The lists below are the services and online products we use to run and grow our businesses online.
Market Research
Research in the most important part of ANY business – luckily it is easy to research online. The following tools will help you make the right decisions about your business online.
Market Samurai – The is the best tool available for market research. The software sits on your desktop and was created by a very clever team in Melbourne, Australia. They provide really good video training and the software is updated regularly: Market Samurai Software
SEO Quake – a great tool bar to add to your web browser that you can then use to look at any website to see how its put together (learn from your competitors & see how your site stacks up): http://www.seoquake.com/
SEO Quake guide – This is a guide to SEO Quake: http://www.seoquake.com/guide.php
Website Basics
Domain name – There are thousands of places to get your domain name from, and most of them are similar. However they are not similar in price, so in order to find the cheapest at any one time we do a Google search for cheap domains. For the last 12 months Crazy Domains have offerred the cheapest rates: http://www.crazydomains.com.au/
Hosting – We use hostgator almost exclusively – they have some of the cheapest rates & offer 24 service. The Baby plan suits most people and allows you to add more domain names in the future if you want – its basically unlimited everything: Hostgator
Premium WordPress Templates – We use wordpress as the basis for all our website now.. The basic software is open source and free, however in order for our websites to have that something special and to have some outstanding extra functionality we use premium templates for most of our website. Most of our templates are sourced from the following sites: Elegant Themes and Woo Themes
On Page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Basic HTML Guide – http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
WordPress Website Software – http://wordpress.org/
Basic Guide To Search Engine Optimisation – http://www.work.com/learning-search-engine-optimization-1053/
Advanced on page SEO concepts
Keyword Density – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
Latent Semantic Indexing – http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml
Siloing – http://www.searchengineguide.com/bradley-leese/building-a-web-site-theme-with-silos-par.php
Off Page SEO – Linking Strategies using social media
Facebook Pages – http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages
Twitter – http://twitter.com/
Twitter for Business – http://twitter.com/Twitter101
Delicious – http://www.delicious.com/
Hub Pages – http://hubpages.com/
Squidoo – http://www.squidoo.com/
DMOZ – http://www.dmoz.org/
Yahoo Directory – http://dir.yahoo.com/
Ezine Articles – http://ezinearticles.com/
Go Articles – http://goarticles.com/
Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
Technorati – http://technorati.com/
Ping-o-matic – http://pingomatic.com/
Google Reader – http://www.google.com/reader
Posterous – https://posterous.com/
Yahoo Pipes – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Outsourcing sites – Online Jobs: http://www.onlinejobs.ph/, Elance: http://www.elance.com/, Best Jobs:http://bestjobs.ph/, V Worker: http://www.vworker.com/, O Desk: http://www.odesk.com/
Keyword use on websites to optimise results
Keyword Density – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
Latent Semantic Indexing – http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml
Siloing – http://www.searchengineguide.com/bradley-leese/building-a-web-site-theme-with-silos-par.php
Tags & how to use them effectively
Fun Tag Cloud – http://www.wordle.net/
Plugs in/add ons SEO (on website & as research tools)
SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URL – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_engine
All in One SEO Pack (wordpress) – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Google Analytics – www.Google.com.au/Analytics
Google Analytics plugin (wordpress) – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/?hl=en
Fire Bug Plug-in (Firefox) – http://getfirebug.com/
Communicating with your customers (& potential customers)
Facebook Pages: http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages
Autoresponders – Autoresponders are basically email on steroids. Emails are still the most efficient way to talk with your customers. You can great a series of emails to be sent to your clients and sned them bulk updates, for sales etc. The two autoresponders we use are: Aweber – which has been around for a very long time and established its self as a leader in the market, and Mailchimp – the new kid on the block, but it offers free options. We use both.
Copywriting courses – We’ve met John Carlton a few times and he really knows what he is talking about when it comes to copywriting, however we have not bought his Simple Copywriting System. We do know a number of people how have and they love it : http://www.simplewritingsystem.com/
Our Favourite Podcasts
Trouble with Freedom – This is a great podcast by two ladies who are working online and sharing the ups and downs of doing so – its very conversational: http://www.troublewithfreedom.com/
Preneur Cast – Pete Williams and Dom Goucher share all their wisdom about online marketing, you will be guaranteed to get lots of “a ha” moments listening to these two: http://www.preneurmarketing.com/petes-businesses/preneurcast-transcriptions/
Freedom Ocean – James Schramko has made a ton of money online and is generally considered to be one of the good guys. Tim Reid, a successful real world marketer in his own right, grills James with loads of questions each week in order to work out just how you can work successfully online. Listening to the podcast from the beginning is a great idea for anyone wanting to get started online or who just wants to get their own business online: http://www.freedomocean.com/
Dominiche – This Podcast by Ed Dale and Danny Batelic is about how you can buy and sell websites – yes websites are not really any different from property. Its about more that just buying and selling website – it would be more accurate to say it is about buying and selling full stop! After all many of the principles are the same, no matter what you are buying or selling. Ed has also been a mentor of ours for longer than we can remember and in our eyes he is the original ‘good guy’ online : http://www.podcastswithed.com/page/2
Other things
Self Publishing (print on demand): http://www.lulu.com/
Awesome Online Marketing Course (free) – http://challenge.co/training/
Please note that some of the links above may be affiliate links (i.e. we get a small commission if you purchase), However you won’t find any thing here that we don’t use ourselves, we would never recommend any thing we haven’t used ourselves!