TOP WEBSITES FOR INCOME INVESTORS (KIPLINGERS)

KIPLINGER'S | March 2016

9 Top Free Sites for Income Investors

Five years ago, Kiplinger’s turned to longtime investment writer and in-house income guru Jeff Kosnett to launch a newsletter designed to steer income-starved readers to the best investments for dependable, spendable income. Today, Kiplinger’s Investing for Income continues to attract a growing army of satisfied readers.

How does Jeff uncover opportunities for his subscribers month after month? Of course, he spends a lot of time interviewing money managers and mutual fund masterminds, as well as the men and women who actually run real estate investment trusts (REITs) and master limited partnerships (MLPs). And he mines the Internet, searching for great ideas and studying the raw data to identify broad trends and profitable prospects. We asked Jeff to share with Kiplinger.com readers his favorite free sources for reasoned discussion and hard-to-find financial data. Bookmarking these sites will be a valuable step toward making you a more successful investor.

 

Closed-End Fund Center

Web address: www.cefa.com

Key data: Discounts and premiums to net asset value

Best for: Sorting and screening 629 closed-end funds

The keys to understanding any closed-end fund are data about current and historic discounts and premiums to net asset value, distribution rates, whether and how much the fund borrows (leverage), and total return on net asset value. This site offers all of that and more, plus the tools to sort and screen more than 30 varieties of funds in too many ways to count.

Kosnett Comment: CEFA’s tables show each fund’s distribution yield next to its income yield. The two won’t match, but they should be fairly close. If the income figure is low but the distribution is high, the fund is selling assets or issuing new shares to maintain the illusion of a fat yield. It could be headed for a distribution cut.

Eaton Vance Monthly Market Monitor

Web address: www.eatonvance.com

Key data: The numbers on all aspects of income investments

Best for: Total returns and average duration of bonds

This fund company’s site is loaded with free stuff. The best is the monthly monitor (accessible in the site’s Institutional Investors section): 40-plus pages of charts and tables about all aspects of stocks, bonds, bank-loan funds, commodities, industry sectors and more. All this — including total returns and average duration of more than 20 kinds of bonds — is nicely laid out on single pages.

Kosnett Comment: The page called “fixed income spread analysis” uses simple bar charts to show the current and past yield advantage of various categories, such as junk bonds or preferred stocks, over Treasuries. When the spread is unusually narrow, there’s more risk. When it’s wide, it’s usually a good time to invest.

FRED

Web address: www.stlouisfed.org

Key data: 382,000 statistical series from 82 sources

Best for: Financial data, graphs and charts from the government and everywhere else

If you want to see a trend in, say, inflation, growth, interest rates or stock-market returns for just about any period, you’ll find it here. This takes the place of any almanac, encyclopedia or reference book — and it’s updated daily. FRED is the acronym for Federal Reserve Economic Data and is the brainchild of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Kosnett Comment: You may go weeks or months without using this, and then you’ll refer to it several times in one sitting. It’s comforting to know that someone has gone to the effort of assembling all this info in one place.

SEE ALSO: 7 Promising Dividend Stocks Yielding 5% or More

FRED

Investing in Bonds

Web address: www.investinginbonds.com

Key data: Real-time market data on bond trading action and prices

Best for: Owners (or potential owners) of individual corporate and municipal bonds and anyone else who wants to see how bonds are priced and what they are yielding at any given time

Kosnett Comment:The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the bond dealers’ trade association, runs the site and has a news feed as well. Some of the commentaries, though, are dated.

Robert W. Baird & Company

Web address: www.rwbaird.com

Key data: Relative yields of municipals and Treasuries

Best for: Analysis of taxable and tax-free bond markets

The managers of Baird Core Plus Bond fund and other excellent no-load income funds publish a combination of basics with just enough financial-market-speak to keep the pros happy with their Capital Markets Perspective. The insights live at Baird’s corporate site (address above) not the Baird Funds' consumer site. Offerings include both tax-free bond and taxable-bond commentaries. A recent subject is the tight supply of new bonds, which keeps prices high and yields low. There is also a colorful market commentary called, ahem, The Bull and Baird Blog.

Kosnett Comment: Baird’s municipal bond letter illustrates such basics as the ratio of tax-free bond yields to Treasury yields and the equivalent yield you need to earn on a taxable investment to net the same after-tax income.

Pimco

Web address: www.pimco.com

Key data: Outlooks and forecasts from the fixed-income behemoth (with $1.43 trillion under management) formerly known as the Pacific Investment Management Company

Best for: Investors who like to see commentaries and explanatory articles that put the market’s gyrations in perspective. For example, an article called “Emerging Markets Trying to Turn the Corner” makes the case for some, but not all, investments in those countries. The Pimco blog about the issues of the day is well-presented and with graphics.

