The following are resources I recommend to other webmasters and web designers, when the need for such tool arises. Most of these are tools which I use myself.
Email Marketing and Subscription Services
See this page on email marketing for full information.
SEO and Traffic Generation
- Article Submission Service: SubmitYOURArticle.com – Article syndication service, excellent for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
- Comment Kahuna – This is a free tool which will help you quickly find blogs related to yours so that you can leave relative and insightful comments on them. The links you leave in your comments will help you get traffic to your own blog and will encourage others to comment on your blog as well.
- SEO Elite – This software is used to analyze your own websites or websites of your competition, to see what you are doing right and wrong in your Search Engine Optimization tactics. It also allows you to quickly find good potentials for link exchanges (websites with whom it would be valuable to exchange links).
- Web2Mayhem – I have found this to be an excellent tool for SEO and traffic generation. It merits a whole page of its own, so if you would like more information, please visit their site and/or sign up for their mailing list.
- Social Media Science and SYNDD – This is a recent addition to my list of favorites and is one of the best SEO and traffic generation tools I’ve tried. Have you ever imagined being able to spend 90% of your time building and improving your content, blogs, and websites – and only 10% of your time doing all of your offsite promotion and SEO? I highly recommend you download the free eBook which you can get from this page: Visit the Social Media Science Website Here.
- Squidoo – This is a giant and incredibly popular website where you can create your own webpages for free, make friends with other people of similar interests, drive traffic to your own site, and make some money as well. It is free to join, very easy to use, and can be a lot of fun.
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Website Design and Creation
- StoreStacker – Allows you to create an entire store full of the products of your choice from Amazon, eBay, Clickbank, and other eCommerce sites. You can choose your categories and layout and fill up your store with hundreds of products (you will receive a commission whenever a site visitor buys from your store). The store can be set up to pull in RSS Feeds from other sites, as well as related videos from YouTube, and it can be set up to update itself automatically. Software and travel-related products can also be sold, with more options being added as time goes on.
- Web Media Toolkit – For one low price this package gives you an enormous library of stock photos, music, sound effects, and more which you can use on your websites. At the time of this writing it costs $47 and includes:
- 4719 Stock Photos
- 7048 Clip-art Images
- 1,500 Classic Pen and Ink Illustrations
- 1,200 Web-ready Business icons
- 7,387 Designer Fonts
- 75 Royalty-Free Music Tracks
- 101 Podcast Intros and Outros
- 2,500 Professional Sound EffectsTotal: 24,530 Web Media Elements.
- Coffee Cup Easy Website Builder – A very inexpensive and easy to use website builder and html editor. I use this to format my own content with proper html code before I insert it into my blogs, Squidoo pages, etc. You can also use Coffee Cup to build entire websites. It is probably the best website building software besides Dreamweaver, but it costs under $50 at the time of this writing, and there are free versions as well.
- Dreamweaver Creative Suite 3. Design, develop, and maintain standard-based websites – If you are going to get serious about building websites, this is a must – but it is also pricey.
Web Hosting
- Host Gator – Web Hosting – This is my #1 Recommendation. The best web host there is, in my opinion. I tried four web hosts! With Host Gator – Web Hosting I have not only had almost zero technical problems, but their customer support is the best of any company I have ever dealt with. They are extremely fast and routinely go above and beyond what they are required to do, in order to help you resolve any difficulties or issues you might encounter.
- Blue Host Webhosting – This is my #2 Recommendation. Bluehost also has a very good reputation but I still found Hostgator to be superior in speed and quality of customer support and service.
Keyword Research
- Google Keyword Tool – A free but authoritative and reliable source of keyword research and information.
- Keyword Elite – This tool works in conjunction with online keyword research websites (such as Wordtracker, Google, or other free and paid services). It allows you to zero in quickly on the best keywords for your website, or to help you find the right market or niche to get started in. The tool can compare hundreds or thousands of related keywords and help you find the best ones. You can also use this tool to generate huge lists of keywords with related data as to searches versus competition, average monetary value of different keywords, etc. With this tool you can spend fifteen minutes doing work which would normally take you a week full-time.
- Word Tracker Free Keyword Tool and the Word Tracker Free Trial – One of the best keyword research websites online. There is a free version, and there is also a paid version which gives the best and most accurate results.
- Keyword Discovery – Another very popular keyword research tool with free and paid options.
General Resources
- Free Business Cards
- CoffeeCup Software
- Free Return Address Labels from VistaPrint.com. Click here.
