Amazingly Cool Websites Guide Online Hints, Tips and Tools to Save You Time and Effort
By Colette Mason
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Introduction Here’s a list of tools, equipment and free resources I have found useful over the years in my online business. I hope you find them useful too! Enjoy! Who Wrote This Stuff? Me. Colette Mason. I’ve been into online business since 2008, and I run an online marketing consultancy now. You can find out more about me at http://www.colettemason.com. Before that I worked on multi-million pound IT projects all over Europe as a freelance IT consultant, making sure websites and software were easy for customers to use. Why Did I Write This Stuff? I burned hours, seriously hours (and wasted quite a bit of cash on trial-anderror projects), finding this stuff out, trying out free and paid versions of tools, trying to create my own products and more. When people meet me face to face they always ask, “hey do you know how to do this?” – so I thought I’d write it down and share it with everyone. If you know someone else worn down with analysis paralysis, please forward this onto them, ASAP Heck, even use it as a freebie to build your list! Connect with Me
www.colettemason.com/webeguide Me looking a bit nerdy in London
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Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents ............................................................................................ 3 Wordpress Themes ......................................................................................... 4 Wordpress Plugins .......................................................................................... 6 Self-Hosted Membership Site Software ......................................................... 11 3rd Party Membership Sites .......................................................................... 12 Shopping Carts .............................................................................................. 13 Marketing Tools ............................................................................................ 14 Social Media Tools ........................................................................................ 15 Product Creation ........................................................................................... 16 Tutorials and Training ................................................................................... 19 Productivity .................................................................................................. 20 Graphics ........................................................................................................ 23 Webmaster Tools .......................................................................................... 25 Video Creation and Editing ............................................................................ 27 Video Players ................................................................................................ 29 Kit and Gadgets ............................................................................................. 30 Creating Physical Products ............................................................................ 31 Hosting ......................................................................................................... 32 Outsourcing .................................................................................................. 33 Autoresponders ............................................................................................ 34
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Wordpress Themes Premium Themes Optimizepress A great theme for creating squeeze pages, sales letters and membership site pages in minutes. It takes a little while to understand how it works (you do a lot of editing underneath the main editing area, which takes som getting used to) but once you’ve sorted that, it works great! And converts well. It’s not good for a “blog” style website, as it relies on “pages” to work its magic, but for selling, it’s fab. Profits Theme This is another cool theme for sorting out squeeze pages, sales letters and your membership pages. It also comes with some “skins”, themed overlays for online marketing niches which save you some time and trouble coming up with a professional look. Woo Themes If you want a cool looking blog-based website, rather than the marketing funnel ones above, Woo Themes are easy to work with and look appealing. They’re also SEO optimized right out of the box. Elegant Themes Dozens of feature rich themes for the price of 1. They take a bit of setting up but they look great! Thesis The Thesis theme is a premium template system for WordPress that is designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website. It doesn't come with much styling, which makes it very flexible – or quite plain depending on your viewpoint PremiumPress A series of ecommerce based wordpress themes, including online shops, digial product shops and more.
Page |5 RocketTheme Another provider of high-quality wordpress themes. Headway Headway’s innovative Visual Layout Editor gives you the power to rearrange your site layout without touching a line of code (unless you want to – I know some of you love angle-brackets). You can sculpt your design into anything you want. You’re not restricted by someone else’s ideas about columns or content layouts. The sky is the limit. Free Wordpress Themes Free Wordpress Themes 4 U A great set of free templates. There’s just a few things to watch out for with free templates in my experience – they can break in different browsers like Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer/Safari, which can cause problems. Sometimes they have “malware” in, like additional menu items going back to the developer’s website that you can’t seem to delete. In my experience, I have saved a lot of time investing in a proper theme. Especially when you can use it on multiple sites. 50 Best Free Wordpress Themes A list of 50 free wordpress templates. Don’t forget you can search for free themes too within Wordpress too, when you login as administrator Mobile Themes for Wordpress Mobile Themes for Wordpress A review of some free and paid wordpress themes that are optimized for smartphones. My favourite is Carrington, which is free . If you’re doing websites for local business, it’s a real bonus for it to be phone friendly. Some of the themes need a switcher plugin to flip between computer mode, standard phone and smartphone mode – try wp-mobile-detector plugin for that.
