, filter and collaborate on all activity for all Rule assets.
• Projects – simple, powerful, collaborative. Your Milestones, Tasks, Time Tracking, Project Calendar, Documents & Discussions come together to make project management what it should be.
• Docs – get busy sharing folders and files with multi-file upload and group/individual sharing and permissions.
• CRM – from the pipeline to your bottom line – manage customer relationships and the deal flow (sales cycle) process with the Rule CRM – integrated with your other valuable Rule assets.

Pricing:

• they’re prompting a free account however their TOS says that Rule.fm has 4 paid pricing plans

10. Freedcamp

Freedcamp offers unlimited user and unlimited project solution for everyone, completely free, forever. By offering an amazing web application Freedcamp believes there will finally be a standard in project management.

Features:

• The dashboard is where you can get your morning cup of information about projects, important tasks, and recent activity.
• Discussions provide a forum-like experience, allowing you to create entries in a simple format. Use it to discuss ideas, give suggestions, and collaborate on the important things in life.
• Milestones are a great way to keep your projects on track. Set dates for each milestone in your project and then try to complete it by the due date.
• Keeping track of time is a fundamental part of project management. This is where you can keep a record of the amount of time you’ve spent on a specific task.

Pricing:

• completely free

11. Onehub Workspaces

Onehub makes large file sharing easy. Secure, fast and easy to use file sharing for any size business. Manage projects, share files and collaborate with others. With Workspaces and Transfers products Onehub has solutions to help growing businesses work more efficiently by improving communication and information sharing.

Features:

• Online Workspaces – organize your files by team, project, client or file type — it’s up to you.
• Content management – workspaces is a simple and secure way to manage your documents, media and content online.
• Secure sharing – share your Workspaces, folders or files with unlimited users on every plan, no per user fees.
• Real-time chat – the ideal way to collaborate with your team in real-time. See who is online in your workspace.

Pricing:

• Free: $0
• Personal: $29/month
• Team: $99/month
• Enterprise: $499/month

12. So1o

Keep on top of your projects with So1o. Intelligently track how much time you’ve spent and what you’ve spent it on. See how many days to deadline, what you’ve quoted and how close a project is to completion. Beautifully designed graphs show a visual breakdown of your project.

Features:

• Dashboard – the hub of the solo experience. The dashboard allows you to easily keep track of the day-to-day things that really matter.
• Projects – keep on top of your projects with Solo. Intelligently track how much time you’ve spent and what you’ve spent it on.
• Diary – manage deadlines, milestones , meetings, tasks and todo’s all in one place.
• Invoicing – electronically send invoices directly to your clients, Solo lets you know when they’re due to be paid, are overdue or need to be sent.

Pricing:

• $10/month

13. Worketc

WORKetc combines CRM, project management, billing, sales, support and more with a powerful automation engine to help take your small business to the next level.

Features:

• Manage your entire customer lifecycle in one application, and easily reference any part of that lifecycle through detailed contact histories.
• Save time and effort by automatically converting sales leads into projects, duplicating existing projects, or using project templates.
• For recurring bills, use a list of products and attach these to customers and invoices. Set up shipping, local taxes, offer discounts, and manage commissions.
• Setting up reminders and to-dos across your business is as simple as a few clicks, and these can take the form of e-mail or RSS, so you can always be up to date even when you’re on the go.

Pricing:

• $39/per user and month (discount for more users)

14. ProWorkFlow

ProWorkflow is the top project management software currently helping thousands of customers globally to optimize their business processes, manage staff resources, track projects, tasks and time and keep on top of it all.

Features:

• Web-based technology allows you to manage your company remotely.
• Get organized with the project manager & assign tasks to employees.
• The task manager allows you to create task lists for each employee, and see activity in real-time.
• Gain knowledge on company performance using the reports manager.

Pricing:

• Standard: €10/per user and month
• Professional: €20/per user and month
• Advanced: €30/per user and month

15. activeCollab

activeCollab is a project management and collaboration tool that installs on your server or local network. activeCollab gives you full control over your files and communications, with unlimited users, unlimited projects, and unlimited storage space – it grows with your company, with no monthly fees.

Features:

• Keep projects on track –  activeCollab provides platform for planning, progress tracking and communication.
• Collaborate – work with your associates and clients, assign tasks, share files, get notified when something happens, discuss and comment.
• Email notifications – activeCollab sends you an email when something important happens.
• Be in control –  install activeCollab on your server and invite people to work with you.

Pricing:

• Small Biz: $249
• Corporate: $499

16. Teamwork PM

Teamwork Project Manager is an easy-to-use online teamwork & project management software application that helps managers, staff and clients work together more productively online.

Features:

• Assign tasks to keep on top of everything – with Teamwork, you can assign tasks to staff, co-workers and contractors in seconds.
• Never miss a milestone again – with Teamwork, you can add Project Milestones to keep everybody on the project informed about key dates and goals.
• Project management – Teamwork allows you to take a birds eye view of all your projects and visualize your overall schedule.
• Track every hour – Teamwork allows you to track the time you spend on every project allowing you to keep projects on-cost and efficiently bill your clients.

Pricing

• Personal: $12/month
• Business 1: $24/month
• Business 2: $49/month
• Corporate: $99/month
• Enterprise: $149/month

17. Conceptboard

Conceptboard offers real time teamwork on thoughts and documents which you can share and discuss with your colleagues, customers & friends. Conceptboard is a great work space for your ideas, documents and pictures. It’s very intuitive and makes online collaboration easy as pie.

Features:

• Use your own files – edit your documents as if they were printed. Highlight, underline and more with just one click.
• Get things done on the iPad – Conceptboard is optimized for the iPad. There is no app you need to download, it works just fine in the browser.
• Comment without the fuss – opinions, ideas, thoughts – comment directly on the object of discussion.
• Work live with your team – discuss drafts, make decisions and produce results. Work cooperatively on your boards in real time

Pricing:

• Basic: free
• Professional: $8/per user and month
• Enterprise: $25/per user and month

p>18. Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is an online project management software with collaboration and bug tracking that allows project teams to collaborate and get work done faster. Planning and Tracking helps you keep your project on schedule. Collaboration helps improve the communication within the team and keep everyone on the same page.

Features:

• With Zoho Projects planning your projects becomes a snap. Use milestones to organize projects, set dependency for your tasks, assign ownership and priorities.
• The bug tracker combines a clean interface to organize bugs with custom workflows, business rules and fix bugs which makes bug tracking painless and simple.
• Record your working hours. Export data and generate reports quickly with time-sheets.
• Create files directly on the browser without having to install any additional software. Tag files with labels and keep track of changes with the version history.

Pricing:

• Express: $20/month
• Premium: $35/month
• Enterprise: $80/month

19. Teamlab

TeamLab is a web-based platform for business collaboration and project management. It has been developed by Ascensio System Limited, a fast-growing company that offers IT-solutions for personal and corporate use.

