Resources
Services and resources you might need:
This is just a rubbish page knocked together to hold a rag-bag of information. If you happen to land here then please don’t take the appearance of this page as representative of my work!
Time Management
Once you get involved in online marketing you will quickly discovered the major attributes of the internet; speed and automation. Translate that into real experience and you will find that other people can send you an overwhelming amount of information really fast!
That means you have to be focused in the management of your time. Everyone develops their own methods but you may find these tools are useful.
http://www.evernote.com/
http://www.nozbe.com/ - free account for up to 5 projects.
Finding A Niche
For the top ten searches on eBay: www.pulse.ebay.com/
For bestsellers on Amazon: www.amazon.com - select a Category and then look for Bestsellers in the sub-menu.
Hot markets: www.buzz.yahoo.comwww.hot.aol.com
www.google.com/trends
www.cbengine.com/
Accounting
Essential Free Registrations
You need to set up accounts with the following:
Clickbank (for sale & purchase of products) www.clickbank.com
Adsense (for adsense revenue) www.adsense.google.com
Amazon (for affiliate sales) www.amazon.com
PayPal (sign up for the business account) www.paypal.com
Skype (free telephone calls) www.skype.com
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/
Affiliate Marketing
Find Affiliates
Affiliate location software
www.cgiconnection.com/affiliate-finder
www.affiliatesalert.com
Find your own through Google keyword “+ affiliate”
Find Products To Sell As An Affiliate
www.clickbank.com
www.cj.com - Commission Junction
www.shareasale.com
Find CPA networks
CPA stands for Cost Per Action and pays substantially better than Adsense and can be as good as affiliate systems.
See the CPA page for a comprehensive list of CPA networks
Article Marketing
Article Directories
Sites where you can upload your Articles
www.ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articlecity.com
www.isnare.com/
(put 'article directory' into Google!)
Article Re-writers/spinners
www.incansoft.com - Contentmania
www.spinnerchief.com/
Article Submission Services/Software
www.submityourarticle.com
www.articleannouncer.com
Audio - Software
Audacity (free) www.audacity.sourceforge.net/
Impact Web Audio www.impactwebaudio.com/
Web Audio Plus www.webaudioplus.com
Sony Audio Studio Audio Studio
Sound Mixing - Accoustica Mixcraft www.impacewebaudio.com/
Sound Effects (free) www.grsites.com/sounds
Recording Skype: www.skyperec.com & www.pamela.biz.en
Royalty Free Music
Autoresponders
For a comprehensive review of email services for 2017 check out this list.
Mailchimp - free for the first 2,000 subscribers. But this is for sending only - no autoresponder.
Mailchimp sets up lots of the pages you require automatically after you create your template but hosts them itself. Unlike Aweber which allows you lots of form design capability and then you just paste the code wherever you want it on your site Mailchimp only provides very basic code if you want to move away from their hosting options.
Aweber.com - probably the most commonly used and recommended in the internet marketing community.
ConvertKit - $29/month for 1,000 subscribers. More expensive but considered to be more effective. Subscriber based so that subscriber actions can tag their interest so they only get what is relevant to them. See: http://timfelmingham.com/convertkit-vs-aweber/
Your Mailing List Provider - free for the first 1,000 subscribers.
ActiveCampaign is intuitive enough so that even beginners can get to grips with it. Includes CRM at $49/month.
NOT recommended - from Shane Melagh
Infusionsoft
Ontraport
Serious stuff: Campaign Commander - so serious we have yet to find a price quoted on the website. Integrates your CRM, social media campaigns as well as your email. Not for the faint hearted.
Blogs
www.Blogger .com (owned by Google), free, easy to set up but you don't own your site.
WordPress (free on www.Wordpress.com) - easy like Blogger but you don't own your site)
Or install WordPress for free on your own host using Fantastico. Recommended. You can also do it the hard way by downloading the software from www.Wordpress.org and uploading using ftp - but the Fantastico way is easier and quicker.
