Business Tools We Use Every Day

One of the aims you must have as an online business owner is to use certain tools to make your business more successful. The big problem most people have, however, is knowing which tools are the best to achieve that!

You see, there are hundreds and thousands of tools available, and it’s confusing when you’re starting out to know what’s right for you, or what’s just going to burn a hole in your pocket and empty your bank account.

We’ve been there and done that, so we’ve filtered our list down to what we think are the best tools available today. We wouldn’t suggest something to you if we didn’t use it ourselves, and these are tools we personally use every day to streamline our online business.

All Online Businesses MUST Have this.

Anyone who’s serious about the success of their online business MUST have their own website. It presents you as a professional, helps you build brand awareness, acts as a central point for people to find you, and, unlike Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and LinkedIn, nobody can shut you down!

There’s two parts to getting a website. First of all buying your domain name or URL. To get cheap .com domains we use GoDaddy. They’ve got great customer service: we’ve got about 70 domains with them (we do a lot of affiliate marketing!) and their support is excellent, plus they do discounts for multiple domain purchases.

 

 

If you’re in the UK and want a .co.uk domain, then NameCheap is your best option. They’re much cheaper than GoDaddy for .co.uk domains.

 

 

The second part of having a website is finding somewhere to host it, or store the files that make up the website. We’ve used Hostgator for several years without any hassle. If you do have a problem, they’ve got live chat so you can get immediate answers, their hosting is incredibly cheap, and you can access cpanel (the techie bit you need for WordPress).

You also get to host unlimited sites with them for the same low fee, so if (or when) you get into affiliate marketing, Hostgator are very cost effective for website hosting.

 

The Most Valuable Asset in Your Online Business

We’ve said it many times before, but the most essential asset you can have in your business is a list of subscribers, or an email list. Having an email list is THE number one way of building a trusting, lasting relationship with your clients.

Think about it. You REALLY MUST have a way of capturing visitor details when they land on your website, as they’re probably only going to visit your site once and you’ll never see them again. What’s worse is that most people don’t buy something the first time they see it. They need to think about it first, of course. It takes on average 5 to 7 times of contacting a customer before they’ll actually buy, so having a list where you can repeatedly contact them and add value is vital.

Luckily it doesn’t cost a fortune. In fact you can start building a list using a tool called an autoresponder, for only $1 for the first month. We use Aweber for our email autoresponder service. They’re the industry leader and by far the most popular and best value for money.

 

 

If you want in depth training on how to use your autoresponder, plus loads more online business training, then click here.

Make Your Life a Whole Lot Easier by Finding Profitable Keywords.

Market Samurai is a software tool that streamlines your search engine marketing. You need to discover profitable keywords to enable your site to rank in search engines, and Market Samurai hands you that market intelligence on a plate.

It saves you massive amounts of time, by allowing you to focus on the keywords that will drive traffic to your site, instead of wasting time searching for ones that don’t.

It works step by step so you know at each stage of your keyword research exactly what to do next. It’s decision making data gives you results that are targeted to your market.

Market Samurai helps you achieve those critical marketing tasks faster and more efficiently than ever before, so you can achieve the results you need.

Here’s just some of what it tells you:

• How to target keywords to beat the competition in your market
• How to uncover the gold-nugget keywords that can send hundreds of visitors to your website every day
• How to find the keywords the real buyers in your market are using
• Which keywords to avoid
• Your chances of ranking on page one of Google for a particular keyword
• Which markets you should avoid
• Which markets you should target
• The topics you should write articles for in your market
• And so much more

What’s even better is their keyword training is some of the most comprehensive we’ve seen in the industry.

Don’t waste any more time struggling to get traffic the hard way…

 

 

How To Put Your Passwords on Speed Dial

Honestly, if you’ve got a limited budget, but you need a tool that will save you hours of time each and every day, then we’ve got the answer.

When you run an online business, you inevitably end up with dozens, if not hundreds of logins for sites you’ve signed up for.

Most people store their usernames and passwords in a notebook, but that soon gets out of hand, and you waste precious time trying to find the one password you forgot to put in your book! Do you associate with that?

Luckily, as with most things online there’s a simple solution. Roboform is a great little software that allows you to have one password to log in to all the sites you’ve signed up for. It’s very secure,  and you only need one master password to log in to Roboform to access ALL of your passwords.

But it gets even better . . .

Once you’re logged in to Roboform  (and you only have to do it once or twice during the day) you just need to click the website you want and you get logged in automatically!

Believe us when we say it  literally can save you hours every week. It’s also great for storing stuff like Bank Account details, Product Licence Keys and so on.

Security is not an issue as it uses some of the strongest encryption available.

Just when you think that sounds totally awesome, it gets even better. Roboform Everywhere means you can log into your Roboform account from ANY computer ANYWHERE in the world allowing you to access your data securely from anywhere – talk about Living a Laptop Lifestyle!

There’s more features than we’ve mentioned here, so try it out with a free trial here:

 

Nobody Ever Does This Until It’s Too Late

It’s probably the most unexciting, unsexy thing about running an online business, yet it’s one of the most essential. The thing nobody ever does it until it’s too late!

What are we talking about?

Backups!