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Wordpress Plugins All in One SEO One of the most popular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plugins for wordpress - and it's free! This makes adding your meta data for your website title, keywords and description a breeze. If you can fill in a form, you can do this stuff! (Check out the Marketing section for help with keyword research.) Better Delete Revisons Wordpress saves a copy of every page or post when you make even just a few changes. This means loads of reduntant information clogs up your wordpress database. Better Delete Revisions is a simple way to delete all the previous versions of your pages and posts. I use this all time - sometimes I have generated 300+ pages of revisions(!) which just slow your site down. Contact Form 7 This plugin makes setting up basic (and advanced) contact forms really straightforward. You can add extra form boxes to pre-qualify the leads too. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator One of the best sitemap generators for wordpress. It's easy to list all the pages and posts on your site in minutes - you can even exclude pages you don't want to appear too. Ninja Page Categories and Tags If you want to include some of your pages in your category or tag lists, just install this plugin and wordpress can include them with your post listings RB Internal Links If you get fed up trying to work out the long URLS of your pages, make it easy for yourself and add this plugin so you can use a dropdown list in your link box to select the page or post on your site in the blink of an eye
Page |7 Simple Google Sitemap XML Make sure your web content information is up to date and google friendly with this easy to use plugin. Add your sitemap to your main menu at the top of your website to make sure it's easily picked up by search engine spiders crawling it. Social Media Widget A straightforward way to add a list of your social media URLs to your sidebar. TinyMCE Advanced Need some extra editing features when you're writing your blog content? This plugin handles that for you. W3 Total Cache Speed up your website for your visitors by setting up this plugin to create static pages that are quick and easy to browse. WordPress Importer A great way to move your blogposts from one blog to another. I have used it when I moved my old blog to my new blog on a new domain name. It took 1 minute to move 100 posts and 100+ comments. Sweet! Embed RSS If you want to embed a blog feed to your website, I've used this one. It adds a button to your web editor. When you click it, you're asked to paste the feed in, and it the lists the feed content on your site. Duplicate Post This saves so much time. Ifyou've got lots of similar posts or pages to create, for example product overview pages, just create 1 how you want it to look, then click on the duplicate button, then just type over to change the bits specfic to the new page. I use this all the time, especially when I'm setting a site up. Global Translator If you have a global audience, this plugin helps visitors understand your content more easily by providing a basic translation using the google translation tool.
Page |8 Picasna If you need to embed a photo gallery, Picasna syncs your wordpress blog with your free Google Picassa account. (Picassa is listed in the Graphics section) Youtuber A simple way of adding youtube videos without having hassle from wordpress removing your YouTube embed code (Repeatedly! Grr ) Simple Social Icons This plugin adds a set of cool icons and widgets at the end of your post for your readers to share. It supports large icons and small icons. WP-Recapture reCAPTCHA is probably the most popular and widely accepted CAPTCHA systems by both end-users and site-owners. It is used by such prominent sites as Facebook, Twitter, to the Average Joe’s little blog out there on the corner of the Internet. Widget Logic This plugin gives every widget an extra control field called "Widget logic" that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on. XCloner - Backup and Restore XCloner is a professional website Backup and Restore application designed to allow you to create safe complete backups and to be able to restore them anywhere. Google Analytics A hassle free way to add basic Google Analytics to your website. Ultimate Analytics A plugin to add Google Analytics to each page on your weblog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also add tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links. Cushtie! Wptouch WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.
Page |9 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer by highlighting other related posts they may be interested in. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Eshop eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with handy features, like using WordPress pages or posts to create product pages, various methods available for listing products, products can have multiple options, upload your downloadable products and much more. wp e-commerce The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products and services online. If you visit Getshopped.org, you can check which themes work best with wp e-commerce. WP Forum Server A complete forum system for your wordpress blog. The forum is a plugin, so no additional work is needed to integrate it into your site. Flexi Quote Rotator Great for rotating testimonials, quotes, special offer alerts etc on your site. Share This This make it easy for visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels. Relevanssi If you want to improve your website’s search results and make it easier for visitors to find what they want, this plugin really helps.