Hosting your own WordPress installation gives more functionality using 3rd party plugins than is available on WordPress.com. Don't forget that as a member you have access to the Bonus Product of a 27 part series of WordPress Tutorials. And if you want to cast your net even wider then there are even more tutorials available over at Speckyboy
Mass Blogs
Installs & posts to multiple Word Press Blogs Mass WP Installer
RSS2Blog (Posts regularly to all types of Blog from an RSS feed) RSStoBlog
Cookies
At the time of writing the EU is getting all hot under the collar about cookies and talking about legislating to make it compulsory for visitors to optin to cookies if you intend to use them. This will bring the internet to a grinding halt but that doesn't seem to have occurred to the ivory palace in Brussels as yet. However, if you need to deal with this problem then take a look at http://cookieq.com/CookieQ
And http://silktide.com/cookieconsent and UK Cookie Consent WP plugin are both free.
Domain Names
Help in choosing a domain name:
www.nameboy.com
www.domaintools.com
http://www.flawlessurl.com/
Domain Name Management
Should you reach the stage of having multiple domain names then you might find this useful: www.FreeDomainDashboard.com. Of course, it isn't really free after the first trial period but if you have a real domain name management problem you may find the subscription worth paying.
Domain names - expired
www.justdropped.com/
Domain - registering
www.godaddy.com
www.cheapcheapdomainnames.com
www.namecheap.com
Duplicate Content Checker
www.copyscape.com
eCommerce - Shopping Carts
www.1shoppingcart.com In the UK there is a private label version called Total Business Cart - it's effectively all the same thing.
If you have just a few items to sell then you can create Buy Now buttons on Paypal and embed them into your website. Rather time consuming to manage but a good way to get going.
If you don't like the price tag for the integrated solution then you might investigate Big Commerce (for the ecommerce) + MailChimp (autoresponder) + iDevDirect (for affiliate system)
It is very tempting to use WordPress for anything and everything for websites but when it comes to ecommerce this is probably not advisable. There are those who know who say that the php software behind WordPress is simply not the right platform for this activity.
Our advice would be to use Big Commerce and link it to a WP site. A small monthly fee in exchange for a reliabile and robust ecommerce platform is worth it's weight in gold when your business starts to develop. You definitely do not want to be struggling to resolve technical problems and placate angry customers whose orders have gone astray just when your business is taking off and you want to concentrate on marketing. Note that Big Commerce also enables you to run your ecommerce store on Facebook.
You then use the Big Commerce for the selling function and the WordPress part of your site for the dynamic content publishing and all the other aspects that WordPress excels at.
eCommerce with WordPress
There are lots of WordPress sites out there selling stuff using ecommerce plugins. Woocommerce, produced by Automattic, the same people who produce WordPress itself, is usually considered a good bet.
The Flatsome theme is also highly recommended.
Event Booking & Sales
www.Eventbrite.co.uk is considered the market leader in this field and has additional functions to allow you to publish your event on Facebook and with widgets and other sales pages.
www.helmtickets.com is an up and coming competitor based in the UK which is about 15% cheaper than Eventbrite. Can also embed booking/payment form and process directly into your own website so customer never leaves your site.
Bookly, a WordPress plugin, with fully customizable booking form with online payments, notifications, and Google Calendar synchronisation enables your visitors to book for events and services and pay directly.
Forms
www.jotform.com - very nice ''drag & drop' online form designer where you can design your own form then paste the code wherever you want to.
Fulfilment
CreateSpace.com is one of these linked to Amazon. Useful but a substantial percentage taken by Amazon.
Kunaki is another. Their production prices are frankly extraordinarily low.
If you are in the UK then Alpha Duplication is one of the biggest.
Blurb if you want to self publish a hard copy book.
Graphics
Software
Adobe Photoshop. Rather expensive. Your main need is to crop images to show exactly what you want and then to reduce the file size and resolution to the minimum so that the image does not slow down the load speed of your website.
You can probably achieve this with software pre-loaded on your computer such as a cut-down version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements or your digital camera will often come with software that you can use for resizing and optimising images for the web. Look for a menu option called something like 'Resize for the web'. .jpg format is the most commonly used format while .png has a transparent background.
www.logomaker.com - instant logos!
www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
Free Graphics Packages
www.freeserifsoftware.com/
There's a useful article here about alternative software.
