One of the biggest stumbling blocks I see for people aspiring to making a full time income online through their blogs, their list, their products and their affiliate promotions is the choices they make in the allocation of their resources.
Let me explain what I mean.
The two main resources that will come at a cost to you in building an online business is:
With that identified, an Internet Marketer is always making a decision which essentially boils down to the following question:
Should I pay for this with my money or with my time?
If you’re not paying for something with your money, then you’re likely to be paying for it with your time! Of course, if you’re paying for something with your money, then the chances are you will not be paying with your time.
This is often a major mindset shift for Internet Marketers, especially in today’s murky market overridden with trashy products trying to make a fast buck off the back of the unsuspecting aspiring online marketer looking to change their life.
I have made a few bad investments in my time, but largely done a good job of weighing up which Internet Marketing tools are going to get me from where I am now to where I want to be.
You may have even bought into the ideology of “you don’t need to invest any money to make money online.” Whilst it is true that you can make money online without spending anything, to bring in a substantial amount of income will require an investment, in terms of both time and your capital.
The good news is that the level of investment required is disproportionately below the amount required for traditional offline businesses.
I own every one of these tools (and quite a few more besides which I won’t be recommending), use them on a regular basis and quite honestly would find it very difficult to achieve at the same level I currently do without them.
This guide is intended to be extensive and very comprehensive to help you make decisions on what the best Internet Marketing tools are available for both development of your mindset and tools to help you save time, be more productive and get more from your efforts.
It’s a fluid list as my business grows and I get new and/or different tools so I will be revising this list as time goes by.
On a final note, some of these tools are my affiliate links giving me monetary compensation should you decide to make a purchase. Others are simply links to other valuable resources which are completely free, which of course I will not make a penny.
This is one of the ways I can support this blog but I don’t think I’ll be putting an order in for the luxury yacht just yet. :)
If you need any personalised assistance in making an investment decision because you’re trying to achieve something very specific, please do connect and contact me through Facebook private messages and we can arrange to chat on Skype. :)
Best Internet Marketing Tools to Develop Mindset
I could write about ten posts on tools to develop your mindset since I’ve read over 160 books in the last 3 years, listened to almost 2,000 hours of audio education, been to about 30ish seminars and I’ve lost count of the number of eBooks, eCourses, web videos and Webinars.
Anyway, here are the resources that stand out as memorable “mindset shifters” for me.
When I was finding my feet as an entrepreneur and investigating which path I should take to create wealth, one of the best decisions I ever made was to take the Wealth Dynamics entrepreneurial profiling test.
It revealed that:
- I must concentrate on building products and systems
- Leverage my value through multiplication strategies
- I must focus on creating value rather than locating value
- I must create my wealth through being an entrepreneur as opposed to an investor. They require a totally different thinking dynamic.
If you had challenges grasping the context of that list, it’s because the language is specific to Wealth Dynamics.
From the outside, it initially seemed very expensive at $100, however I was able to see the value in not wasting lots of precious time and money chasing other ‘opportunities’ to decide which avenue I wanted to pursue. Property investing? Network marketing? Franchise? Affiliate Marketing? Product Creation? Blogging? Social Media?
There’s no sense starting in network marketing only to find that is not your forté and having to start all over again. This test puts and end to the guesswork!
A great audio product which you can listen to in your car or on your iPod to condition your mind for success.
As a result of implementing what you learn, you can do nothing else except move forward towards your goals. Starting with this one programme will make you hungry to consume every Tony Robbins product on the market.
I may be a slightly freakish example, but I’ve listened to all of Tony’s audio programmes at least 4-5 times.
Yes, if you look this up in the George Zalucki store, it is $149 (at least as at today – 12th June 2011). In my opinion, it’s worth every penny.
Again, I’ve listened to it about 4-5 times. He has a very direct hard hitting kick ass style and his objective is to bring you to true empowerment and responsibility for everything in your life.
I think I’ll be getting it out again shortly for more deep level conditioning and rocket fuel up my proverbial.