P a g e | 10 BackupBuddy Backup your entire WordPress site, including the widgets, themes and plugins, and Backup to your server, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, or e-mail. Quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. The process is easy, fast, and reliable. A real time saver Simple Paypal Shopping Cart I found this really straightforward to use. If you need something really simple so your customers can pay you through paypal without a load of faff, this is great! Really quick to set up. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets you started quickly. Exclude Pages Fantastic for hiding certain pages from your menus and search results, like download pages and email list signup confirmations. Wordpress Meta Robots Hide pages from the search engine spiders with this plugin – again great for making sure your product download pages don’t end up in Google. Bunnys Print CSS Make it so your website is printer friendly quickly and easily. If you’re into coding, it’s easy to customize it too. Strange name, but still a great plugin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to attach a pdf to a wordpress-post Not really a plugin, but useful – how to upload PDFs and other files to your website – great for that ebook you’re trying to sell if the thought of FTPing it somehow/somewhere fills you with dread
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Self-Hosted Membership Site Software Digital Access Pass This provides membership site features to your Wordpress site, for example only letting paid members access content. Drip-feeding content over time and handling payments. It’s easy to set up if you’re comfortable with Wordpress and payment systems. If you’re not, you might need someone to help you. There’s a great, responsive helpdesk to handle any questions. Wishlist Member Wishlist is a powerful solution for creating an online membership site – all built using Wordpress. It has unlimited membership levels, you can redirect members to individual pages based on their membership type and more. A very flexible and robust answer to membership sites. Easy Membership Pro Easy Host it yourself. One of the easiest to setup and use. It can be linked into premium themes so you get a cool looking site quickly. Not the best looking admin dashboard, but can be the easiest to set up for most people. Amember aMember is a flexible membership and subscription management script you install on your website. It has support for PayPal, BeanStream, 2Checkout, NoChex, VeriSign PayFlow, Authorize.Net, PaySystems, Probilling, Multicards, E-Gold and Clickbank payment systems and more and allows you to setup paid-membership areas on your site. It can also be used without any payment system – you can manage users manually if you want to. It works with Joomla and Wordpress.
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3rd Party Membership Sites Subhub Hosted membership software solution that includes content management, membership/subscription tools, a range of design templates, an online store, pay-per-view functionality, your own forum and web stats. MemberGate Another seriously premium piece of software, MemberGate is the top of the line, membership site solution, with 1,000+ users. They say when you invest in MemberGate, you can concentrate on making your business profitable instead of trying to figureout how to make it run. They set it up for you, do the graphics and have a support desk I’ve only used this as a member, not a site owner. This next one does a lot more than being a membership site, but I wasn’t sure which section to put it in – have a look at all those features!! DLguard As well as protecting your digital downloads, DLguard does a whole whose of other things like running membership gateway, a shopping cart and integratingwith a lot of payment and autoresponder systems. I’ve used it since 2009. Great product.
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Shopping Carts EKM Powershop This one’s great if you have to create a big shop for a large range of physical products, with things like stock control and complicated shipping to think about. 1 Shopping Cart This is a full shopping cart system that lets you store digital products under 7Mb in it’s digital library – great for selling short reports and ebooks as the link is secure. It can also handle physical products and you can set up and affiliate program. e-junkie E-junkie provides shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website and other websites using PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Payflow Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, TrialPay, ClickBank and 2CheckOut. They secure the digital delivery of files and codes. If you’re selling physical goods, they automate the shipping calculation and inventory management. Their shopping cart has a built in sales tax, VAT, packaging and shipping cost calculator.(…something that drove me mad with PayPal!)
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Marketing Tools  Google Keyword Tool To have a successful Google/Search Engine Optimization strategy, its important to identify keywords that are particularly relevant to your business as well as being profitable to target. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool can help identify keywords that are related to your main business or niche. You can either enter a keyword phrase to find related keywords, or you can enter your website URL (or your landing page) and Google will then identify useful keywords!  Market Samurai Market Samurai is the Gold Standard for keyword research. Google Keyword Tool is great for occasional lookups, but if you find yourself looking keywords up on a regular basis, this is a real timesaver. Plus it automatically analyses if the visitors are likely to be tire-kickers or buyers. Handy!