Photopea - enables you to edit Photoshop images without Photoshop.
And some good paid tools at: http://www.laughingbirdsoftware.com/ - who also have a nice explanation of why you might want to produce vector images with a useful link to a conversion service.
For ecovers try http://www.myecovermaker.com/ - $3.95 each or a subscription package for unlimited covers.
Icons
www.iconfinder.com is a great resource to find high quality icons in various sizes and formats - many free. You don't have to be unique - but quality always shows.
If you want to get serious and buy a product then The Logo Creator does exactly what it says on the tin - as well as icons, headers and graphics of all kinds.
Want a set of icons? Try: www.icondock.com/free - Also has more comprehensive paid sets.
Royalty Free Photos
Various sites, check carefully for usage restrictions
www.sxc.hu
www.morguefile.com
www.openphoto.net
www.freephotosbank.com
www.dreamstime.com/
www.fotolia.com - claim to offer the largest image bank of free and most affordable royalty free photos and illustrations (perfect for web or print), but they also offer crowd-sourced and professional images on one site.
www.shutterstock.com
www.123royaltyfree.com
www.bigstock.com
www.e-cobo.com/stockphotos/
www.public-domain-photos.com/
www.f11digital.com/4images
www.photoeverywhere.co.uk
www.crestock.com/
www.shutterstock.com/
www.studio7designs.com/stock-photography/
www.freeimages.co.uk/
www.powstock.com/ - the humdinger collection of them all. Someone has put serious time into collecting this information.
The following 3 sites are all recommended by Andy Jenkins, The Video Boss.
www.AnimationFactory.com and its sister site www.ClipArt.com - as many clipart, animated images, Powerpoint templates, animated video backgrounds etc as you can shake a stick at for an annual membership of just $59.95
www.DigitalJuice.com - ditto for sound and yet more imagery.
There are also millions, yes, I said millions of images available from Flickr under their Creative Commons licence.
Hosting
UK based:
eUKHost.com- a reseller account with unlimited domains: £14.99 per month.Another host which offers both competitive reseller accounts and a UK location is Site5
US based:
Hostgator: a Reseller account allows you to host unlimited domains $25 per month www.hostgator.com
Bluehost: well regarded. www.bluehost.com
Page.ly- specialises in hosting WordPress. Very easy setup, painless security with automatic backups and upgrades - but there's no such thing as a free lunch and you do pay more for the service.
Same goes for http://websynthesis.com/ which also specialises in high speed, reliable, secure hosting for WordPress sites.
Amazon based WP hosting at https://amznhosting.com/ High speed SSD and security built in.
Another UK based service for top of the range hosting is at WPMaintain.
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Tool: www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Google Search Based Keyword Tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/# - Use to analyse the keywords that Google is detecting on your own and your competitors' sites.
www.Wordtracker.com: generally considered the industry standard, but a paid service. Can be bought by the day.
www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Kindle Direct Publishing
Even better than publishing your articles on article directories is to publish a book on Kindle. The extra authority from a book and the fact that it is automatically, globally available on Amazon - to die for.
Check out: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin
Link Building
Free Link Builder (there is a paid version too) www.cyber-robotics.com
Link Exchange www.linkmetro.com
Paid link building service www.link-assistant.com
Find your own through Google keyword “+ addurl” keyword “+ addsite” Keyword “+ submit site”
Link Directory Submitter www.linkdirectorysubmitter.com
Membership Sites
WordPress with Wishlist Member plugin - $97 single site licence
Paid service: http://traindom.com/. Start at $5/month.
Office Software
I can see no purpose in continuing to pay Microsoft for Office software. I now do all document and other content creation on Google Drive which, among other things enables me to convert pdf to editable text documents as well as removing the necessity for backups and removes the consequences of the possible loss or failure of your laptop/desktop.
You do, of course, need a decent internet connection.