Sadly, there’s no affiliate programme for this one, so I won’t be making a commission on this recommendation.
Andy’s product is relatively new in the already well-established personal development world, but his two books about clearing your mind of clutter and literally installing beautiful mental software are totally lifechanging and game changers within the personal development industry.
Written versions and audio versions of the books are both available to buy, so you can pick either or do what I did and get both.
A seminar to change the way you view money and your habits around money. Harv is famous for saying:
Give me 5 minutes with someone, and I can predict their financial future for the rest of their lives.
Very energising seminar and as a starting point, you should read his book:
Matt asked many successful Internet Marketers if they would do an interview with him to contribute towards his ‘Adventures in Internet Marketing’ PodCast. During his research, he discovered that there were simple habits that successful Internet Marketers do on a continuous basis that distinguishes them from others who are stumbling from product to product and still not getting any desirable results.
Best Internet Marketing Tools to Generate Traffic
For anyone to become successful online, traffic is an absolute pre-requisite. Without traffic, your online business will die as surely as a human will die without blood in their body.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any Internet business. If your Internet business is starved of traffic, it will die!
Yes, full disclosure… this is my product and the entry point Bronze level membership consists of 30+ videos that are absolutely free. For the upgraded membership, there are over 75 videos and is priced at a very accessible $19 for a limited time only. This $19 deal is accessible beyond the original offer’s opt in page.
These tutorials will demonstrate how to drive a ton of traffic to your website. Look at the Alexa ranking of this site against your site as proof of that!
If you buy other products using the affiliate links on this page, I’ll give you access to the complete membership as a ‘Buy with Bonus’ offer. See the form at the bottom of the page for details.
This is a rock solid product which consists of a 318 page PDF, a membership area with video tutorials, cheat sheets and more.
The investment is just $80 for this training. You can make your money back easily enough though as it has a rock solid high converting affiliate programme you can join.
This membership site is an extension to the popular and extremely informative Buzz Blogger blog. The dashboard contains superb information on how to generate a tonne of traffic to your website. It’s a rock solid product consisting of videos delivered through a membership area, cheat sheets and much more.
As at the time of writing, the investment is just $37 for this training. You can make your money back easily enough though as it has a rock solid high converting affiliate programme you can join for free where they give you 100% commissions. One sale and all your money back!
This product is the compilation of Phill Turner interviewing several traffic experts on what they’ve done to get large volumes of traffic to their websites.
There is a version 1 and a version 2 of the product with the only difference being the people that were interviewed as part of the product.
The product is seriously affordable for the great strategies that are shared within it so I definitely suggest you pick up a copy and listen to the interviews in your car or on your iPod.
This tool is absolutely free – unbelievable if you ask me! Yes, Google do have a vested interest in providing you with this software as it enables them to gather market intelligence about the way people are using the Internet and helps them with their ranking algorithm to determine which pages they should rank as quality content and which pages they should penalise.
It’s possible for an entire training course to be produced on using Google Analytics itself because there is simply so much to it. The majority of users will just use it for it the traffic stats and the sources of traffic. However, it can be used to help you:
- Determine traffic sources
- Page views per visit
- High performing keywords
- Video analytics
- Tracking for goal conversions (downloads, sales, etc.)
- Creation of your own reports
- And much more…
Most people think of Market Samurai as a keyword research tool. I did for a long time and thought that using the Google keyword tool would do exactly the same job. How wrong I was!
Market Samurai is now my trusted companion for:
- Keyword research
- Checking SEO competition
- Uncovering simple backlink opportunities
- Domain Samurai (an additional tool they provide for free which lets you hunt for keyword rich domains on the cheap)
- Monetisation module which helps you find suitable products and affiliate programmes to monetise your site.
- Publish content straight to your WordPress blog by connecting it to Market Samurai.
- Track the rank of your keywords for all the keywords you’re targeting within your blog.
SEO pressor is a premium WordPress plugin that serves as a coach by looking in at you as you’re writing your blog content.