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Social Media Tools Tweetdeck TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more. Great for watching trends in your industry by filtering all that information for specific keywords that relate to you. Hootsuite Save your time and your sanity. Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard. Show off your social media success. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics all without leaving the dashboard. There is a free and a monthly subscription paid version. 22 hot new social media tools worth exploring Social media tools seem to be cropping up all the time, so here’s a list of 22 to keep you going.
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Product Creation Word and PowerPoint Templates Dreamtemplate Excellent templates for PowerPoint and Word, as well as websites, and printed brochures. I’ve created a lot of free reports and eGuides based on these templates. (Including this ebook ) Microsoft Office Templates A comprehensive list of templates to help you finish a new document quickly. There's flyers, marketing letters, expenses forms and more. Video Training Pocket Video Power Created by professional UK TV Director, Jules Watkins, you can benefit from his years of experience as a video director and create stunning videos just with one or two pocket video cameras like the Flip, the iPhone or the Zi8. Did you know you could use two helium balloons as a hoist to do aerial video shots on the cheap? Neither did I until Jules shared his tricks of the trade Great stuff. Mind Mapping Mindjet MindManager A fantastic tool for simplifying product creation, and for recording all the ideas buzzing round in your head. You might have created “spider diagrams” or “bubble diagrams” in the past, sketching out ideas on paper. The great thing about MindManager is you can play around with the ideas as bubble diagrams, move them and change them, then export your final version to Word or PowerPoint as a readymade outline you or your outsourcer can expand upon. This product has saved me days and days of time. I create all my products with this.
P a g e | 17 Document Formatting Wordzworth If you spend ages mucking about trying to format your ebooks properly, Wordzworth can help you. Just upload your document and they will format it consistently and make it look really professional. Not the cheapest, compared with fiverr, but very reliable and very quick and giving your ebook a professional look. Just upload your rough version and they will style it. Note: They don’t do proofreading and editing – just formatting. Document Editing The Document Doctor If you need someone to tidy up the content you have written and proof-read along the way, the document doctor can help. I have used them for reviewing reports and workbooks to make sure the language is clear, concise and compelling. Proof-reading Scribendi.com Proof-reading your own content is time consuming and fraught with problems because you’re over familiar with the content. Make it easier by uploading your content to scribendi. They also help with minor grammar changes too. You can get your information back within 6 hours with the premium service, or within 1-7 days for the cheaper options Audio Editing Software Audacity Free software for editing audio files, and adding intro music, to give your audio products a very professional sound. Skype Call Recording MP3 Skype Recorder Records Skype calls and stores them as MP3. It’s a free tool.
P a g e | 18 Royalty Free and Affordable Music Resources Partners in Rhyme Incompetech.com Wavtracks Don’t get your YouTube videos pulled because you used copyrighted material – use music you can use commercially, with confidence. The wavtracks box set at $99AUD is great value and saves a lot of time hunting down public-domain sources. Video Music Stockmusicsite Great for intros and outros (stingers), and background music. Window Resizing Tool Sizer A window resizing tool so you can make your windows exactly the same time each and every time you open them, so your videos recording your screen are consistent (and fit perfectly without leaving black bars on your uploaded clips)
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Tutorials and Training W3C Schools If you're keen to know what goes on "underneath the hood" of your website, this is a great free resource for learning about coding. Web Pages That Suck If you're keen to know what goes on "underneath the hood" of your website, this is a great free resource for learning about coding. Chris Farrell Internet Marketing Training Chris Farrell's membership website is a fantastic resource for learning more about how to make money online. His site has won awards for being a great place to learn. He’s a straight-forwards guy who makes it easy to understand the fundamentals. Niche Profit Classroom The powerful combination of quality training, "done for you" resources, and personal coaching is what sets NPC apart from any other program or 'system' out there. Great quality products and plenty of training make it easy to get your online business started. Much cheaper than paying for 1-2-1 coaching.