Features:

• Project management – build teams and assign tasks. Schedule project milestones, track project activity and generate reports.
• Business collaboration – create posts in blogs and forums, view employee details. Share photos, bookmarks and Wiki pages.
• Time tracking – save information on time spent for a certain project task. Add details to the work done and generate time-tracking reports.
• Mobile full version – access your portal from Android or iOS mobile phone. Keep track of team and project activities regardless of your location.

Pricing:

SaaS, Open-Source, AMI: free

20. DeskAway

DeskAway is a web-based project collaboration software that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects & work. DeskAway is carefully hand-crafted by a small team of developers and designers. Each feature is custom-made to give you the ease of use and power to help you grow your business.

Features:

• Go green – DeskAway will have all your project stuff in a central location – project plans, reports, to-do’s, notes etc. This way you and your team are less likely to hit the print button. Save the trees and help conserve energy.
• Less email clutter – once you start using DeskAway, you will automatically have less email clutter in your inbox and no problems finding old project information.
• You control who sees what information – DeskAway’s permission-control system is built with the idea that not everyone should know and see everything.
• Nothing to download or install – since DeskAway is an on-demand business software delivered on the Internet, there is nothing to install, compile or configure.

Pricing:

• Professional: $35/month
• Plus: $49/month
• Power: $99/month

21. Producteev

Working on a Product Launch? Got a Team? Producteev is a dead simple, fast, smart Task Management platform connected to your daily communication services.

Features:

• Multiple team support – manage multiple teams with Producteev using simple, built-in features.
• Filters and reports – easily generate useful reports on project and team activity.
• Overview – see a real-time overview of what’s been accomplished and what should be done next for each team and project with integrated activity feeds, timelines, and alerts.
• Producteev Academy – turn task management into a social game. The Academy is a built-in, fun competition to see who can get the most done.

Pricing:

• Free: $0
• Plus: $5/month
• Premium: $20/month
• Platinum: $30/month

22. Kapost

Kapost is an online newsroom for web publishing also used by 1stwebdesigner. Kapost handles the entire content production process: from pitch to payment and everything in between. Enable your editorial team to focus on audience and content, not administrative tasks. Easily scale your set of contributors.

Features:

• Kapost moves the content production process on to its online workflow: from pitches & story ideas, to assignments & editorial calendars, to drafts & publishing, and into performance and payment tracking.
• Kapost enables the entire production workflow to be moved online. In Kapost, anyone can create Story Ideas, which can be closed or approved and assigned.
• Track the performance of your content in terms of page views, uniques, re-tweets, FB Likes, etc.
• Easily automate the tracking of the payment of your contributors. Kapost handles the calculation and reporting of payments.

Pricing:

• Starter: free
• Standard: $8/month
• Plus: $15/month (coming soon)

23. Campfire

Campfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Link to a room on your intranet for internal communications.

Features:

• Basecamp integration – use Campfire with Basecamp, the leading web-based project collaboration tool.
• Live image previews – upload a GIF, JPG, or PNG, and it shows up right in the chat room.
• Conference calling – invite your chat room to a voice conference call with a single click.
• Jump back in time – read past chat transcripts anytime you want. Campfire keeps a history.

Pricing:

• Basic: $12/month
• Plus: $24/month
• Premium: $49/month
• Max: $99/month

24. Socialcast

Socialcast is an enterprise collaboration platform that unites your company’s people, data, and applications in real-time. Socialcast’s software creates a flexible, simple, data-rich collaborative space where employees can find information from applications, systems, and people across the enterprise.

Features:

• Activity Streams are the future of enterprise collaboration, uniting people, data, and applications in real-time in a central, accessible, virtual interface.
• Contribute to an evolving hub of company information with every note, question, and document shared.
• Social Business Intelligence is a suite of analytics that provides real-time feedback and actionable insights into the employees, topics, and information-sharing occurring in your Socialcast community.
• User Roles enables community administrators to grant people access to social tools such as Reach, Social Business Analytics and External Contributors, providing people with the resources and information they need to get work done faster.

Pricing:

• Basic: free
• Enterprise: contact the service

25. Flowdock

Flowdock creates a bridge between conversation and knowledge management. You don’t have to use clumsy tools like instant messaging, IRC or email for group conversation on one hand, and wikis, ticketing systems etc for knowledge management on the other. With Flowdock, you can reduce your ways to a light-weight, effortless process, where the conversation flows and the barrier of creating knowledge is diminished.

Features:

• Real-time group chat – Flowdock’s efficient real-time group chat saves you time and helps your team get answers right away.
• Easy file sharing & storage – upload mockups, images, code snippets, presentations or other documents to Flowdock and share them with others instantly.
• Bring your systems together – Flowdock integrates your wikis, project management tools, customer feedback, Twitter feeds and much more into one simple feed.
• Constant brainstorm – with Flowdock, recording ideas or gathering knowledge is just as easy as chatting. Just jot down the idea in the chat, tag it and it’s immediately saved and shared with the team.

Pricing:

• Team: $19/month
• Unit: $39/month
• Department: $79/month
• Division: $159/month

26. Thoughtboxes

Whether you want to brainstorm ideas for your next big project or you just want to keep track of tasks, Thoughtboxes makes it fun and easy. With a single click, you can share your thoughts with anyone, or collaborate privately with your friends, family, and co-workers.

27. Peers.me

Peers.me offers hosted conversations to keep everyone involved in an easy way. By using Peers.me for group communication your email inbox stays clean. No fancy stuff, Peers.me is all about communication. And Peers.me is free up to 10 users.

28. BrixHQ

BrixHQ makes online agile project management and collaboration easy and cost effective.

Features:

• Dashboard – the Dashboard gives you a visual snapshot of where your projects are at via; The Wall, Gantt Chart, My Tasks and Graphs.
• The wall – visualize all your projects and tasks on the wall.
• Gantt Chart – the Gantt Chart gives you a graphical representation of your tasks and where they are all at.
• Reports – reporting is part of all projects; use some flexible reports to ensure your needs are met

Pricing:

• Up to 10 users: $19.99/month
• Up to 100 users:  $99.99/month
• 100 Plus:  $199.99/month

29. Podio

Podio is an online platform with a new take on work and how it gets done. It gives people more power than they’ve ever had before to do everyday work better, smarter and in their own way. Podio is used by a variety of teams and organizations for a wide range of purposes. For the first time ever you can create your own work tools and shape the way you work.

Features:

Project Management

• Discover the easy way to run projects – smple yet fully flexible. Enjoy successfully finished projects.
• Product development – boost your development process. Stay on top of customizable workflows. Leverage team power to create great products.
• CRM & lead management – stay on top of all your business relations. Fully customizable to close more deals and know your customers better.
• Event management – all you need to organize great events. Easily keep track of budgets, participants and your team’s tasks.

Pricing:

• Up to 10 users: free
• $4/per user and month

30. Scadaplan

Scadaplan is a project management and collaboration tool for small and middle groups. There are many similar programs can be found across the internet, which consist of functions like Tasks, Deadlines, Calendars, Comments, etc. The Scadaplan team has tried using dozen of similar programs, working in the design and development industry for 9 years. This is why they have decided to develop something of their own and to let the people use their product.

