Hey, Rob here!

Over time I have used and tested an awful lot of web tools, software and applications. This “Cheat Sheet” is a list of what I believe to be the best ones that I use personally to grow my online business on a day-to-day basis.

If you like, you can download the latest PDF version for free by right-clicking here and choosing “Save as…”.

Save it to your computer, print it out, spill your coffee on it… It’s Yours!

All the best & speak soon,

Rob.

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Internet Marketing Cheat Sheet

 

Please Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links which means I will earn a commission if you follow that link and make a purchase. I have personal experience of all of the following services myself and am ONLY recommending them because I like them, trust the companies that provide them and think they might help you too. The affiliate links won’t mean you pay any more but I just want to be upfront and transparent with you from the outset…

Market Research

Market research is the main thing I slipped up on when I started out online. You can get EVERYTHING else perfect, but if your market research is sketchy then you have built your new website with very bad foundations. Here are some tools that I like to use before I start a new website…

Google Keyword Tool: Enter a seed phrase into this free keyword research tool and Google will show you related keywords and monthly search volumes. I used to use this heavily but now prefer Market Samurai (see below).

Market Samurai: This is a superb tool (the best available on the net in my opinion) which allows you to perform keyword research on a more advanced level than simply using the Google Keyword Tool. But the real power of Market Samurai is that it allows you to check out your competition through its Competition Module. The videos on their site will show you the power of this application.

WordTracker: Another cool service you can use to cross/double check your keyword research.

Open Site Explorer: A great website from SEOMoz.Org. Check the number of links to a website and other metrics such as Page Authority. Quick (and free!) to use.

Flippa: A really useful platform for buying and selling websites. Click on the “Ending Soon” tab to get a feel for the latest trends of websites coming onto the market and what they have sold for. Invaluable inspiration when you are looking to launch a new website!

Google Trends: A fascinating application to quickly check which topics are hot and receiving a lot of searches in Google.

Google Insights: Very similar to Google Trends but more detailed. I like to make sure that the key phrases that are associated with my niche are trending upwards through time (or are at least stable!). This is also a great tool for checking seasonal trends and geography to find out where your potential customers are located.

Amazon: I always like to check how many books and magazines there are for a particular niche that I’m looking to get into. A large amount of both is usually a good indicator that other marketers are already making money in that niche, which in turn means a greater likelihood that you can do the same.

QuantCast: A nice place to check out the demographics of your audience. Put in the web address of a leading website in your niche and see the ages, gender and income level of its audience. One reason why this is useful is so that you can design your website by using graphics and photos that will appeal to (and be representative of) your target audience.

Building Websites

In the old days people had to spend hours learning and coding HTML to create cool looking websites. Now we use WordPress (mostly!). This is one of the reasons why I feel blessed to have started online during 2010 and not in 2000! WordPress was originally designed as a tool to create blogs. However, there are so many third-party companies designing customizations for it that you can literally create pretty much any kind of style of website you like…

WordPress.org: This is what you need if you want to use WordPress on your own domain: e.g., http://www.gainhigherground.com. You can download and install the software you need from this site if you like. But it is much easier to use the one-click install facility from the control panel in your hosting account (e.g., Hostgator).

WordPress.com: This is a separate service which allows you to create a blog hosted on the wordpress.com website. If you do this then the web address will be something like: robscoolsite.wordpress.com. I usually only use this for when I set up quick “satellite” blogs to create links back to my main website (which, of course, uses WordPress.org).

Graphics/Photos

It’s important to make sure that you have the legal right to use a photo before you do so. The bad news is that some images online can be quite expensive. The good news is that there are a number of different places to get free photos that you can use legally.

sxc.hu: Free stock photos that you can use for your website or products. I often use this as my first port of call for photos, although the free nature of this site means it’s not always possible to find exactly what you are looking for. Always be careful to check out the creator’s terms and conditions for the particular photo that you are interested in because they sometime vary slightly.

iStockPhoto: A paid service for thousands of extremely high quality photos. Trouble is, some of them can be quite expensive so you might like to use this service sparingly!

Snipping Tool: Free from Microsoft. One of the simplest pieces of software you will ever use! Click a button, highlight an area on the screen, and Wham! you have a screen capture photo.

SnagIt: This is a great picture editor which you can trial for free, purchase on its own or get a discount for when you buy it together with Camtasia (see below). I use this for resizing images, adding “fancy” borders or jagged edges and taking computer screen snapshots.

For graphics, web and logo design, please see the Outsourcing section in this Cheat Sheet.

Hosting

HostGator: I use this hosting for (pretty much) all of my websites. The user-friendly control panel allows you to do common tasks such as creating/redirecting email addresses and installing WordPress with ease.

Amazon S3: This is Amazon’s “Simple Storage Service”. It’s an lovely service (although possibly a little hard to figure out at first) which allows you to store large files on their server. The advantage of this is so you don’t over-burden your own website with too many large files. I use this for all audio and videos files on my sites. Amazon S3 is incredibly cheap (cents rather than dollars!) even for huge amounts of data.

Affiliate Marketing

Promoting other people’s products and receiving commission when you generate a sale is exactly what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is a great place to start out in your online business (it’s what I started with). It allows you to learn the basics of making money online without having to take the risk of creating your own product.