Kosnett Comment: The departure of Bill Gross from Pimco changed this site from his soapbox to more of a team effort.

EMMA

Web address: www.emma.msrb.org

Key data: Muni bond trading details

Best for: Screening the tax-free bond universe for top yields

Electronic Municipal Market Access, from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, shows every municipal bond trade, plus key background information about thousands of issuers. If you own tax-exempts, you can see a price graph for each bond based on months of trades, just as you can chart a stock or a fund. You can also screen the tax-free bond universe in detail. For example, when you search for all AA-rated Arizona water and sewer bonds due between 2024 and 2029, up pop the yields and other particulars.

Kosnett Comment: EMMA is easier to navigate if you know your bond’s CUSIP number.

REIT.com

Web address: www.reit.com

Key data: Historical returns and other performance information for real estate trusts going back to their invention in the 1960s.

Best for: Avid real estate investment trust fans and anyone who wants to see new offerings and news tidbits about the industry and its members. The site is run by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT).

Kosnett Comment: It would be good if NAREIT would link to a resource that provides up to the minute data on the individual REITs’ net asset values and prices to book value. You need a brokerage link to that kind of research.

TCW

Web address: www.tcw.com

Key data: Monthly updates by sector, such as the High Yield and Mortgage Market updates. Find it all under Insights from TCW, a global asset management firm.

Best for: Bond fund investors, especially if you dabble in risky or unusual areas like junk bonds, mortgages and bank loans. There are also excellent forecasts and commentaries from the portfolio managers and analysts.

Kosnett Comment: This is some of the best perspective on individual bond-market segments and what’s driving them up or down.

Miami Herald: Low Cost Marketing Tips for Small Business

Posted on Mon, Sep. 20, 2010
Marketing help just clicks away
BY TASHA CUNNINGHAM
Tasha@BizBytes101.com


1. Twilert. This is a Twitter app that allows you to receive e-mail updates of tweets that contain keywords related to your business. Other apps like TweetDeck let you do the same thing, but Twilert sends the updates directly to your e-mail in-box so you can view them when it's convenient for you.

2. Slide Rocket. Slide Rocket is a free online tool for creating slick, professional Flash-enabled presentations that can showcase your products and services. It's like turbo-charged version of PowerPoint. You can share your presentations instantly on YouTube and Flickr and track the number of people that view your presentation using Slide Rocket analytics.

3. Click Tale. With pricing plans that start at free, Click Tale is an essential tool that lets you learn more about how your visitors interact with your website. You can record snapshots or ``movies'' of your customers' browsing sessions and get detailed information on how they use all areas of your site. You can use the data you collect to improve their customer experience while on your website.

4. Trackur. Trackur is a tool that allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand on social blogs, social networks, and online forums.

5. iKarma. Based in Jupiter, Fla., this reputation management tool allows you to compare customer comments, review products and services and get customer referrals that help you manage your brand's online word-of-mouth.

6. BrandDoozie. This do-it-yourself online tool allows you to create professional marketing materials in minutes including business cards, logos, brochures and flyers. It's free to create your materials and just $19.99 when you're ready to download and print them, saving you thousands of dollars in design costs.

7. Shoutlet. With this tool, you can distribute, track and manage your social media marketing campaigns across different social networks at once, saving your business time and money.

8. Later Bro. This service saves you time by allowing you to post-date Facebook and Twitter updates. You can plan, create and schedule updates for delivery to your customers at a later date.

9. PRLog.org . This service is completely free and lets you distribute press releases about your company to blogs, search engines and news sites. It's a great way for a cash-strapped entrepreneur like you to get the word out about your products and services.

10. Pitchrate.com . This free service will help you maximize your public relations and marketing efforts by connecting you with journalists who write about topics related to your business. It also offers free guidance on how to get publicity and a regular free ``PR Happy Hour,'' a series of conference calls that let you interact live with marketing and PR experts to ask questions and get advice.

Check out BizBytes101.com for more must-have marketing tips.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/20/v-print/1830154/marketing-help-just-clicks-away.html#ixzz106K1TL48

Online Marketing for Small Businesses (Information Week)

Ten Local Online Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
May 25, 2010
By Court Cunningham


In his new book, "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," Court Cunningham shares strategies and tips that can help SMBs seize opportunities in local markets and sidestep common mistakes.
The following excerpt from Court Cunningham's book "Local Online Advertising for Dummies," is presented by InformationWeek SMB courtesy of Wiley Publishing.

BOOK EXCERPT

Local Online Advertising for Dummies

Chapter 18: Ten Local Online Marketing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)

This foray into the world of online advertising is kind of a grand adventure. Although there is clearly a beaten path that you need to follow to maximize your chances for success, at times, you'll see your efforts come up short and wonder: What the heck am I doing wrong?