Features:

• Create, track and collaborate – it takes seconds to create, assign and name your task. Every task has built-in timer to log work time and plan your goals.
• Plan and analyze – with Scadaplan calendar you’ll see the whole picture of your team. Besides today’s everyone`s tasks, you can see future work and analyze past projects.
• Never miss a thing – being used to Like-facebook notifications, you will be able to be aware of all updates and actions with necessary tasks.

Pricing:

• Microbe: $9.99/month
• Lab: $29.99/month
• Factory: $49.99/month

Google has dozens of undiscovered, yet excellent products, people don’t know about. In Google Labs itself you can find plenty of useful tools and products for web designers and developers. Furthermore all Google services are free to use and that makes them appealing alternatives to paid products of a similar nature. For example, Google Docs can be a great alternative for Microsoft Office since it’s free, light and easy to use. This article presents 30 useful, practical and smashing products, tools and services from Google that you should consider using daily.

1. News

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests. The articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online.

2. Reader

Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won’t miss a thing. With your Google Reader public page, you can share your favorite items with your friends, simply by sending them to relevant links.

3. Bookmarks

With Google Bookmarks, you can save shortcuts to your favorite webpages and navigate to them in seconds. Unlike browser bookmarks that are stored on a single computer, Google bookmarks are stored in your Google Account. This means you can access them from any computer with an internet connection.

4. Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive.

5. Sites

Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share web pages. With Google Sites you can easily create rich web pages, collect all your info in one place and control who can view and edit it. You don’t need any knowledge of HTML and it’s free to use.

6. Blog Search

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Blog Search helps users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

7. Trends

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

8. Gmail Labs

Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. While you may find some awesome stuff there, you have to keep in mind that these features can break at any time or disappear altogether. However they may work so well that they graduate and become regular features.

9. PubSubHubhub

PubSubHubbub is a simple, open, server-to-server publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications via WebHook callbacks when a feed they are interested in is updated.

10. Contacts

Google Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that’s important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once.

11. Knol

Knol is a Google project that aims to include user-written articles on a range of topics. Knol allows you to communicate, collaborate and share your knowledge with the world.

12. Moderator

Google Moderator is a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations and events. Suggested questions as well as user votes are seen in real-time.

13. Tasks

With Google Tasks you can add new tasks, set due dates or add notes, and (most satisfyingly) check them off as you’re done. Your task list stays up to date no matter how you access it. It’s a simple list that’s with you everywhere you go. You can access Google Tasks from your Google Mobile, Gmail, Calendar or iGoogle.

14. Docs

With Google Docs you can create and share your work online and access your documents from anywhere. Manage documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys, and more all in one easy to use productivity suite. What’s handy you can embed your created forms and use them in websites.

15. Checkout

Google Checkout allows buyers in over 140 countries to purchase goods and services using a credit or debit card through our fast, secure checkout process. Google Checkout also helps you increase sales with the Google Checkout badge that can be displayed on your AdWords ads and Product Search listings.

16. Fusion Tables

Google Fusion Tables is a modern data management and publishing web application that makes it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online. There’s also a gadget that that helps you create animated flash charts & graphs for your web pages, blogs & Google Pages.

17. Double Click

Google’s DoubleClick products provide ad management and ad serving solutions to companies that buy, create or sell online advertising. The world’s top marketers, publishers, ad networks and agencies use DoubleClick products as the foundation for their online advertising businesses. With deep expertise in ad serving, media planning, search management, rich media, video and mobile, our DoubleClick products help customers execute their digital media strategy more effectively.

18. Art Project

With Google Art Project you can explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

19. Shopper

Google Shopper helps you find information on millions of products. Google Shopper recognizes products by cover art, barcode, voice and text search. You can find local and online prices, reviews, specifications, videos, and more to help you make the best purchasing decision. With one click you can save items to your shopping list and share with your friends.

20. Voice Actions

Voice Actions for Android lets you control your phone using your voice. Call contacts and businesses, send messages, browse the web, and complete common tasks. You can do pretty much anything with it –  send simple text messages or get directions.

21. Code Search

Google Code Search helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. With Google Code Search, you can use regular expressions to search more precisely, restrict your search by language, license or filename and view the source file with links back to the entire package and the webpage where it came from.

22. Code Labs

In Google Code Labs, you’ll find developer products that are experimental. Some of these will one day graduate out of labs, others may remain experimental or even be shut down. That’s what a lab is for. Likewise, graduating from Google Code Labs is a big step that indicates our long-term commitment to that product.

23. Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools provides a free and easy way to make your website more Google friendly. With webmaster Tools you can see how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your website, see how many people found your site in search results, and how many people clicked on it and much more.

24. Browser Size

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

25. Page Speed

Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

26. Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. Its goal is to enable productive development of high-performance web applications without the developer having to be an expert in browser quirks, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript.

27. reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that protects your site against spam, malicious registrations and other forms of attacks where computers try to disguise themselves as a human; a CAPTCHA is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart. reCAPTCHA comes in the form of a widget that you can easily add to your blog, forum, registration form, etc

28. Web Elements

Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products to your website. It’s a great alternative if you don’t want to create your own search engine, for instance.

29. Installable Web Apps

Installable web apps are a way of making Google Chrome treat certain websites like apps. People can find installable web apps using the Chrome Web Store. Many installable web apps are hosted apps—normal websites with a bit of extra metadata. You can build and deploy hosted apps exactly as you would build and deploy any web app, using any server-side or client-side technologies you like.

30. Dashboard

Google Dashboard is an online tool that allows Google Account holders to view all their personal information Google is storing on their servers. It’s pretty handy to manage all your Google service accounts at one place and keep them up to date.

Discover more

There are actually many more products, especially for you designers and developers. Like I mentioned before, Google has a great number of lesser known, yet powerful, development and coding tools. Listing them all would be useless, however there’s no reason why you shouldn’t check them out yourself. Here are some websites where you can learn about Google products and their features.

• Demo Slam
• Google APIs & Developer Products
• Google New

Online generators can be extremely handy for creating small details or saving time writing code. Whether it’s a striped background, a pattern or an advanced CSS3 text effect, online generators can surely make your workflow go smoother. This post presents 45 of the best and latest online generators for designers and developers. The emphasis has been put on CSS3 generators since CSS3 is quickly becoming the new progressive web standard.

Backgrounds & Patterns

1. BGMaker

BGMaker allows you to create solid line patterns which are then exported as transparent PNGs. Don’t be fooled, however. If you checked out the gallery, you’d see the true power of this lite generator.

2. BGPatterns

BgPatterns is a tiny web app for making background patterns in a few clicks. It was created mostly for fun and experimentation by Sergii Iavorskyi.
Feedback is welcome.

3. PatternCooler

With PatternCooler you can add your own colors to 100s of cool free pattern designs, or browse from 10 000s of colored patterns using a seamless pattern background editor.

4. TartanMaker

Tartan Maker is a new trendsetting application for cool designers created by Alex ‘Pit’ La Rosa & Fabio Fidanza. You can easily create tartans with up to 10 bands and then export them as PNGs.