For those occasions that you do need an MSOffice equivalent on your local machine for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, drawing and database then try this:
www.libreoffice.org/ - this has the advantage that when you convert a document into .pdf format any links in header and footer are converted as live links - essential when giving away ebooks for viral distribution. Adobe does not do this.
http://www.printfriendly.com/ - Extracts neat, printer friendly, documents from cluttered web pages.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing Services from these sites:
www.123employee.com - complete Virtual Assistant outsourcing service with quality supervision.
www.upwork.com (previously known as Elance)
www.freelancer.com
www.peopleperhour.com
www.scriptlance.com
www.rentacoder.com
www.webdesignlance.com
www.upwork.com
www.iwriter.com - Hire online writers - get content written for as little as $1.25 an article.
www.onlinejobs.ph - recruit your very own outsource worker.
Transcription - audio or video to text, captions, translation - https://www.rev.com/
www.99designs.com - need a design? Whether you need a logo, business
card, website, for t-shirt designed, 99designs allows you to be in charge of the process and get what you want. 99designs has professional designers bidding on your project and actually submitting their designs for consideration - so you get to choose between designs - not designers.
Then you can get all the designers to vote on the best - so you get a professional viewpoint - thought that's not to say that you cannot ignore their opinion because you can always choose the one you prefer.
And if you don't like any of them, you don't pay a penny!
The following were all recommended by Colette Mason of www.WebsiteSuccessSystem.com. You may pay a little more for them but they are all quality suppliers with a track record.
www.textbroker.com - writing
www.scribendi.com - proofreading
www.document-doctor.co.uk - editing
www.wordzworth.com - formatting
www.fingertipstyping.co.uk - transcription
SkillPages - is an outsourcing service linked to a social network - so you publish your requirement through your friends and contacts similar to word-of-mouth but also get your requirement matched up with providers who have put their skills online. You should then get back 2 types of responses; from your friends with recommendations and also from the system with appropriate matches - who you might also find have contacts in common.
Cheap outsourcing
Don't forget - you usually get what you pay for. www.fiverr.com has become well known as a cheap if somewhat unpredictable source of outsource talent. Following are a series of similar sites that you might try.
| www.fivequids.co.uk | www.fourerr.com | www.7richer.com |
| www.gigbux.com | www.gigdollars.com | www.earnerr.com |
| www.gigme5.com | www.7freelance.com | www.justafive.com |
| www.uphype.com | www.tenbux.com | www.gigbucks.com |
Photo Editors - Free online
www.Aviary.com
www.Splashup.com
preview them on real-world examples.
www.nattyware.com/pixie.html
Private Label Rights (PLR)
http://freeplrvideos.com/
Public Domain
Books and documents
www.alibris.com Useful sources for bonuses
www.Abebooks.com
Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
www.Rollyo.com
Video/film
https://www.wochit.com/ - professional video production at scale
www.DesertIslandFilms.com
www.pdmdb.org
www.openflix.com
www.emol.org/movies
Audio/radio
www.radiolovers.com
www.librivox.org - free audiobook downloads
Music
www.classiccat.net
US Govt - everything is public domain
Images: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml (note this URL is case sensitive )
Press Releases
Sites where you can upload your Press Releases
www.prweb.com
www.free-press-release.com
www.usanews.net
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.prlog.com
Remote Access
If you reach the heady heights of wanting to access either your own PC or a client's from a remote location then you might find these tools useful:
www.logmein.com
www.gotomypc.co.uk
Security
Some useful notes on security for your site: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/511. There is also more here on WordPress Security.
Shopping Carts
1ShoppingCart - all embracing
https://www.orderforms.com/ - simple way of selling different products.
Social Media Marketing
To find a relevant user name across multiple online services: http://namechk.com/
SocialOomph - to manage your Twitter and other social media postings and statistics.
To build Facebook Pages for free visit www.Pagemodo.com
To manage multiple accounts from a mobile device - www.hootsuite.com
Surveys
www.surveymonkey.com
www.surveydaddy.com
https://www.typeform.com/
https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk
Tech support
This company offers free tech support on just about any question: http://support.icobb.com/index.php It's not clear why unless it's the classic; if we're nice to you then you will eventually buy something from us.