SEO Pressor helps you to:
- Make the best use of header tags
- Embolden, italicize and underline keywords automatically
- Identify images without alt tags
- Identify opportunities to adjust links to “nofollow”
- Ensure your article is not penalised as being spammy by feeding back your keyword density.
In my opinion, SEO Pressor is the perfect partner for the free WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast.
This plugin enables you to spread your content to other blogging and microblogging platforms. To get traffic back from using this plugin, you need a network of friends on each of the accounts that you set up. I’m sure from your own experience of sending friend requests on Facebook or following people on Twitter, you’ll know that this takes a long time.
The benefit of the plugin isn’t really the traffic it creates but the building of one way links pointing back to your site content, so you’re always link building as you’re releasing new blog content.
SEO Smart Links premium is yet another plugin that helps you in your SEO efforts. A major factor in SEO is links and one way of getting very easy links to your pages is to build deep internal links between your pages. This can take a lot of effort in recording the URL’s of your posts and using keywords within your posts as anchor text for other content on your blog.
Matt Cutts at Google said that internal link building would be one of the main 3 important factors in SEO in 2011.
As a sidenote, in case you’re wondering what the others were, they are:
- Social votes (such as getting tweets, likes and Diggs)
- Page load times
It’s also important to increase the number of pageviews per visitor. This tells Google that your content is relevant for the visitor and therefore serves as a positive vote for your content in Google’s algorithm.
SEO Smart Links enables you to:
- Automatically interlink your content pages passing pagerank from page to page within your site
- Cloak affiliate links and add the “nofollow” attribute automatically
- Use custom keywords for your anchor text
- Specify the number of links per post/page
- Click between pages on your site with fast load times
I personally use the premium edition of SEO Smart Links for my internal link building campaign and Ninja Affiliate for my affiliate links.
Best Internet Marketing Tools to Optimise Conversions
Although traffic is a pre-requisite for online success, all the traffic in the world will not help you to generate sales without conversions. By and large, conversions are achieved as a consequence of connecting the right product to the right people that have a pre-established relationship with you. The key watchword for conversions is trust. The prospect needs to trust that you’re not a rip off merchant and they need to believe that you can solve their problem and deliver against the promise you’re marketing (communicating to prospects in your marketing collateral).
With that understood, it’s important to have experiments in place and monitor your stats on a scheduled basis. Some of the tools that help you to monitor conversion rates and increase conversions overall are:
OK, this is a totally free tool provided by Google, however just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean that you should overlook it, right? For anyone who knows a little HTML and can follow some on screen copy and paste instructions, you can set up a simple A/B split test in about 5 minutes.
If you’re split testing WordPress pages using Google Website Optimizer, the you’ll probably want to get the Google Website Optimizer for WordPress plugin straight from the WordPress repository.
An extremely simple product to use. It’s simply a website that enables you to split test two pages by submitting the two pages URL’s as split test variants and driving traffic to the split test URL.
The service is for $9/month and allows you to split test really easily without having the additional steps and learning curve that Google Website Optimizer has. If speed of testing is important to you and you’re ready to start doing more testing, then this may be for you.
It has no affiliate programme, so I guess I won’t be getting any commissions for this recommendation.
I could so easily have put this tool under the section for product creation since it enables you to create membership sites and content pages for a blog, however it’s best known for creating high converting squeeze and sales pages.
It’s a premium WordPress theme with literally hundreds of options, shortcodes and functions included which enables it to be as versatile as a Swiss army knife. If you’re wanting to market your own products online, you simply won’t want to be without it!
OptimizePress enables you to:
- Create stylish high converting squeeze pages effortlessly
- Create stylish high converting sales pages completely integrated with your favourite shopping cart solution
- Create a membership site with its easy to use parent/child WordPress pages structure
- Create funnel systems where content is dripped at various stages of a product launch
- Integrate with popular membership solutions such as WishList Member and Digital Access Pass
- Integrate with all the top autoresponders on the market
- Share your content socially to help your message grow virally
- Use comments from both WordPress and Facebook
I built The Profit Share membership site, the squeeze and sales pages using OptimizePress.