5. StripeGenerator

With Stripe Generator you can unleash your personal style, experiment and download the tile. You can use it directly in your CSS file or as pattern in Photoshop.

6. StripeMania

Stripemania is a simple and free web tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs. You are able to choose the size of the stripes and the spacing between those. You can even add color gradient effect for all of your stripes.

7. StripedBackgrounds

StripedBackgrounds generates a 5 column striped background with your chosen colors and resolution.

8. Dotter

Dotter allows you to easily create stylish dotted background with either one or two colors.

9. secretGeek’s GradientMaker

This gradient maker by secretGeek allows you to create horizontal or vertical gradient backgrounds with two colors.

10. ColourLovers Seamless Studio

Seamless Studio makes it easy to design a seamless pattern. With simple editing tools you can resize, rotate and add shapes, lines and text to the canvas and it tiles automatically. Save your pattern template and see how the world colors it in.

11. Background Generator

Background Generator provides the ability to edit the background of any website in real-time. It allows you to create fancy web 3.0 backgrounds without getting dirty with Photoshop and other image editing software. The project includes a collection of textures which are combined with custom linear-gradients and colors to create a wide assortment of themes.

12. Patternify

Patternify is an app that lets you create simple pixel patterns and export them either as PNG or as base64 code. The awesome part is that you can embed the base64 code straight in your CSS code! You don’t even need to use an image file anymore.

Color Palettes

1. Kuler

Kuler by Adobe is a web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler.

2. Color Palette Generator

With Color Palette Generator you can generate a color palette based on an image. You can upload your own image or choose from other user submitted ones.

3. Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer allows you to create various color schemes and export them as HTML/CSS, ACO for Photoshop and many more.

4. Copaso

COPASO from ColourLovers is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color palette.

5. Pictaculous

Pictaculous helps you to decide which colors suit best with a particular image. Just upload an image and it will generate a color palette from it. You can also download Adobe Swatch File (ACO).

6. Colormunki

Colormunki allows you to generate color palettes from advanced color libraries, images and browse other user palettes.

Buttons

1. RoundedCornr

With RoundedCornr you can generate HTML/CSS code and images for rounded corners. There are four options to choose from.

2. Tabs Generator

Tabs generator allows you to create tab styled buttons online without using any image editing software. Tweak size, colors, corners and more, generate your design, then download and use in your CSS style sheet.

3. Brilliant Button Maker

Brilliant Button Maker is a web interface to create 80×15 buttons. You can also use two images (one on the left and the other on the right side) to decorate the button.

4. Web 2.0 Badges

Web 2.0 Badges is a generator that creates cool web badges. Badges can be used to display a big ‘Beta’ message on your website or emphasize a price or a promotion. No web 2.0 site is complete without one.

5. FreshGenerator

FreshGenerator is a web design tool which can create interesting graphic elements used in many web 2.0 sites. You may use it to create boxes of different styles and colors. In order to make changes to your image later, store the link listed below the image.

6. Favicon

Favicon is a tool that allows you to create favicons either by painting pixels manually or importing an image.

CSS3 Buttons

1. CSS3 Button Generator

With CSS3 Button Generator you can create modern and stylish web buttons that fits today’s web standards.

2. CSS3 Button Maker

CSS3 Button Maker allows you to easily create CSS3 buttons with gradients and shadows. Just adjust the settings until you have a nice looking button, then press the button and it will give you the CSS.

3. CSS3 Button Generator

Generate fancy CSS3 buttons with just few clicks. This generator also provides you with the code for IE styles.

4. CSS Button Generator

CSS Button Generator will create beautiful CSS buttons for you to use on your web pages without the need for any images. When you have styled your button to your liking, simply click on the generated button to get your CSS style code.

5. CSS3 Button Generator

This CSS3 Button Generator is a HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Flash application that generates all of the style properties and speeds up the code writing for CSS3 buttons.

6. CSS Button Generator

With the CSS Button Generator you can instantly make buttons for your website or blog that use your colors, web fonts, and sizes. The CSS button generator uses no images and can say anything you want in any colors or size.

7. CSS3 Button Generator

Easy tool to generate CSS3 buttons with gradients and shadows.

CSS3 Generators

1. CSS3 Generator

CSS3 Generator allows you to play with multiple CSS3 properties to create backgrounds.

2. CSS3 Generator

Simple generator for creating simple single CSS3 properties.

3. CSS3 Please

CSS3, Please! is a Cross-Browser CSS3 rule generator. You can edit the underlined values in this CSS file and when done, copy the whole CSS code.

4. CSS3Warp

CSS3Warp is a proof of concept: create Illustrator like “warped” text (text following an irregular path) with pure CSS and HTML.

5. CSS3 Text Shadow Generator

CSS3 text shadow generator helps you insert beautiful shadow effects to your texts. You can change between different web fonts and explore different shadow effects such as Fire, 3D , acid and more stunning examples.

6. Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator

Ultimate CSS gradient generator is a powerful Photoshop like CSS gradient editor from ColorZilla.

7. CSS3 Gradient Generator

CSS3 Gradient Generator allows you to generate nifty CSS3 gradients with just a few clicks.

8. CSS3 Rounded Corner Generator

CSS3 Rounded Corners Generator generates the necessary CSS3 code to put rounded corners around your content. You can set different radius for the four corners, it is image free.

9. CSS3 Rounded Corner Generator

This generator will help you create the code necessary to use rounded corners (border-radius) on your webpages.

10. Border Radius

Easy tool for creating rounded corners.

11. Border Image Generator

This generator helps you to generate code for border radius properties.

12. CSS3 Multi-columns

Generator for creating multi-column CSS3 layouts.

13. CSS3 Pie

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features.

14. CSS3 Sandbox

With CSS3 Sandbox you can explore CSS3 features and properties.

Spamming – Earliest Form of Online Advertising

The internet was intentionally created as a military and educational tool, and never intended for what it is now: a huge networking, communications and money-making machine.

Thus, the first ‘spam’ was not commercial in nature. The word ‘spam’ comes from a 1970s comedy of a British comedy ‘Monty Python’. In the sketch, a man and his wife are in a restaurant, but everything they ordered has spam on it. While trying to get an order without spam, Vikings from the background sing: ‘Spam, spam, spam. Lovely, spam. Wonderful spam!’

Photo by Wikipedia

You can view the episode here.

The phenomenon later influenced early internet users to flood forums with the word ‘spam’. Soon online marketers got the idea to overpost and flood Usenet groups and emails with junk mail, recounting the repeating the useless presence of spam in the Monty Python sketch.

The first spam email was ‘Arpanet’ on 1978, coming from Gary Thuerk of the Digital Equipment Corporation. The first commercial spam was by lawyers Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel, where they used bulk Usenet posting to promote their immigration law practices. Within a few years, marketers changed their medium of spamming from Usenet forums to e-mail, where it remains until this day. Over 90 million spam emails are sent everyday. 85% of our emails are actually spam. But it’s level of effectiveness in promoting or selling a product is very low—it now barely exists as a nuisance to all.