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Productivity Firefox’s Most Popular Add-Ons Firefox add-ons can really boost your time spent surfing. From blocking popups, to making Amazon easier to browse, there is a wide range of add-ons to suit your preferences. Google Chrome Extensions Googles’ most popular extensions for its superquick Chrome browser. Evernote The goal at Evernote is to give everyone the ability to easily capture any moment, idea, inspiration, or experience whenever they want using their smartphone or a PC, whatever’s most convenient, then to make all of that information easy to find. From creating text and ink notes, to snapshots of whiteboards and wine labels, to clips of webpages, Evernote users can capture anything from their real and digital lives and find it all anytime. Great when you’re doing web research! (Note: there’s an iPhone app for this too) Basecamp Basecamp is an online Project management tool. Over 5 million people worldwide have used Basecamp to collaborate on over 4 million projects, track 57 million hours of work, share 46 million files, and complete 43 million to-dos. How will you use Basecamp? I use it for working with my outsourcers and also when I am creating an information product with clients/friends. It comes with an iphone app, so if you want to login with just your phone – that’s cool. You can work on the move without being weighed down with your computer.
P a g e | 21 Log Me In In a matter of minutes you can get fast, easy and secure access to remote computers (PCs and Macs) with LogMeIn. Simply install LogMeIn on the computer you want to access to gain remote control of its desktop, files, applications and network resources over the web through your browser. You can also access your PC with your smartphone with a paid app. There is a free version of the software, its hidden a little bit but it is there. (Note: I used this tool as I wrote my first ebook so I could remote control onto my PC at home - when I was sat at my desk at work, supposedly doing something work related. As it was normal for me to be working on a Word document, no-one realized I was shirking . Tim Ferriss would be so proud!) iGoogle I signed in and created a Google account a few years back and made it my homepage. I added key links to my online business tools using the Google bookmarks tool. Wherever I logged in in the world, I could access key information, without having to remember URLs. One of the best free tools I have ever used. Passpack Need to share passwords with someone, or provision passwords across your company? Say Hello to Secure Sharing. With Passpack you can share one (or batches!) of passwords with single people or with entire groups. Combine that with fully integrated transfer of ownership, and password management starts looking a bit more manageable. The freebie account lets you store 100 passwords Roboform Roboform makes it easy to login to your favorite websites and applications. RoboForm makes the process effortless by automatically saving, then entering your usernames and passwords. No more illegible bits of paper and post-its with logins scribbled down. Simply click and login-similar to a browser bookmark! You'll never need to remember or type another password again. It also generates passwords that are very difficult to guess – and then remembers them for you securely.
P a g e | 22 DropBox If you need to email someone, and you’re wondering just how you’re going to manage it – set up a free account with DropBox and share a file upto 2Gb in size with others – just invite them to your dropbox and they can quickly download the file There’s a desktop client that comes with it too. I tend to just login and use the online one.
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Graphics 3d Covers Easy Cover Action Script If you’ve got Photoshop and you can design your covers yourself, with a click of a button, you can turn your 2D design into a 3D design, creating books, magazines, boxes, membership cards and more. Note: If you haven’t got Photoshop, you’ll need a different answer (see below) eCover Go This is an online tool. Just upload your flat graphic of your book cover, choose a 3d view you like, press a button and your 3D product shot is ready for download. There are all the usual things like boxes, booklets, DVDs and more. Web Graphics Web 2.0 Graphics A superb collection of Web 2.0 graphics, that can help get your site looking up to date. These easily recognizable, clean and simple buttons and icons will help improve your conversions too. Easy Banner Maker Use this banner advert tool to create any graphics you need to promote your products and services you’re selling or events you’re running . You need Photoshop to use this tool. If you need banners on the cheap, take a look at fiverr.com Logo Inn A very quick and easy logo design service. They can also help with websites and brochures 99 Designs A different way of coming up with design options – set up a design brief and run a contest. The best thing to do is have a look at the site. If you’re looking for things like logos, you can get *hundreds* for a bigger budget of couple of hundreds bucks.