Tell a Friend
Free script and plugin - www.freetellafriend.com
Free script www.expertwebinstalls.com/tell_a_friend_script.html
Low cost but good reporting www.jemscripts.co.uk/
URL Shorteners
There are a number of commonly used URL shorteners around. For reliability and credibility we would suggest you use http://www.clickmeter.com/ - supplied by Amazon. Free up to 1,000 clicks per month and then becomes paid. As with everything else, if you are not making money by the time the charge kicks in then you might need to rethink your strategy.
Video
YouTube of course. Sproutvideo.com and Vimeo.com both offer password protection
To download from YouTube
To download a video from YouTube: http://youtubeinmp4.com
Video Software
Desktop Screen recorder (free) www.sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio
Online Screen recorders (free) :
- Screencast-O-Matic: www.screencast-o-matic.com/ - 15 minutes record time
- Jing: www.jingproject.com - 5 minutes record time
- Screenr: www.screenr.com/ - a recruitment tool for the Articulate e-learning community.
Sony Movie Studio Movie Studio
Microsoft Movie Maker www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
(Often supplied free with with your PC)
Free online teleprompter: www.cueprompter.com
Virus protection
AVG-Anti-Virus Free Edition
www.download.cnet.com/AVG-Anti-Virus-Free-Edition/3000-2239_4-10320142.html
bitdefender comes out well from many surveys particularly because it does not hog resources as much as products such as Norton Symantec and scores among the best on many tests.
Website - building
What you use and how you go about building your website(s) will depend very much on your level of technical skill and how much time and money you have available for the task. Never fall into the trap of believing that you have to be able to build a website to be an internet marketer. That is just not true - you have the ideas and the strategies - you use competent mechanics to build the engine to drive it.
If doing it yourself and the ability to respond and publish changes quickly without having to wait for a webmaster to do it for you is important then use WordPress. There are endless tutorials avaiable either on product suppliers or on Youtube.com Make sure that you self-host your site for maximum functionality.
Many hosting companies offer site builder software as part of their package. Avoid them. They are usually less than optimum and you are also tying yourself to that host and you might not want to stay with them in the longer term.
Having said that, there are some better building packages that also come with hosting - but in this case you are buying the website builder with the hosting rather than the other way around.
http://nationbuilder.com is effective for building communities.
https://siteorigin.com/page-builder/ - a free drag and drop WP plugin - highly recommended.
www.Wix.com provides free hosting and claims 14 million users.
www.Weebly.com is a rapidly growing integrated system claiming 10 million users and growing fast.
www.Basekit.com provides a professional looking site . £6/month for a 10 page site.
www.Webflow.com is an excellent free tool that comes with great training videos. Hosted online using Amazon Web Services so it is fast and it works. Two projects for free before you move to $16/month for the Lite version with 10 projects then $35/month for unlimited.
www.MrSite.com for absolute beginners but delivers a surprisingly effective site. Slightly expensive at £15/month for a simple personal site. £25/month buys you the Storefront ecommerce package able to display 500 products online.
www.Moonfruit.com from £7.20/month or £13.50 for the Business option again allows you to build an ecommerce store with Paypal payments, Google Analytics etc.
The converse of this process of building a website that can also be an ecommerce platform is to look at the problem the other way round and if your main requirement is to have a fully functional ecommerce store then look at some of the options in the next section on Shopping Carts which start from the ecommerce end and allow you to build your website pages around them.
Templates - free
There are various sources of free website templates other than WordPress. You can find one at http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
Similarly you can build a site for free with http://www.yola.com/ or at http://www.weebly.com
Visme allows you to wireframe your website to get the design right before building it.
Squeeze/Lead Pages
Squeeze pages are pages where you 'squeeze' the name and email out of your visitors. Thats pretty crude way of putting it but the only way that this works is if you offer an ethical bribe of some product or information that is of perceived value by the visitor. In other words it becomes a fair exchange.
There are many squeeze page generators out there but among the best is www.LeadSiteLauncher.com from Ed Rivis. It's pricey but fast, comprehensive and effective.