Photo by First-News

The Era of Banner Ads

The first online advertisement appeared on the web in 1994, prompting the beginning of the online advertising world. The first part was the period of experimentation by the advertisers and publishers, pioneering on ad formats and technology. In 1995, DoubleClick was launched, one of the first ad-serving technologies.

Photo by Ad Week

Photo above is one of the oldest online banner ads, dated October 25, 1994 (so sorry for the bad resolution). The advertiser is A&T, and the ad appeared on Hotwired. Hotwired also launched many online ad campaigns for Club Med, Volvo and MCI, and was eventually acquired by Lycos. Soon after Hewlett-Packard created one of the first interactive online ad, embedding a video arcade game ‘Pong’ into the ad.

From the start advertisers already know that online advertising is very different from traditional advertising. Early on they already did target market research and measurements. However, the media was largely misunderstood. It wasn’t until many years later that the effectiveness and the mechanics of the medium was understood.

Photo by Wiki

There are many forms of old school online ads apart from banner ads. This includes pop-up ads (photo shown above), pop-under ads, hover ads, takeover ads

Online advertising was at its peak in the late 1990s. Investors were dropping billions of dollars into dot com start-ups at an alarmingly fast rate. The internet was the new playing field, and investors fell in love with the novelty factor of it. They have high hopes for their investments–and it made some people very rich–on paper, at least.

by Banner Ad Museum

Back then, ads were in the banner format. Advertisers were required by the clients to provide the standard 468 x 60 px banner ad for their online advertising campaign, like the banner ads on the photo above. Soon, so thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and advertisers are pouring in–nobody wanted to get left behind this brand new money-making machine. In its hey day, it was a lucrative business: Yahoo! could charge up to US $30 to even US $100 to run these banner ads. At its height, internet spending has reached US $8.2 billion. The figure wouldn’t be reached again until 4 years after the dot com bubble burst.

However, banner ads are not effective; it is very expensive but the returns are low. Advertisers were set against the low effectiveness of ads, high prices, and the complex process of online ad auctions. The advertisers realized that the online banner ads pale in comparison to the effectivity of 30-second TV commercial or a full-page print ad.

Dot Com Bubble Burst

Photo by GDS Infographics

Mid-2000, the huge influx of money that created the online advertising bubble started to dry up. Companies now have no interest with online advertising and the online banner bubble burst happened. The stock market collapsed, resulting into a recession. The ‘bubble’ covered for five years from 1995 to 2000. From within that time frame the stock value rose steadily and rapidly at an astronomical rate. And then suddenly in just one day, the bubble burst–everything is gone in a flash.

NASDAQ peaked at 5,049 in March of 2000, and declined on October 2002 at 1,100. One one dot com company after another went bankrupt. Soon online advertising dollars had a dramatic fall of 32%, from US $8.2 billion to US $6.2 billion. As the market went sour, advertisers and agencies lost interest in using this unproven and unstable new medium.

Enter Google: The Era of Google Ads

After the bubble burst, advertising on the internet was in rapid decline except for search, because search engine technology has shown efficiency. Because of its ROI, Search engine market grew to US $2.3 billion in 2003. The search engine technology was highly efficient and dependable.

Google was, once upon a time, just a search engine. Google worked mainly on its functionality, perfecting the algorithm to produce the most appropriate results. Google drove plenty of traffic, but didn’t sell anything. But on the start of the millennium, 2000, Google AdWords was born. Google revolutionized online advertising–instead of using the banner ad format; which is the dominant advertising format of that time, they decided to sell through text ads. These ads are based on search engines, kept separate and on top or on the side of the main search results.

Why did Google’s text ads succeed and the banner ads did not? First of all, Google knew the weight of relevance. They introduced the click-through rate, creating a ranking algorithm to measure the advertisement’s relevance. Google only requires payment when the people click on them. Another stroke of genius from google is Page Rank.

Google did not create search engine or pay-per-click advertising–instead they focused on perfecting it. Google AdWords marked the New Growth Period of Online Advertising. Google has changed how we approach online advertising. Rather than mere selling or marketing, advertisers are now focusing in creating relevant content for consumers.

Ads make use of two different advertising model: the Pay-per-click and the Pay-per-impression. What’s the difference between the two? Pay-per-click requires advertisers to pay the host for every time the ad is clicked. Pay-per-impression is used to measure the cost and worth of the whole online marketing campaign. Both models are used to online ads such as text links, SEO marketing, web banners and e-mail advertising.

Photo by Searchlinqs

In search engines, advertisers bid on keyword terms and phrases relevant to their market. But with content sites, they use a fixed price for every click or impression. Pay-per-click model is perfect for bringing the targeted market into the website efficiently, while the Pay-per-impression is best for building brand recognition. Although these models are open to abuse through click fraud, Google and others have devised automated systems against corrupt advertisers or competitors.

Advertising through Social Media

If you haven’t heard of social media, then you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past five years. Social media, in its simplest terms, is a social tool for communications and networking. Rather than a web site merely providing you with information, social media sites are interactive; giving you the freedom to comment, rate and share information. There are four types of Social Media:

1. Social Networking Tools – Facebook, Twitter, Hi-5

2. Social News – Reddit, Digg Propeller

3. Social Photo & Video Sharing – Photobucket, Flickr, YouTube

4. Social Bookmarking – Del.icio.us, Simpy

One of the biggest advantages of social media advertising is proper targeting of market through the use of the users’ demographic information provided.

Photo by Singapore SEO

Social media advertising is now apparently more effective than traditional advertising! Some even go through lengths as to have a billboard with their own Twitter ID—such as Naked Pizza of New Orleans. Naked Pizza, reputedly the healthiest pizza in the world, erected a billboard prompting viewers to add them on Twitter. It’s not the first time Twitter is featured on a billboard, and surely not the last. It’s a smart marketing move, they will gain more followers and thus increase their marketing and advertising scope and awareness.

Photo by Wikimedia

Nowadays, it is now necessary for businesses to have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn page. Social media is the best thing online advertising could get: it’s free, it’s far and wide-reaching (500 million users) and it’s viral. The disadvantage is probably measuring effectivity of social media advertising, whether or not the number of ‘likes’, ‘friends’ or ‘follows’ could convert to actual sales.

Online Advertising as of Today

Since 2004 online advertising has recovered. Advertisers have seen (almost reluctantly) the importance of advertising online, and the number of hours consumer used on the internet. Now the web is used by many companies on their overall marketing campaign. Online ads make use of Flash and JavaScript to improve graphics and interactivity. Online advertising is now more sophisticated, the branding tools and technologies are diversified. There are now online blogs, social media, SEO marketing and more.

Viral marketing is now more popular, making use of video ads to market a product or brand. Old Spice (video still shown above) is one of the many companies that have gone into viral marketing. They posted numerous videos on YouTube starring Old Spice guy. It was a huge hit, having 30 million views to date and considered to be one of the most successful advertising campaigns in 2010. Isaiah Mustafah is now a household name. Other successful viral campaigns include Levi’s, Guitar Hero and Super Bowl. We see a regrowth in advertising on the web, which is now equals to the total internet spending.