The team at OptimizePress are very responsive and are constantly developing the theme. Existing customers get all the new updates to the product for free.
Again, they have a great high converting affiliate programme paying 50% commissions, so refer two people and you’ve made your money back instantly and your copy is free!
Best Internet Marketing Tools for List Building
The #1 essential tool for anyone in Internet Marketing or online business has to be an autoresponder. It is quite possibly the only ‘must have’ essential tool that you need in Internet Marketing, even when you’re first starting out.
You need to build a list from day one of your Internet Marketing business.
I have tried iContact, 1ShoppingCart and Aweber and can say that Aweber has the most features and the most intuitive user interface out of the lot. Some might say that tools like GetResponse and MailChimp offer similar tools, however I think that an autoresponder is definitely something that you should not be too tight with. After all, you get what you pay for and if you don’t want to entrust just anyone with your business database, you want the company with the industry leading deliverability rates.
For me, an essential part of a modern blog is the ability to capture and recycle traffic. A great way of doing this is using popup boxes and opt in boxes that are strategically placed around your blog.
At the moment, WP Subscribers is about the most versatile of the big 3 competing products for popup list building WordPress plugins. During my research, I’ve discovered that MaxBlogPress Subscriber’s Magnet has some awesome features and I’ve seen it used to good effect on other blogs, however I’ve never personally used it myself, therefore I cannot personally endorse it.
I have used Popup Domination and got over a 400% increase in opt ins within just the first few weeks of installing the plugin and creating the popup upon visitors entering my blog.
However, due to the sheer versatility of the plugin and the outrageously cheap price, WP Subscribers has to be the best list building plugin available at the moment.
Best Internet Marketing Tools for Blogging
The following tools can help you take your blogging to a new level.
At the moment, I am still using a shared hosting solution, albeit a premium business class one. This will work just fine if you’re generating less than 600 visits per day. If your readership is anything above that, you’ll be wanting to start investigating other forms of hosting such as dedicated hosting or even cloud hosting in preparation to cope with a much higher level of traffic.
The one thing that separates Westhost from other cheap shared hosting providers is that they backup your files every six hours, so if something were to go wrong with your site, you would simply revert to the snapshot of your site as it was just six hours ago. Additionally, they have attentive US based customer service 24 hours a day and every day of the year. It’s surprising how many times you need to call them at 2:00 am.
Choosing a blog theme is a very personal thing to choose. Kind of like choosing the wallpaper in your house or the colour of your car.
There are many people who scrimp and scrape on using a premium Theme because they think they can get the same results using either a free theme directly from the WordPress repository or creating their own customised theme using theme creation software such as Artisteer.
I would recommend against using any of those solutions because things like quality of coding affects things like page load time. Most Internet Marketers will simply find it too painful to tweak their websites to increase things like page load time. The challenge is that these factors are massively important to Google and their importance is increasing.
Google rewards faster loading page times and they know how fast is a good speed because they collect masses of information back from all the users that use their Google Analytics package.
I have investigated several themes including Socrates, Thesis, Genesis themes, Theme Forest and WooThemes. I originally built this blog using the Socrates theme but realised that the blog had outgrown the theme and to move it to the next level, I needed to design my blog and get the best theme out there to help me do just that.
WooThemes is my favourite collection of themes because:
- They have an active community of Woo Ninjas on hand to help you with any of your queries.
- The coding on their themes is very clean and precise. Page load times are excellent.
- The themes look amazing and stylish and there is many of them to choose from. They often run deals which helps you pick one suitable for you if you are undecided on which one to choose.
- They operate on a parent/child theme basis which enables you to deep customise the theme as well as get all themes updates without copying and pasting custom modifications into your updated theme.
As far as registering domain names go, registering with GoDaddy is simply as easy as it gets. I’ll be totally honest and say that I don’t think too much to their hosting but their domain registration and domain management options are second to none.
If you’re the type of marketer that uses lots of domain names, then domain management will be vitally important to you. GoDaddy uses an awesome interface to help you manage your domains easily and they even have an awesome iPhone app too.