HTML editors
HTML editors - write/edit the code used to build conventional web pages.
Dreamweaver- www.macromedia.com. Dreamweaver is recognised as the professional tool.
Frontpage - www.microsoft.com. Easy for beginners who are familiar with Microsoft Word. But has issues with the additional code that Microsoft uses to make life very convenient for the user - can ultimately can trip you up if you don't fully understand what is going on.
Kompozer - www.kompozer.com
Kompozer is open source and write more compliant code. Lots of good tutorials on YouTube - and it's free! Remember, if you are a marketer you do not need to know how to build websites! And you certainly don't want to waste your time struggling to learn. WordPress plus a little bit of html to understand linking is as far as you need to go.
Free Web design software
www.freeserifsoftware.com/
Free Web Templates www.freewebtemplates.com
Outsource See outsourcing section
Fonts
Classic designer, Massimo Vignelli, claims that only 6 fonts are necessaryL
Garamond - classic/smart
Bodoni - looks premium/elegant
Century Expanded - most readable
Futura - sans serif - modern
Times New Roman - classic
Helvetica
Split Testing
Some conflicts:
- WordPress is an almost universal site building tool for marketers these days
- Split testing - finding the version of your page or offer which is most attractive to your visitor and therefore most profitable for you - is a high priority for marketers.
- Google Website Optimizer is the standard, powerful tool provided free by Google to help you with split testing.
....And yet there is a big black hole of tools to make Google Website Optimizer work with WordPress.
There are various WP plugins that will deal with simple A/B split testing. But if you want to do anything more complicated then you will almost certainly need a paid-for tool. Reedge.com is one such starting at $27/month for one domain or VisualWebsiteOptimizer which starts at $49/month. Both of them offer 30 day free trial period.
Colour Scheme
Harmonious Color Schemes a program that allows you to see color theory in action: you can create harmonious color schemes and
www.color-wheel-pro.com/
Free Color Matching Software Just point your cursor at the color and get the RGB, CMYK and HTML settings
You can find colour pallettes put together by a professional here: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes
WordPress Management
If you have multiple WordPress websites then you might find this paid-for tool useful for managing them all from a single location:
Staging - a place to make changes
This article describes different ways of providing staging for your WordPress site.?
WordPress Backup
There are various ways of backing up WordPress yourself. If you want to leave it to the professionals and have real peace of mind then take a look at http://blogvault.net/.
WordPress Security
WordPress is the most popular website platform - and it therefore attracts a lot of attention from hackers. Don't waste your time wondering why they do it - they're just mindless and do it just because they can. WordPress is not the most secure platform and you can do a lot to protect yourself. There's a useful WordPress security training package here.
WordPress Training
Constantly updated WP training: https://www.videousermanuals.com/
WordPress Premium Themes
http://www.elegantthemes.com/
http://ownyourownblog.co.uk/
http://ithemes.com/
If you want to design your own theme without knowing any coding then the latest offering is The Website Weaver.
And for serious players: Genesis from StudioPress
Webinars, Screensharing, Teleseminars
Screensharing
www.Skype.com is becoming increasingly effective at screensharing. You should be using it anyway to benefit from the free telephone communications - this is just an added benefit. UK users note that using SkypeOut where you pay local call charges from your Skype credit even for international calls is a great way to participate in US based webinars when a US number is provided.
Free screen sharing service: https://join.me/
Zoom - latest screen sharing/webinar service - free for personal use
Webinars
www.GotToWebinar.com and www.GoToMeeting.com are well known paid services.
WebinarJam - based on Google Hangouts technology and fronted by well known marketers Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins - appears to be both much cheaper and more effective.
www.AnyMeeting.com is a good way to get started - free for 200 attendees with ads or you can get rid of the ads for a $17.99/month subscription.
Webinars - Automated
A great technique to use the increased conversion capability of webinars but deliver them anytime, anywhere without your being constantly involved. Evergreen Business Systems
Writing
Gingkoapp.com - a great text editor tool for outlining and drafting before producing a final document.