This does not mean that Online Advertising has now been perfected. Annoying pop up and pop under ads still persist. One of the most annoying and interruptive of ad formats, the pre-roll ads are now used in YouTube. YouTube used to be a free site for uploading and viewing videos. But YouTube has problems generating income–so they added pre-roll ads, or commercials that run before a video that cannot be bypassed. So if you need to watch a 1 minute video you have to sit through a 30-second ad first. Most music videos uploaded on YouTube are now from VEVO, and not from actual users. Which means that there are ads on top, on the bottom and on the background of the page.

So will the internet’s bubble burst again? We are hopeful it won’t. Millions of people are now relying on the internet for advertising, promotions, business and employment. However, one thing is clear; we have learned a lot from the first bubble burst. Only time will tell.

The need for getting traffic is emphasized a lot. Actually, it is emphasized to that extent that people forgot one fundamental thing:

- A visitor to your site, by itself, is useless. If a particular group of visitors from a traffic source don’t do anything then why bother attracting them in the first place? Yet, millions of webmasters do it every single day. They put traffic before money. All of this because of one fundamental assumption.

If you have traffic, you’ll eventually make money. THIS IS NOT TRUE.

How do I know this?

Because I’ve taken this concept the extreme. I created a site which ranked in the top 10.000 most visited websites in the world (according to Compete.com). I got all my traffic from Digg/StumbleUpon, thousands unique visitors per day. I actually got on the Digg front page 5-6 times and frequently got 30.000+ views from Stumbleupon on each of my articles. The whole site got over half a million unique visitors in 6 months.

My assumption was: Boy, I have so much traffic, once I put something like AdSense, I’ll be making decent amount of money. Maybe like $10 a day. So I put AdSense and waited for 3 days…

…and I made less than $1 a day. The CTR was less than 0.1%. Ouch! The sad thing was that I was working on the site for more than 6 months (you think getting into top 10.000 on Compete is easy?) and was operating under this flawed assumption.

I could have also made money via pay-per-view (some sites pay max. $2 per 1000 views) but still that would have been less than $1000.

Traffic = Money Sounds EASY

This is the reason, I think, people accept this assumption without being critical of it all. It sounds easy, comforting. Something like having a day job, you know that if you work for a month you’ll get the salary. Same here, just work on the traffic and the money will come. As we’ve seen, this is far from the truth.

What about Facebook?

There are exceptions, though, and this is where traffic is taken to the extreme. If you capture an enormous number of visitors (20.000+ a day) then you should make some money. Facebook has millions of visitors per day and they make a lot of money. What about Twitter? Well, they also have a lot of visitors but haven’t figured how to make money yet. Some people take Facebook/other high-traffic sites as an example that traffic = money. However:

a) Not everyone can have millions of visitors on their website per day. The number of people online is limited, so you’re way better off focusing first on monetization and then on traffic.

b) You will need a lot of luck to get to the size of Facebook. You also have a big competition for traffic. Many people are myopic in terms of blindly competing for traffic without realizing that, if they were to have a business online, their first priority should be MONEY, not traffic.

And if you think about this, the sheer amount of volume Facebook got allowed them to attract a whole different range of advertisers a smaller site would have no way of attracting.

5000 Visitors Per Day and Making $1  or 500 Visitors Per Day and Making $20?

I met people who are making barely $300 with 100.000+ visitors coming from Stumbleupon/Digg. On the other hand, I’ve met people who are making $10.000 with around 30.000 visitors coming from Google/other high-quality traffic source. The idea I want to propose here is to focus on MONETIZATION first and TRAFFIC after that (like most businesses do).

When was the last time…you’ve seen a fastest growing business focus on getting prospects first without selling anything? Most of them actually have their own products which is (and will probably always be) the best way to make money in any industry. The reason for this is probably because you have the most opportunities when you’re making your own product: you can do PR, SEO, paid traffic, pay bloggers to blog about your product etc. You can then carefully analyze and see which traffic source brings most sales and focus on that. Then you have the word-of-mouth advantage, you’ll have people that will spread the word to their friends and you’ll also have repeated customers.

How to Focus on Money Using Google Analytics

There’s one great feature in Google Analytics called GOALS. If you have an Adsense account, you can automatically link Analytics + AdSense and the goals will be set up automatically for you. In case you’re selling a product you’ll need to do the setup yourself.

For example, you can count as ‘goal’ the moment someone gets to the ‘thank you for purchasing’ page. What that means is that they’ve gone through all the steps like taking a look at your product, going through the shopping card, entering their payment details and purchasing.

Google Analytics can then tell you what referrers sent you the biggest % of people who completed a goal (purchased your product). For example, if you’re selling an anti-virus software, you might discover that 3% of the people who type ‘good antivirus software’ on Google but your product. You might also discover that you did a recent PR campaign and people coming from some famous magazine tend to buy more  than average.

In that case, you’ll want to do more work for those traffic sources. Let’s take the previous example. If you rank #4 for ‘good antivirus software’, you might want to get to #1 in order to receive a bigger number of people who will eventually convert at 3%. Or you might want to create a deeper relationship with that famous magazine so they do more cover for your software.

Another good strategy is to focus on the low-hanging fruit. Identify traffic sources outside of the top 10 that brought you a sale or two. Do some research on them and see if you can bring more visitors from these traffic sources to see how they convert at a bigger scale. For example, you might notice that you got 2 sales from some old guest post you did. What about doing another guest post on that blog? Let’s suppose you did another guest post and saw that people convert consistently from that blog. Here’s an opportunity for forming a deeper relationship and posting regularly there.

Mark Joyner, the founder of Simpleology told one really profound story. While Mark was in the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School, they had an instructor whom they called Yoda because of his superior skills/accomplishments. One day they had a class from Yoda. He asked his students “What is the one skill that defines a leader?” Many people tried to guess. Some guy said “Communication skills!” Yoda replied: “Oh really? So let’s have you have a suicidal tactical and you communicate it oh so clearly to your troops. That makes you a leader?”

Another fellow student tried to guess: “It’s charisma!” Yoda replied: “Oh, are you joking? So you’re a tactical moron but you look good in your BDUs. I just wrote your tombstone for you. No charge. Next!”

And so it went and nobody was able to say what’s the defining characteristic of a leader.

Then Yoda finally told the answer:

“The one skill that defines a leader is the ability to see the battlefield”.

A really profound lesson. When you think about it, it might have been obvious…what’s the use of communicating clearly or having charisma when you can’t figure out what’s going on the battlefield?

In the business battlefield, money is the main way businesses keep score. But can you see the battlefield? Can you see where money comes from? You decide. Focusing on traffic for a long period of time without focusing on promotion is ignoring to see the battlefield for a long time.

WHEN to Focus on Traffic

Of course, you should focus on traffic but always ask yourself whether it brings you money/any other benefit. For example, you might want to test some traffic source. Bring some visitors from it and see whether they buy your product/affiliate product/click on ads.