This plugin enables you to determine whether you’re choosing the right focus keyword for your blog. It will help you to determine whether your keyword is being searched for and may stop you from producing posts where there’s no demand for the keyword you’re targeting.
This same task could be achieved using the Google keyword tool, but it would take a lot longer for you to produce the same content. The tool also forces you to check what you’re doing before you publish. This is especially good if you’ve ever had the habit of publishing blog content before doing thorough keyword research.
You might want to check your Google Analytics stats. When I checked mine, I was shocked to discover that 10% of my readers were browsing my site from their iPhone, so I knew I needed to cater for my mobile readers and make it easy for them to browse and consume my content.
That’s exactly what WP Touch Pro does. You can get the free version of WP Touch directly from the WordPress repository, however if you want to provide more options to your users, then you’ll be wanting WP Touch Pro.
Browse this site on your iPhone or Android device using the mobile theme to view the options and layout that it presents.
My personal preference is to display my site using the desktop version, although many bloggers such as Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net or Ana Hoffman’s Traffic Generation Café prefer to present the mobile theme.
Best Internet Marketing Tools for Affiliate Marketing
The following tools can help you with your affiliate marketing business.
OK, put the hypey name to one side for a second and you’ve got a seriously good affiliate cloaker here.
The product:
- Protects your affiliate links by cloaking them with more attractive and more clickable links.
- Assigns keywords you choose to associate with your affiliate link so each time those keywords appear on your blog, they’re replaced with an anchor text link which directs the user to the destination page through your affiliate link.
- Tracks clicks for each of your links.
- Allows you to set up sub-campaigns for your campaigns which enables you to track clickthrough performance from specific locations on your blog, so you can spot where the winner and losers are.
Best Internet Marketing Tools for Product Creation
The following tools can help you to create and market your own information products.
Video software that quite honestly transforms videos on your blog/site from everyday YouTube videos to snazzy videos with a customised video player. The video content streams seamlessly from your Amazon S3 account with Cloudfront configured, which of course, you already have set up, right? :-)
The software is actually uploaded and installed onto your server rather than simply being a WordPress plugin, desktop software or an online account.
I’ve used Easy Video Player 2 as my video player for my entire membership and for the videos on this blog.
The software enables:
- You to create customised videos using your branding – not YouTube’s! This also means that you don’t have to let visitors bounce off your site to YouTube any more!
- You can present an opt in form right after your video inside the video itself using a lightbox popup. As long as you have your viewer engaged, you can build your list using video.
- The simple creation of a ‘Buy’ button either inside the video or magically appear at a set interval below the video.
- The protection of your content, so no-one else can find the media’s source file, host it themselves and use your content. You might want this sort of set-up for a membership site.
- Host other people’s videos through your video player. Even videos on YouTube!
- You to track the performance of your videos using the video analytics to determine drop off times and play counts. This can be helpful to determine which videos are the performers.
For me, anyone interested in using video to build relationships with their blog readership and subscriber list, increase their opt in list and sell more products using video should definitely be using this software. Anything else is a complete waste of time and basically futile.
My favourite preferred method of creating my own information products is using a membership script such as Wishlist Member.
I have very positive experiences with using Wishlist. It’s super easy to use, integrates with the most popular autoresponders and merchant accounts.
There are many advantages of delivering your content through a membership site including:
- Building your own community of content consumers and like-minded customers.
- Protecting your content from digital product thieves.
- Using your existing blog as a lead generation system funnelling prospects to your back-end membership site.
Once you’ve created some products to sell, you’ll want to form partnerships with other people allowing them to promote your products in exchange for a commission.
That’s the beauty of having your own affiliate programme. You can turn your traffic onto complete autopilot by allowing affiliates to worry about getting the traffic to you.
To do this, you could do with a great affiliate management system right from within your WordPress blog. Affiliate Royale allows you to:
- Upload a series of different banners for your affiliates to use.
- Tracks all your affiliate sales showing you the best performing affiliates.