P a g e | 24 Dreamstime Stock Photos A wide range of affordable premium stock photos. Perfect for commercial use. I use them for my presentation slides. Stock.XCHNG An alternative to expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. The site has evolved into the massive community you see today — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos online. 1001 Free Fonts If you need to create a fresh look for your fonts, or try to identify one, there’s plenty to download for free at this font website Clipart.com Need a cool sketch or illustration, you can find plenty here. When you become a member, you can download 250 images a WEEK Icon Finder If you need an icon to brighten up your website, maybe some social media buttons to encourage people to connect with you – you can find heaps of them here quickly. Gimp A weird name for a great free graphics tool (that could put you off initially). Don’t be fooled. If you need to edit some graphics, maybe a quick resize and add some text, this is great. It’s a bit like “PhotoshopLite”. It will open Photoshop files (although it sometimes can’t support all the layer styles). Great for a free tool. I’ve used it for about 10 years, even though I’ve got Photoshop on one of my main computers, it’s that good I put it on all of them . Picassa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your photos look great. It makes it easy to share pictures with friends and family. It also created video montages and photo collages quite easily.
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Webmaster Tools Google Webmaster Tools An excellent resource for finding out problems with your website. Google analyses what’s wrong with your website and how to improve it. Better still, it’s free. Google Analytics The place to get google’s free tracking script to give you information on how your website is performing – where your visitors come from, what they look at and how long they stay. Bing Webmaster Tools Use the Bing™ Webmaster tools to improve your site's SEO, submit your sites and XML-based Sitemaps to Bing, get data on which pages of your site have been indexed, backlinks, inbound links and keyword performance. BLT-Web Heaps of really useful website tools, like broken link checkers, screen resolution checkers and more. iWebTools Another collection of great website tools to check out how your site’s performing and highlight any problems Dynamic Drive A great place to get dynamic scripts to add to your site, such as calenders, scrolling text boxes and more SEOChat A site packed with tips and ideas if you want to have a go at doing your own SEO
P a g e | 26 Alexa Free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for websites. Find out more about the type of people who visit successful websites in your niche. Quantcast Similar to Alexa, review the demographics for a wide range of popular websites to gain insights into where your customers are to be found online Google Places A great way to get free traffic for you business. If you’re not sure what a google places page is, or how to set it up, Google have provided a great tutorial. At the end of the tutorial you can set up your own page.
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Video Creation and Editing Screen Recording Video Software Camtasia The ultimate product for creating screen-based video products. There’s a free 30 day evaluation, so you can always create your product in advance, then do the recording during the trial period. You can also do your editing in Camtasia. Camstudio A free tool similar to Camstudio, but without the picture in picture facility (at least I can’t find it if it is in there ). Great for trying out screen recording and seeing if it’s for you (and your customers!) Image Mage Create high-quality 3d animations to give your videos a professional look, at an affordable cost, without having to refer to creative designers. Animoto Turn your photos, video clips, and music into video masterpieces to share with everyone. Fast, free and shockingly easy. Video Editing Software Sony Movie Studio (Sony Vegas) Affordable, good quality video editing software, with the ability to create DVDs or Blu-Ray disks too. Jing Take a picture or make a short video of what you see on your computer monitor, do a voiceover and then share it instantly via web, email, IM, Twitter or your blog.
P a g e | 28  xtranormal This is heaps of fun, I love this app. You can create 3D animated cartoons where the characters can speak your script. They can dance, wave, sigh, run and as well as chat. You see lots of these animations on YouTube (especially about Graphic Designers for some reason‌)
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Video Players Video players are great for hosting your own video files. Of course, it’s ok to use free hosting sites like YouTube, but if your channel gets closed down because a competitor complains about you (it happens more than you might think!), or if you want to do videos for longer that 15 minutes, you’re going to need another solution. Easy Video Player 2.0 Not only a way to add video to play on your site, but some great marketing features too, like adding buy buttons to your video, replacing the space where your video was with your newsletter optin, split-testing conversion rates with different videos and more. EzS3 Use eZs3 to put video on your webpage in 3 simple steps:Step 1 - upload your media to your own Amazon S3 account Step 2 - create your a player with eZs3's great player features Step 3 - paste the embed code and your video is on your webpage And that's it! EzS3 also has the ability to customize your player with buy buttons and optins etc.