The main point is, traffic does not always equal money. The best way to see whether a particular traffic brings money is to test and not just assume.

These are some good ways to earn money using Twitter, but I suggest you don’t over do it as you would look like a spammer & no one likes to get spam not even on their Twitter Timeline. So use this method cautiously

Affiliate Advertisement

If you are connected with many affiliates to sell their product and services, you can use Twitter account to tweet your affiliate links to your followers & get paid for the selling product. Be cautious using this method, see that you are not breaking the terms of service agreement.

Increasing Traffic

Image: Source

This is indirect method of monetizing Twitter. Many people use this method effectively to send huge amount of traffic to their website which in turn generates revenue from the ads you post on your website.

Look For Leads

Image: Source

When I was working as an marketing executive I had used Twitter to find potential leads for the company. Twitter Advance Search offers some best method to find people who are looking for services & products. This is an indirect method but still you can try it.

Get Paid To Tweet

This is one of the easiest way of making money on Twitter. You Don’t need to have a website, product or services to earn money, It’s one of the direct way of earning money through Twitter. There are various sites that offers services where you can get paid-per-tweet. Following list of website that offers such services.

SponsoredTweets.com

Its one of the most used website that offers pay-per-tweets services. I have personally used this website to monetize my twitter account & found it to be working & useful. Even many of the celebrities are using Sponsored Tweets Services.

Ad.ly

Ad.ly is another website which offers similar services. Recently it has also included MySpace to its network. Ad.ly algorithm automatically calculates the amount that you will be paid per tweet. It depends on the factor like number of followers & how often you tweet.

Some Other Websites

• TwittAd.com
• AdCause.com
• MyLikes.com
• Be-A-Magpie.com

Sell Twitter Related Services

If you are designer you can offer services like creating custom professional twitter background you can use your own background to promote it as a service. Also if you know how to get mass follower & influence people on twitter account you can provide services like Twitter profile management & become  face of a brand in your local area.

Sell Your Product & Services

Image: Source

Selling your product & services through twitter is an also effective way of making money on twitter. You can use Twitter Advance Search option to find out people that are looking for product or services that you are offering & you can directly get in contact with them offering your services.

Some Related Post You Must Read

• How To Make 15,000.00 In 1 Month Just By Tweeting
• How to make money on Twitter ? Some ideas that work ( without screw ups ) !
• 77 ways Twitter could make money

If you have other method to share please do it in comment I would like to know.

Thumbnail: Source

Certainly, you won’t need them all, but I offer you the choise to choose best from the best. Each of them has it’s own pros and cons, and I hope you’ll be able to choose the best option for you.

1. ChartGizmo

With ChartGizmo you can create different kind of charts for your website, blog and social network profiles.

2. Barchart

Simple online tool for creating bar charts. Choose your image size, colors, enter all values and export your chart as png. I created this chart below in like 2 minutes.

3. Bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. With Bubbl you can:

• Create colorful mind maps online
• Share and work with friends
• Embed your mind map in your blog or website
• Email and print your mind map
• Save your mind map as an image

4. AmCharts

AmCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages.

5. OnlineChartTool

On OnlineChartTool you can choose from 10 chart types, choose charts style, add data, customize labels and fonts, preview your graph and then save and share it.

6. ChartGo

ChartGo allows users to create charts online quickly. Create bar charts, line charts or pie charts. Simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button. In my opinion, one of the most useful tools for creating charts.

7. Chartle

Chartle is Java based online tool that allows you to easily create different types of charts and then publish them.

8. Create A Graph

Here you will find five different graphs and charts for you to consider. You can create graphs in 3D, customize fonts, colors and then choose one of six file formats to save it.

9. Google FusionCharts Gadget

FusionCharts Google Gadget is widget that help you create animated flash charts & graphs for your web pages, blogs & Google Pages. Be it your sales chart, inventory chart or your personal weight chart, FusionCharts can render an exciting face to all your boring data tables – for free.

10. DIY Chart

DIY (Do it yourself) Chart is a web-based, simple and powerful online tool to create interactive charts and graphs from static or dynamic data which may be generated using any scripting language. The minus is that in free version there will be a logo watermark.

11. CSS Chart Generator

The only on-the-fly generator for bar charts in the net. With this easy to use interface you can create a design your bar charts in seconds. A whole bunch of features is waiting for you – from defining the output size, over colors for each bar, titles for x and y axis, to color of font and bar backgrounds and much more.

12. Hohli Online Chart Builder

Good looking jQuery using tool that allows you to choose from over 10 types of charts, customize them and get the image or embed the chart.

13. Google Chart Tools

The Google Chart Tools enable adding live charts to any web page. Using these tools allow you to create rich gallery of visualizations provided as image charts by using a simple URL request to a Google chart server or interactive charts using a Google developed JavaScript library.

14. Pie Color

Just enter number of slices, label, all the values and PieColor will generate you an image, which you can then download and share.

15. Cacoo

Cacoo is a user-friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Choose from a number of stencils. It’s just so easy to make great diagrams.

16. JS Charts

JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs. Keep in mind that it’s only free for non – commercial use.

17. Creately

Creately is a powerful online Organizational Chart software for creating quick and easy organizational charts, department & team org charts and even photo org charts. It works in your browser and contains templates and elements that you can use.

18. yUML

Allows you to create and share simple UML diagrams in your blogs, wikis, forums, bug-trackers and emails.

19. Mind42

Mind42 is a browser based online mind mapping application. With Mind42 installing mind mapping tools is no longer needed – for a hassle-free mind mapping experience. Just open the browser and launch the application when needed.

20. Highcharts

Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

21. Diagrammr

Create and share consecutive diagrams just by writing sentences.

22. Product Planner

Product Planner help people understand and create user flows for their web products. See how other websites and products work and then create your own.

23. LucidChart

LucidChart is an online flowchart maker app where you can create and publish customized flowcharts. It’s easy to use, feature rich and has a decent free option which includes 5 MB storage for your documents and works in most of the browsers.

24. SlickPlan

SlickPlan is a web-based sitemap/flowchart generator that allows for the creation of free sitemap  and flowchart design. SlickPlan was handcrafted with PHP/MySQL and jQuery by the Dayton website design team at Atomic Interactive.

25. Charts

Useful iPhone app that lets you create and manage all kind of charts, i.e charts to track and monitor your expenses, weight, mileage and more. You can also map your data on a line, bar graph or a pie chart, apply different color schemes and share charts by email.

26. ChartPart

ChartPart is a web tool that lets you instantly create charts online. The application supports different types of charts including pie charts, line graphs and grouped bars.

27. Yellowpipe Chart Generator

Though pretty pixelated, but really easy tool to create 3D pie charts.

28. Grapher

Totally old school. Simple to use, but only bar graph with limited features is available.

29. Gliffy

With Gliffy online diagram software, you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more.

30. LovelyCharts

LovelyCharts is a free online diagram editor that allow you create chart and diagram freely on the web browser. On lovely chart, there are various of diagram can be produces such as creating flowcharts, sitemaps, network diagrams, people diagrams, basic symbols,and wireframes.