In a lot of cases, the fault isn't so much with the execution, but with the thinking or preconceptions. Because these things are part and parcel of your inner self, they can be really hard to recognize as the actual culprits when your efforts aren't having the results you want.

In our experience, many people make certain mental errors when launching themselves into the online arena -- and in this chapter, we list the ten most common.

1. Assuming Your Customers Behave Like You
Maybe you're a 25-year-old running online marketing for a retirement community. Just because you go to the blogosphere before you buy any products or services doesn't mean that your target audience does. Conversely, you might be a 70-year-old dentist, and you think the Internet is just a fad. You need to think the way customers think and figure how they find businesses. No matter what your mom told you, in this case, don't be yourself.

2. Not Knowing Your Limits

You can create your own Web site, do search engine optimization (SEO), and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. That's one of the reasons books like this exist. However, to do these things right, you need to spend an appropriate amount of time on them. That means that the five minutes you spend monthly on your PPC campaign may not be enough, and consequently, you're wasting money that could just as well go to pay someone to take care of your local online advertising for you. Think hard about whether you'll make an ongoing commitment to optimizing your advertising campaigns. If not, maybe the best thing to do is go with the pros.

3. Assuming Web Site Aesthetics Equals Web Site Success

You may think all the frames, flash, and images you've put on your Web site look great. Unfortunately, that great stuff is all but invisible to the search engines. Like Joe Friday, search engines want only the facts. The subjective stuff on your site can be a lot of fun to create, but if content on your Web site can't even be read by the search engines, you aren't even in the game. Think like a search engine does. Make sure you have


A search engine-friendly URL
A site map (or site index)
Contact information on every page
Keyword-rich copy
Footers
Reciprocal links In other words, position yourself to be found before you worry about being impressive. And when in doubt, test and learn.

4. Creating a Web Site That No One Visits

If you build it, they will come, right? Wrong. Just because you have a Web site doesn't mean anyone will go there. To get people to your site, you need to drive traffic -- whether that means using SEO, PPC, e-mails, banners, or some of the other tools we talk about in this book. The moral of the story: Give people a road; then they will come.

5. Making It Difficult for Potential Customers to Contact You

You'd be surprised how many local business Web sites we see that don't even show the phone number. Or the contact information is buried deep down the Contact Us page. Your phone number (or however you want your potential customers to contact you) needs to be large and in charge on your Web site. Throw an easy-to-fill-out form on your page, too. That way potential customers who don't want to call still have a way to contact you.




6. Caring Too Much about How Many People Visit Your Site

This may at first seem contrary to the mistake of creating a Web site that no one visits, but it isn't. True, you need people to go to your site to get sales, but not all site visitors are equal. You can waste a lot of money paying vendors or directories for meaningless clicks that don't convert into new customers. This is especially important to remember when you use something like PPC. Sometimes you're better off to pay a premium for expensive keyword search terms instead of driving a lot traffic that represents only traffic -- and no sales.

7. Having Google Tunnel Vision

Yes, Google is the most important search engine by a long shot. We know this, you know this, and so do all your competitors. Although the most traffic is on Google, it isn't unusual for other search engines and directories to have more cost-efficient ways to drive traffic. When possible, the best strategy is to test a variety of sites (including Google) and see which one ultimately works best for your business.

8. Not Knowing whether Your Marketing Is Really Working

One of the greatest things about online advertising is that it's so measurable. The rub, of course, is that measuring takes work. But the payoff will be well worth it because you can focus your ad dollars on those channels and methods that work while cutting the fat out of your budget.

Arguably, the best five things for you to measure are

Traffic numbers (the number of visitors you get)
Conversion rates
Your cost per lead
Your cost per acquisition
Your return on investment
You can keep track of other things as well, such as how long visitors from particular channels stay on your site, but the five items here tell you what you most need to know.

9. Not Getting Sales from Calls

Your phone rings off the hook, but you still aren't getting any new customers. What could be wrong? For starters, answer your phone! According to a survey by FastCall411 of 5,000 local businesses, approximately two-thirds of incoming calls to local businesses go unanswered. What's more, a study by market research firm Synovate found that four out of five Americans regard immediate availability by phone as an important -- or the most important -- factor when selecting a local service provider. In the end, not picking up your phone is akin to taking that cash that you paid for your advertising and throwing it into a bonfire. Additionally, make sure that you or your staff handles those calls with the utmost care. After all, those people on the other end of the line have your future in their hands.

10. Not Doing Any Loyalty/Retention Marketing

Getting new customers is far more expensive than keeping existing ones. Make sure you're doing everything you can to take care of the ones you have. Keep in touch via an e-mail newsletter or offer them occasional special deals. Today's online tools make that sort of thing easy to do. So do it!


Court Cunningham is CEO of Yodle, a leading local online advertising company that works with thousands of businesses. Before joining Yodle, he held positions at Community Connect and Double Click.