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Kit and Gadgets Microphones Audio Technica ATR3350 (ATR-3350) Lavalier (Tie Clip) A great microphone to use with the Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera. It has a very long cable, making it really easy to position the camera a little further away, so viewers can see more of your surroundings when doing some video, not just the normal headshot. It’s great for cutting down on background noise too. Logitech Premium Notebook Headset Microphone This is great for recording Skype calls and also for doing Camtasia voiceovers. It’s easy to keep your voice at a constant volume, even when you move your head, so it’s less distracting to use over longer periods of time. Samson C01u Studio Condenser Mic This is a great quality mic at a mid-range price, perfect for podcasting and video voice overs. Blue Snowball Another mic that’s great for podcasting. Video Lighting PhotoSel Continuous Lighting Portable Studio Two lightweight, good quality beginners lighting units. Give your videos a very professional look with great lighting. I’ve used this on all my big video projects. Just be careful with the bulbs, they are quite delicate. Portable LED Video Lighting LED lighting is not as bright as the PhotoSel lights above, but they are much less fragile and can run off batteries, so better for shooting further away from a power socket on a wall.
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Creating Physical Products Lulu Create printed books, calendars, CDs and DVDs on demand. You can also sell your products via Amazon, which is great for boosting your credibility. They handle the manufacture and the shipping Kunaki Upload your CD or DVD disk images to Kunaki and they will create and send your information products worldwide. It costs just $1 to duplicate the DVD, so it’s a very easy, affordable way to move into physical product production.
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Hosting Hostgator Super popular, flexible, reliable website hosting. Great if you've got 1 website or hundreds. A lot of my business partners and coaching students use this company. Justhost You got a free domain and you can park unlimited domains on there too. I get great service. It's hassle-free hosting. What's more, if a problem crops up, it gets resolved within an hour. There's also marketing bonuses like free google vouchers iPage Another great value hosting package with a free domain for life and no limits to your account bandwidth. Look out for the freebies, there's a lot of them when you sign up. Fat Cow Another great value hosting package with a free domain for life and no limits to your account bandwidth. Look out for the freebies, there's a lot of them when you sign up.
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Outsourcing oDesk Access to highly skilled people all over the world, ready to help you with your websites, social media, your information products and more. Your assistants have regular screenshots taken as they work, so you can see how they are progressing. Elance Another service like oDesk, but without the screenshot monitoring. 123Employee if you need regular help, rather than ad hoc project help, you can get 123employee to interview and manage skilled Philippine people to help you with admin, marketing, website publishing, writing and more. You can have 10-40 hours of help a week, depending on your workload. Fiverr A website where a very talented group of people offer their skills for just $5. You can get real bargains here. I’ve used them for writing, logos, blog headers, video, SEO and more.
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Autoresponders MailChimp What I love most about this is their “Free Forever” plan – where you can have upto 2,000 subscribers on your list for free – ideal when you’re starting out. Store up to 2,000 subscribers. Send up to 12,000 emails per month. No expiring trials. No contracts. No credit card required. Result! Aweber Inbuilt templates, lots of tracking, integration with social media and your blog, plus good delivery rates makes Aweber a good choice. Get Response The best thing about GetResponse is the GetSubscribers feature. GetSubscribers is a "pay per lead" or "pay per subscriber" service that rapidly builds opt-in lists for GetResponse customers at a reasonable cost. This service automatically funnels high-quality leads to your campaign, powering the growth of your Internet business! Much quicker than driving traffic to a squeeze page. For months…. 1 Shopping Cart I was wondering where to put this . 1 Shopping Cart combines an autoresponder service with its shopping cart service, so you can do two things at once with your monthly subscription – handy when you’re starting out and you want your own affiliate program too. Infusionsoft Eyewateringly expensive compared with the others, but great for intergration with things like webinar signups, move customers from 1 list to another really easily, make use of a full shopping cart as well! Use this when you’ve made you first $10,000 as you relax on the beach
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Afterword Thanks for downloading my Web eGuide. I’d love to know how to make it better. You can let me know with this quick online survey – it’s just 2 questions Thanks!
Note: I have listed lots of free resources and paid resources in this guide. It’s taken me a while to find and test out these resources so, for some of the paid products I have listed I’ve added an affiliate links so I earn a commission if you choose to get a copy of your own. Hope that’s OK with you - I’ve done the hard work and saved you some research time, so you don’t have to Gotta keep the FTC and the ASA happy, right, yeah? ©Colette Mason 2011 Version 1.0