If you’re looking for tools that will help you become more effective as an internet marketer, you’ve come to the right place.
This post covers seven Google Chrome extensions that will make you more effective and efficient in your marketing.
#1: PicMonkey
First, we’ll take a look at PicMonkey, an in-browser photo-editing software that makes it easy to crop, edit, and customize photos. To help us fully understand it, we’re going to use a sample project.
Suppose you’re using iSpionage to learn more about your competitors’ landing pages. You enter a competitor’s URL into the search box (in this case we’re going to use GoDaddy) and click “Search.”
Next, you click on the plus button next to one of GoDaddy’s top keywords: “cost of professional website.” This pulls up the ad copy and landing page URL info as seen below. Clicking on the first URL takes you to GoDaddy’s landing page associated with the keyword that was selected.
Let’s say you’re a competitor and learn something from the landing page you’d like to implement on your site, such as the computer monitor and smartphone image that’s used. Instead of attempting to describe it to your designer, you can use PicMonkey to take a screenshot that can be edited.
First, click on the PicMonkey icon at the top of your Chrome browser (assuming you’ve already installed the extension). PicMonkey will open and take you to a screen where you can edit the page you were looking at. You can then save the entire image, or you can crop it to only include a certain part of the page. We’re going to crop this one to include only the monitor and the smartphone since that’s the section of the page we want to show our designer.
And voila, you now have an image from the site that you can share with a designer or use on your blog as a screenshot (which is exactly what I’ve done for all of the images in this post).
#2: Awesome Screenshot Capture
Now let’s say you want to do something a little more in-depth. Instead of capturing a portion of the landing page, you want to capture the entire page. To do this, we’ll need to use Awesome Screenshot Capture.
Once again, to begin, click on the Awesome Screenshot Capture icon while looking at the page you want to capture and choose “Capture Entire Page.” This, as you might guess, takes a snapshot of the page from top to bottom (even the portions you can’t see on your screen) which you can save and ends up being useful if you’d like to send the entire page to your designer and not just a part of the page.
Here’s an example of the entire GoDaddy landing page that was referenced above.
#3: Eye Dropper
Now let’s suppose you want to figure out what color GoDaddy’s using on their landing page. The orange they’re using to draw attention is really cool, and you want to figure out what color it is. That’s where the Eye Dropper extension comes in handy.
To use it, click on the plugin and then select “Pick color from web page.” After you do, your mouse will turn into an “eye dropper” and allow you to figure out what colors are being used on the page. Simply hover over the color you’d like to identify and click.
After clicking, you’ll see the information for the color picked as well as past colors you’ve picked. This comes in handy if you’d like your designer to match a specific color from a page.
#4: WhatFont
Now what if you want to find out what fonts GoDaddy is using? You guessed it. There’s an extension for that as well.
WhatFont makes it really easy to find out what fonts are being used on sites that you like. Simply click on the icon and then hover over fonts to find out which one is being used. You can also click to find out more information such as line height and font size.
In the example above, GoDaddy is using ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, and sans-serif for their font, although Helvetica is the font showing up on my screen. They’re also using a font size of 48 px, a line height of 52.79999, and a font color of #333333. All of that is really useful information when you like the typography a site is using and want to learn more about it.
#5: Page Ruler
The final web-design-related extension for digital marketers is the Page Ruler.
Suppose you need to figure out how wide a certain section of a page is. This could be the width of a blog so you know how large images can be, or it could be the width of a competitors landing page. Either way, Page Ruler makes it easy to find out.
You click on the icon, scroll over the section of the page you’d like to measure, and then click and drag the mouse to set the dimensions. In our example, we’ll measure the header height to see how tall the header is on GoDaddy’s landing page.
As you can see, the white header height section is 86 px, something you can relay to your designer if you’d like your header to be a similar height.
#6: WebRank SEO
Moving on to another type of project, we’ll look at the WebRank SEO extension.
The WebRank SEO extension makes it really easy to see what the PageRank is for a certain site, i.e. how high of an authority ranking the site has with Google.
This information comes in handy when you’re looking to guest post on another site. By clicking the extension, you’ll find out the site’s PageRank to give you a better idea about whether or not it’s a worthwhile site to guest post on. You can also see additional information such as Alexa and Compete traffic ranking and the number of pages indexed.
#7: Signals by Hubspot
Last but not least is Signals by Hubspot.
Signals is an app that enables you to know when someone opens your email or clicks on a link.
Let’s say you send an email to a blog manager and want to know when they get it. First, you sign up for Signals, and then connect it to your inbox. After getting everything set up, you’ll get notified via the extension whenever an email has been opened or clicked. You can also review your past emails to see what the activity has been like.
This app is ever so slightly creepy, but only if you use it the wrong way. Just make sure not to email someone important and say, “I know you opened my email, why haven’t you responded!” That would be ok if you’re mother did it to you, but you definitely don’t want to get on an editor’s bad side by creeping her out.
That wraps up this post on seven Google Chrome extensions every digital marketer should be using. All seven of these free Google Chrome extensions will help you save time and get better results with your marketing.
Are there any extensions you find helpful for marketing that you’d add to the list? If yes, share it in the comments so we can make this list even more impressive.
Author
Joe Putnam is the blog editor at iSpionage. You can discuss this article with him on Twitter at @josephputnam.