31. Online Chart Generator

Really easy tool to generate charts. Choose from 9 types.

32. OWT Chart Generator

The OWT Chart Generator is an online tool to be used to produce charts. A GIF image of the chart that you specified will be displayed on the screen.

Software to create graphs

• Swiff Chart Generator 3
• MindMeister
• Smarrtdraw
• Diagram Studio
• OpenOffice

I would like to say that a very big plus is a fact that these sites practically do not use your computer memory, so you can always be sure that none of your images will disappear. And you don’t have to worry about getting your computer crashed if you have slow one :)

1. Pixlr

Pixlr is a perfect online image editing application that is designed for non professional users and allows them to easily edit images. It combines image design and paint tools with photo editing and adjustment features more convincingly than any other online image editing program.

Major features:

• Create an image or open one from your hard drive or a URL
• Save your image to your desktop
• Undo/Redo
• Resize an image
• Rotate an image
• Use layers – something not heard of with other online image editors
• Change the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation of the image
• Apply different effects to the photo

2. Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint is an online image editing application similar to Adobe Photoshop.

Major features:

• Layers with blending modes
• Layer Effects
• Shape Tools, Brush, Ink, Clone Stamp, Eraser, Gradient, Custom Shape, Symmetry, Transform, Magic Wand, Lasso, Smudge, Line, Blur, Curve, Zoom Tool
• Color Picker
• Swatches
• Saving images with multiple layers
• Selection Modify

3. Splashup

Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photo-sharing sites, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress.

Major features:

• Online graphic editor
• Take pictures directly from a web cam
• Tool bar that almost matches Photoshop or Gimp
• Similar interface to most desktop graphic applications
• Sharing features to share images and photos with friends

4. PicMagick

PicMagick is an online photo editor that enables you to make ordinary photos look wonderful within a few clicks. It will surprise you how fabulous your photos can be and how easily this can be done.

Major features:

• Designed to be simple and intuitive
• Enhance colors and details of your photos
• Expose hidden details in shadows and highlights
• Professional yet simple skin retouch
• Remove red-eyes or unwanted color casts
• All common tasks: crop, rotate, sharpen, etc.
• Absolutely free, no registration, no download

5. Photoshop.com

Photoshop.com is the complete solution for managing, editing, storing, and sharing your photos online, with tutorials, inspiration, and more. Photoshop.com is available from any web-enabled computer, compatible mobile phones, and directly from within Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 or Adobe Premiere Elements 7 software. With Photoshop.com, you can organize, tweak, create, e-mail, display, and store your photos.

Major features:

• Personal URL to access your account
• Online private and public sharing
• Tutorials
• Online photo management, editing, and interactive photo galleries
• Browser-based upload and download
• Anywhere access to your photos and videos from Photoshop Elements 7 and Adobe Premiere Elements 7, including syncing and backup from your desktop to the web
• Mobile access
• 2 GB of online storage space
• The Plus version adds special artwork, album templates, and effects, and 20 GB or 100 GB of online storage.

6. Pixer.us

pixer.us lets you manipulate, edit, enhance and apply filters to your digital pictures using only your web browser.

Major features:

• Simple lightweight photo editor.
• Perform most common image editing functions like resize, crop, rotate, flip, saturation, blur, sharpen etc.
• Instantly apply and preview the effects using the slide bar.
• Revert changes to previous or to the original image version.
• Upload, edit and save images without registration.
• Save edited images in multiple image formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP).

7. Phoenix

Edit photographs with this online photo and graphics editing tool, which does much more than adjust brightness or remove red-eye. Aviary’s purpose is to “make creation accessible to artists of all genres,” including graphics and even audio editing. Phoenix is only one of many editors

Major features:

• Peacock – for creating patterns
• Toucan – color swatches and palettes creation
• Raven – a vector art editor
• Hummingbird – create 3D Models and skins
• Myna – audio editor
• Roc – music generator
• Horus – font editor
• Tern – terrain generator
• Pigeon – a painting simulator
• Owl – desktop publishing layout editor
• Woodpecker – image resizer

8. Picnik

Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It’s fast, easy, and fun.

Major features:

• Fix your photos in just one click
• Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
• Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
• Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
• Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
• Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
• Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
• Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
• No download required, nothing to install

9. Snipshot

Snipshot is a fast online image editor. You can use it right from your browser, no downloads or Flash required.

Major features:

• Use Snipshot with Open IT Online—the best way to open any kind of document
• Our free API lets you use Snipshot for your own website
• No download necessary—100% browser based, no plug-ins required
• One-click import from any web site with our bookmarklet
• Save as GIF, JPG, PDF, or PNG
• One-click enhance improves most images
• Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize
• Basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or ?Z and ?Y on your Mac)
• Nondestructive editing—we always work from the original
• Edit big pictures—up to 10 MB, or 25 megapixels (5000×5000 pixels)
• Import PDF (first page only)

10. Flauntr

Lots of one-click options to edit your digital photos instantly.

Major features:

• Defined tabs with unique tools and features for photo and image editing, photo and image styling, text and embellishments and others
• One-step batch uploads and gallery creation
• Instant export to cell phones and PDA devices with visual make/model search engine
• Built-in store where prints, posters, wall decals and greeting cards can be ordered directly; no need to be directed to another website

Throughout this year several new fun websites have been released and become popular. After heavy research this is what I could come up with! Enjoy, take a rest and have a fun time!

1. Picjoke

In Picjoke you can choose from many cool effects to apply. Just choose picture from your computer and it will do the rest.

2. Cardgame

Create your own personalized playing cards at the click of a mouse button.

3. Condenent

Design your own Wired magazine cover.

4. Blibs

Here you can find lots of effects including animation, adjustments and even kaleidoscoper.

5. Imagechef

In imagechef you can easily create anything from word mosaics to football shirts. With over 100 templates it’s a great place to have fun with your photos. After you have created your photo you can share it social networks.

6. Anymaking

Anymaking is a great place to edit your photos online. Here you can find all the necessary tools for picture editing. Cropping, rounded corners, shadows, frames – it’s all here. There are also some cool effects to have fun with like wanted poster.

7. Frontpage

In 3 easy steps you can create a unique and fully personalised magazine cover for yourself or someone special. Use the magazine covers on your Facebook, MySpace profiles or on your own web site for free. You can even send the cover images to all your friends and family easily and quickly with the email options provided.

8. Maronface

Moronize your photo.

9. flauntR

flauntR is a flash based online photo editor, where you can quickly edit your photos, add some effects, blend photos and create social network photos.

10. Tiltshift maker

Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.

11. Effmypic

Choose from over 30 cool effects to your picture

12. Avatar.pho.to

Upload your photo and create a cool avatar from it.

13. Seenow

In seenow you can find a lots of good quality effects and later share your outcomes.

14. Funnywow

Choose from over 40 cool effects to apply to your photos in good quality.

15. Wishafriend

Create photo effects, photo frames, name acronyms, fake magazine covers and much more.

Do you know more fun and free online photo editing websites? Share with us!