WSJ - optimize your Search Engine Optimization Results

THE DECODER FEBRUARY 5, 2009 It's a New Me (As Seen on Google)
By JULIA ANGWIN
Article

For years, I winced at what popped up when I Googled my name.

The top result of a search on "Julia Angwin" was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005 after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

How Are Your Google Results?
Have you tried to change the search results for your name? What worked? What didn't?
I hated seeing the story at the top of the list for a number of reasons: It was not a topic I normally wrote about; it had an underwhelming headline, "Novak's Role is Still Largely Unknown"; and -- most horrifyingly -- the story contained an error and had a correction appended to it.

Mysteriously, this article had become my hallmark online, showing up in my top-five search results for years. As a longtime media and technology reporter who is coming out with a book, I didn't feel the article represented my career. So a few months ago, I began trying to figure out how I could knock that story -- and a few others, while I was at it -- out of my search results. It was the beginning of a long and arduous introduction into the murky art of search-engine optimization, or SEO.


Lisa HaneyOne of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page.

Of course, Google is not the Internet's only search engine. But since it is the most dominant one, I only focused on improving my Google SERP.

My first thought was to try to remove the unwanted article from my SERP. But search-engine expert and consultant Danny Sullivan advised me that it is extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results.

If you can prove to Google that a Web site has stolen your Social Security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, then Google will consider removing the offending data, he said. Even in those cases, Google urges people to contact the Web site directly to seek removal. "They don't really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that," Mr. Sullivan told me.

Still, Google does encourage people to boost their results by creating content about themselves. "People should take control of their own presence," says Adam Lasnik, search expert at Google. The best way to do that, he advises, is to create original compelling content about yourself that is easily accessed by Google and earns links from authoritative and relevant Web sites.

For details, I turned to WSJ.com's search-engine-optimization consultant Alex Bennert, who advised me to bury the annoying article underneath more favorable material, such as my social-networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, as well as blogging site Twitter.

Next, I contacted Rhea Drysdale, a search-engine-optimization expert at OutspokenMedia.com. Ms. Drysdale explained that I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many links they have from other credible Web sites.

Ms. Drysdale explained that this interlinkage system was the reason that my Novak article had been appearing so high in my SERP. Using Yahoo's Site Explorer, a tool that identifies sites that are linking to a Web address, she found that the Novak article had 25 links from sites that included the Washington Post, Instapundit and 13 different places in the archives of a conservative blog.

By interlinking my sites, my efforts soon began to pay off. Two weeks into the project, the Novak article disappeared from the first page of my results. My LinkedIn profile jumped to the No. 1 spot.

“One lesson: You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant.”

Soon, my results got another boost as I launched a new blog and a column on WSJ.com. Within a month of the launch of both, traffic and links to these sites pushed two older articles I had written down or off my top results altogether. Of course, it's easier for me to move my results because I'm a journalist. Every time I publish a new article on WSJ.com, it immediately becomes part of my SERP equation.

For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.

Still, visibility has a downside, which I unwittingly learned. The day that Apple Inc.'s Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced his "hormonal imbalance," I went on camera with a colleague at WSJ.com to talk about the possible impact on Apple's business.

Within hours, Apple enthusiasts at MacDailyNews.com started trash-talking me and my colleague for allegedly casting aspersions on their leader. As a result, these posts, some of them quite vulgar and nasty, shot up near the top of my search-results page. Luckily, they sank back down to the fourth page of my results within two days.

The whole unpleasant experience was an object lesson in another aspect of SEO: It's never over. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Constant vigilance is required. That's why big companies hire experts to monitor their search results on a full-time basis.

Still, I hoped to strike the knockout blow for my SERP with the creation of a new personal Web site. With its launch approaching, I sent it to Ms. Drysdale, who made some specific technical recommendations. The front page was too graphical, she said. It needed to have more text that Google could categorize when its systems examined the site, a process called crawling. So the Web designer I was working with changed some of the text to make it more crawlable, sacrificing a beautiful typeface on the altar of SEO.

She also weighed in on the importance of the text and coding -- some of it invisible -- called metadata that's embedded in a Web site that helps search engines categorize the content. When building a page, Web programmers include a "title tag," which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine.

For example, The Wall Street Journal's home page has a title tag that reads: "Business News, Finance News, World, Political & Sports News from The Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com." All those words help search engines categorize the content and are the exact words that appear in a Google search result.

Once my title tags and metadata were optimized, the site went live.

At Ms. Drysdale's recommendation, I used Twitter to "tweet" about the site, sending out a short text message. I also linked to my site from my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as my "WSJ Community" profile.

For several days, I was greeted with a deafening silence. My SERP changed not at all as the site worked its way through the circuits at Google. Finally, 10 days later, my site appeared on the ninth page of my results and began slowly bubbling its way up to the top of my SERP.

And thus, I learned the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required.

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1
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