We can’t stress how important it is to back up your stuff. That includes documents, photos, music files, in fact anything you can store on a computer. Because once it’s gone, there’s no way of getting it back again!

What if . . . your hard disk crashes and you lose the valuable document you’ve been working on all day! Or have you ever overwritten an important file with the wrong information, and had no way of recovering it? We’ve done that many a time.

You’ll be doing yourself a big favour if you get a backup tool like Goodsync. It’s dirt cheap, and it’s simple to use, plus you can back up your files wherever you want. That includes another hard drive, another computer, to somewhere like Dropbox, Amazon S3 or FTP.

That means not only do you have a backup of your files, they can be stored offsite which is a huge advantage for keeping your precious data as safe as possible.

You can also auto schedule back ups, so you only need to set up your backups once and don’t need to think about it again, it just quietly runs in the background.

 

Backup Your Blog at the Push of a Button

So Goodsync is awesome for backing up data on your computer, but what about backing up your website? Well, if you’re like most online businesses, no doubt you’ll be using WordPress for your website as it’s the easiest and most powerful website software available.

There’s a great piece of software called WPTwin, that allows you to backup your WordPress website at the click of a button.

There are free back up plugins for WordPress but they only backup the database. That means only your blog posts and pages.

That leaves a big problem however. If your website gets hacked, or if you install a plugin that corrupts your site, then you lose all your layout, all your plugins, pretty well everything that makes up your website aside from the content.

We use WPTwin EVERY day. It does the lot – backs up our database and layout, in fact, our whole website. So reinstalling or restoring it is simple.

We’d also recommend that you restore your backups on another website (or maybe be a subdomain of your website), just to make sure the re-install works. But, we’ve never had any problems with our backups using WPTwin. Click a button and they’re cloned, click another button and they’re recreated. (There’s a little bit more to it than that, but you can learn it all in a 5 minute video when you purchase it):

 

Screen Capture On Steroids

Snagit is a brilliant little tool. Another one click piece of software that allows you to take screen shots of your computer screen. What’s great about it is you can just copy a part of your screen, a particular window, or even a whole webpage, including the bits you have to scroll down to see! You can even save an entire webpage as a pdf file, complete with all the links.

It’s got a pretty cool editor in it, where you can add annotations, create funky edges around the image, add talk bubbles and so on.

It saves a load of time if you’re doing powerpoint presentations or if you want to copy an image from somewhere to put on your blog. You don’t even need to load it. You can just do the normal print screen on your keyboard (ctrl+PrintScr or whatever it is on your computer) and up pops Snagit to let you do all the stuff above.

Getting Your Website to #1 On Google

 

If you can get your website to rank on page 1 of Google for your chosen keywords, you are going to get a tonne of traffic! There’s many ways you can do that, but you might’ve noticed we like things as automated as possible.

That’s where SEO Pressor comes in. To get a website ranked on page one of Google, two things are needed.

Firstly off page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). That includes things like backlinks, keywords in domain names and so on.

But the other vital part of the equation is on page SEO. So when you’ve found the keywords you want to rank for using Market Samurai, you need to optimise each blog post for on page SEO. That means using the right number of keywords (not too many), optimising your images, using H1, H2 and H3 tags correctly, and a whole pile of stuff that is quite techie in nature!

But SEO Pressor does it all for you. What it does is go through your blogpost automatically and come up with a checklist of things you need to change. You make the changes and it ticks them off when they’re right, making your page super optimised for ranking on Google and hopefully reaching that coveted #1 position on Google.

70,000+ WordPress website already use it, so don’t wait any longer!

Tweeting on Autopilot

Twitter is outstanding as a marketing tool, but the big disadvantage with Twitter is you need thousands of followers to make any impression. Twitter is all about numbers, but how tedious would it be if you had to sit there follow hundreds of people every day to build up your list of friends?

Tweet Adder does it for you automatically. You find a list of people you want as followers, say how many followers a day you want, then click just a few buttons and it does the work for you, running in the background on autopilot.

You can also send out automated messages, which is a great way to stay in touch with your friends. Just load up a list of messages directing people to your blog posts, videos on YouTube, your latest articles and so on, and then TweetAdder sends them out for you automatically.

Tweet Adder saves you hours of time as who’s got the time to sit there all day managing Twitter

 

 

This great piece of software continuously pops up subliminal messages on your computer screen. It can help you reprogram your inner subconscious mind helping you achieve your goals and desires and is used by over 1 million people worldwide. Find out more here

Compensation Disclaimer

We recommend products or services  that we use in our online business which are provided by other businesses. Most of the time we’ve used our affiliate links above so will receive compensation if the products or services are sold. Note that the price charged by the vendor is the same, whether purchased via our affiliate link, or whether purchased direct from the vendor’s own website.

Products and Services that we own will be clearly marked as our own products. Please assume in most cases, that for any other products or services, we will receive some sort of compensation if you purchase through our link.

We don’t make recommendations for products we don’t use or believe in ourselves. We do greatly appreciate any purchases you make based on our recommendations and through our affiliate links and banners. This helps us continue to provide free content to you on our blog and through other means.

For full details please view our compensation disclosure

Thank you.