- Integrates with most autoresponders so you can communicate to your affiliates.
- Accepts one time or continuity payments from many of the top payment merchants.
Yes, you can get a free affiliate account, however to sell your products on ClickBank, you will have to pay a one off administration fee of $50.
It has received some bad press in the recent past for accepting some product listings too easily seemingly without any form of vetting. This has had an effect on the quality of the products in the marketplace, but this doesn’t detract from the benefits of the service they provide.
ClickBank gives you:
- A means of accepting payment by using their merchant account facilities. ClickBank takes a small percentage of each sale for this.
- Access to a database of over 120,00 affiliates looking for products to promote.
Best Internet Marketing Tools for Social Media Management
There have been an array of tools out there to solve the problem of managing many social media accounts from one integrated platform. The most famous are quite possibly HootSuite and Tweet Deck.
The following tools can help you manage your social media campaigns more easily.
Tweet Adder is my secret Twitter tool that enables me to continuously build a following of people on Twitter. I can also unfollow people that are not following me back to keep my ratio of followers to following at a rate that Twitter deems acceptable.
Tweet Adder helps me to:
- Build a list of followers.
- Unfollow people who do not follow me back.
- Send out tweets on a scheduled basis.
- Follow followers of other users.
- Generate custom tweets.
As you can see in the screenshot, this tool has enabled me to generate a following of almost 55,000 followers between my two main accounts on Twitter.
I could have used all 5 accounts to generate an even bigger following had I of set them up at the time. I guess that reminds me to add another task to my “will do” list.
The big benefit of MarketMeSuite is it enables you to manage your main social media accounts from the MarketMeSuite application which is based on Adobe Air.
The software also enables you to send out tweets that are branded from your company which increases the number of backlinks to your blog significantly.
Best Internet Marketing Tools for Other Reasons
This section addresses a catch all of other useful tools for Internet Marketers.
The following tools can help you manage your Internet business more easily.
DropBox is a very simple free utility that enables you to share folders with other users by simply being connected over the Internet. It’s essentially like having a shared folder on a server.
If you use the link I provide to sign up, you will get 2.25GB of space for free to manage your files and collaborate with others with.
Podio is simply awesome. Ever wanted to manage a project collaborating efficiently with people contributing from all over the world. Podio enables you to have a team of up to 20 people for free which makes it perfect for any small business.
Additionally, there are many apps which further extend the functionality of the platform.
Again, it’s free so I won’t be claiming an affiliate cheque for this one.
Recently acquired by Microsoft, the industry standard for talking to people using voice and building relationships online over the Internet. I know, I know a revelation!
Geek alert! Skype uses VoIP (Voice of Internet Protocol) technology to enable its users to make voice calls over the Internet.
Combine those features with the industry leading instant messaging service and complete integration with Facebook and you have an awesome tool.
If you’re looking for a free tool to create office documents such as word processing documents and spreadsheets. This is awesome because it is totally free open source software. Originally Sun Microsystems developed this product, however it was acquired by Oracle in 2009.
Awesome mind mapping tool which enables you to plot ideas for blog posts, products, investment plans and engines in a visual format. Once you’ve created your mind’s vision on paper, it’s so much easier to create your content and funnels. I cannot recommend this free tool highly enough.
So there you have it! A definitive list of the best Internet Marketing tools there is. Take action and benefit from the array of fantastic tools out there to get better results in your business.
As an additional offer to provide you with even greater value from your purchase, I’d like to offer you a buy with bonus option.
If you purchase any of the above listed products through the affiliate links above and provide a purchase purchase receipt, then I will give you complete access to Turbo Traffic Explosion. A complete traffic solution especially designed to show you how to drive explosive amounts of traffic to your website delivered from within our member’s area.
To read more about the bonus offer, click here.
Simply complete the form below to claim your membership now.
Buy with Bonus Form
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To Your Online Success,
The Profit Share
The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)
I recently spoke with a gentleman called Dr. John Pollard who contacted me claiming that he had written a book that is the algorithm that cracks the code of how relationships work.
