Resources

Thanks to Abner from The Entrepreneurial Life, I decided to list out the tools that I use.  All of these are tools that I currently use, or have used at some point in time and still find them to be valuable:

Invoicing/Finance

• Freshbooks – Probably the easiest invoicing app that I’ve used.  It definitely leaves some things to be desired accounting wise, but if you couple it with Outright.com it’s pretty killer.
• Outright - Let’s you keep track of expenses and income that are outside of billable work.  It also reminds you of when you need to file certain tax documents and what your estimated taxes are.  It’s no longer totally free, but still great.

Both of these save my accountant HOURS of work.

Email Newsletter

• Aweber – I used to use other free email marketing services, but if you are serious at all about having a great email newsletter, you need Aweber.  They have amazing deliverability and their autoresponder capabilities are top notch.  Love them.

Video Editing

• Camtasia
• Animoto – I use these for very short intro videos for podcast and other stuff.  In order to do that you need to have the business version.  It’s a great tool but since it is becoming very popular it’s starting to lose a little of it’s luster.

Screencasting

• Jing – Fantastic for short 5 minute videos and an ABSOLUTE if you have virtual assistants.  Quick videos are the only way to effectively train your staff.
• Camtasia – great for long videos and information products.  For PC it’s really the only way to go for screen recording.

Web Hosting

• Bluehost – Been using them for almost 5 years now and I’ve never been disappointed.  Anytime there was a problem, they either fixed it immediately or helped me to fix something that I cause on my end.  Ha!  They are fantastic.

File Hosting

• Amazon S3 (For large files) – Very inexpensive solution for hosting large files that are going to be downloaded often.  As Amazon expands their capabilities, the less and less you end up paying.
• Screencast.com (for my training videos)  I use this when I need to upload videos quickly.  Works well and is free, but be careful since it starts costing money after 2GB.

Project Management

• Basecamp – I recently switched back over to Basecamp because of its ease-of-use and because it is so user-friendly for my web development clients.  Having a piece of software that makes it easy for my clients to log into and track projects and communicate really sets the quality standard high.
• Dropbox – If you don’t have Dropbox then you are CRAZY! It let’s you sync your folders accross multiple computers without having to “upload” etc.  It’s transparent and awesome in the way it keeps you connected to all of your files.  You can even share folders with others and they’ll immediately get files that you put into the folders.

Outlining

• MindMeister – Great mind mapping tool online.  Works well.  I also use this for my information products.  Their iPhone app is crap though.
• iThoughts – The reason why I don’t use MindMeister‘s app.  This iPhone app is amazing and exports to multiple formats.  I used this to create an outline for my ebooks as well.

Landing Pages

• Premise – I use premise for all landing pages that I have.  Whether it’s a sales page or a content page for one of my webinars, this software makes it sooooo easy to be able to create powerful pages to get your point across.  There is nothing else like it on the market as far as plugins are concerned and it’s definitely paid for itself.

Hiring in General

• Virtual Staff Finder – The point of hiring a VA is to have a trusting and valuable relationship.  If you are a loyal reader, you know how much I despise most services out there that charge a fee to connect with a virtual assistant.  Virtual Staff Finder finds you an extremely talented VA for you, and then takes themselves out of the picture.  You work directly with your VA and build your business together, long-term.  Very cool service, and depending on the VA skills you need, you can find one for around $350/mo.

Hiring for Design

• 99Designs – An easy way to get the best of the best designers to create website designs (and other things).  You can then use your virtual assistant (if you have a developer) to code the site for a client.

Keyword and Market Research

• Market Samurai – Saves HOURS off of keyword and competition research.  Great platform.  I also use this to find local markets that I can sell web development and SEO services to.  If there is low competition for a market, it’s a great way to show opportunity to small business owners.

Article Marketing

• The Best Spinner – This saves my VAs (and me) hours on re-purposing articles.  Rather than having to constantly re-think about how to say a phrase in another way, this spins a new article almost automatically.
• Unique Article Wizard – (I don’t use anymore, but it still works) Shoots all of my articles out to 1000?s of websites for backlinks.  Usually with just one shot I am able to get on the front page, or at lest the second page of Google for a well researched keyword, and that’s on a brand new site.   This is a must-have for anyone doing article marketing.
• Article Marketing Robot – AMR is Unique Article Wizard on crack.  It submits to hundreds of article directories and WordPress blogs. However, the best part is that it is one flat fee instead of a monthly thing.  Love it, totally worth the buy.  One thing to note is that it has a steep learning curve in the beginning.

In my opinion, using these are pretty necessary if you want to make it easy on your virtual assistants.  Reason being is that you need to re-write articles twice (making 3 articles) to use  the article distribution programs to spread the content around.  If your VA can just spin the articles quickly, it saves a ton of time.

WordPress Resources

• My Ultimate List of WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Ping List
• Woothemes – By far the best premium wordpress theme company around.  They are so amazingly well coded that I use them often for my web development clients.

Training for Virtual Assistants

• Replace Myself (Bought the lifetime and consistently use it for training) – this is a course for virtual assistants that show them how to do article marketing, SEO, social media marketing, etc.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve had a lot of success moving my business into the SEO market.
• Scribe SEO (This is actually a WordPress/Drupal/Joomla plugin, but is BY FAR the easiest way to teach your virtual assistant On Page SEO.  Just have them use it with every blog post).

Training for ME!

• Internet Business Mastery – Great program for learning to sell information products online and is the reason I’m selling my accumulated knowledge via ebooks and videos.

I’ll add more as I find more valuable tools to use .