Clickbank.Com: A huge affiliate network which brings together people who have products and people who wish to promote them (affiliates). If you make a sale you can expect a commission of anywhere between 50-75% of the sale price of the product. The commission rates are so high because these products are digital and so it costs nothing for the product creator to sell an extra unit. Click on Marketplace on their site and check out the thousands of products you could promote and what commission you could earn for each one.

Amazon Associates: This is the name for Amazon’s affiliate program. I use it and it is a nice way to create a simple store on your website that your visitors can browse. Only trouble is that the commissions are very low (starting at 4%) which means that you need to have super high traffic to your website or sell very high valued products to see any significant income. However, depending on your website this could still be a good option for you though so I wouldn’t write it off before trying it.

Advertising

There are a number of different ways to generate income from online advertising but I am not a great fan of this type of business model if I’m honest. To me, it seems to require an AWFUL lot of traffic to your website to see any kind of meaningful revenue.

Google Adsense: This is the only form of advertising I use to generate income. It goes something like this: 1. You sign up, 2. You get accepted (provided you haven’t been banned from Google in the past in which case forget it!), 3. Select the style and type of ads you would like Google to display on your site, 4. Add some simple code to your site (I use the Quick Adsense Plugin for WordPress to do this), 5. Wait for people to click on your ads (don’t even THINK about clicking on your own!), and finally, 6. Collect your share of the cost-per-click.

Email Marketing

Whilst you don’t have to build an email list to be successful online, it is highly recommended. I didn’t do this during my early days until I realized the full power of email marketing. In the unfortunate event that Google changes its algorithm and “slaps” your site (i.e., drops you down the ranking in its search results) you are still very much in business if you have a solid list of customers and prospects that you have delivered value to and taken the trouble to build trust with over a period of time.

Aweber: My email list building service of choice. I believe it to be very fairly priced (monthly subscription) and very user friendly in terms of customer service. Creating new lists and designing web opt-in forms using Aweber’s online tools is extremely straightforward and requires almost no technical skills at all.

Forums

Warrior Forum: The best online forum for all things to do with internet marketing. If you have a question, the chances are someone has tried to answer it here. This is also the home to the “Warrior Special Offers Forum” where discounted internet marketing products are offered for sale.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is great because it allows you to free up your own time and take advantage of exchange rate differences and lower labour costs in other countries. Looking back, I wish I had started to outsource sooner than I did.

ODesk: My website of choice for hiring freelance contractors. I’ve mainly used Odesk for article writing and backlink building but it’s also good for web programming, graphic design, etc. Post your job, either on a per hour or fixed cost basis, wait for candidates to bid and provide samples of their work and then make your hire.

Elance: Another great resource for freelance online workers.

99Designs: Logo and web design. Decide how much you want to pay and designers will bid. Watch the 1 minute video on their home page.

Video Creation

Not so long ago the vast majority of online products were in text format (PDF eBooks, text blogs, articles etc). Better internet speeds and bandwidth availability has contributed to massive growing trend in video. I love this because videos are often easier to get ranked in Google than articles and frequently much quicker to create.

Powerpoint: As a PC user I create all of my slides and presentations using this software from Microsoft.

Keynote: The equivalent of Powerpoint for Mac users. I’ve never used this (I don’t own a Mac… yet!) but I heard great things about it…

Camtasia: Screencast software. Use this on your PC or Mac to record you presentation or your computer screen for training videos.

YouTube: The “Google Of Video”. I’ve experienced rapid Google page 1 success with some of my niche sites by simply creating a Powerpoint presentation, recording it in Camtasia, uploading it to YouTube, putting a link back to my site in the description box and using the free Audioswap feature to add background music. You don’t even need to speak!

Audio Creation

Creating an audio product is a great way to give (or sell!) value to your customers. Either record yourself providing training, tips and advice, or, go out and find an expert to interview.

Skype: The tool to use for interviewing experts in your niche (or just speaking to friends & family!). Free phone calls, worldwide, over the internet. It costs a modest amount to make calls to regular phones/landlines.

Pamela: Allows you to record your Skype calls. The free version is limited to 15 minutes recording. You will need to upgrade to the full version to remove this limitation.

Audacity: After recording your audio, edit it using this easy to use free open-source audio editor. I also use Audacity to record my own voice for podcasts.

Internet Browsers

Google Chrome: I have used Internet Explorer and Firefox in the past. But for me, Chrome blows them away. It’s fast, easy to use and I love the detachable tabs which you can push and pull all over your screen!

Generating Traffic: Article Directories

Although it has been around for a number of years, article marketing remains an effective way to generate backlinks (and therefore authority in the eyes of Google) AND referral traffic from people reading your article and following the links in the author’s bio box back to your website.

Ezine Articles: The “Big Daddy” of all the thousands of article directories out there. Google loves it and if you are going to just write one article to create a link back to your site then use Ezine!

GoArticles: Probably my second choice to Ezine for creating backlinks and generating referred traffic to my sites.

Buzzle: Another high authority article directory (Page Rank 6 at the time of writing). I’ve used this a fair bit for my niche sites.

Generating Traffic: Article Spinning & Distribution

This is a slightly more advanced (and controversial) method of article marketing. You create an article by hand and then “spin” it so it includes multiple variations of paragraphs, sentences and word synonyms. By doing this you can instantly generate many different unique versions of it and post them to multiple blog networks and article directories around the web. Since the spun articles are all slightly different this increases the likelihood that Google will rank them and give you hundreds of valuable links back to your website.

The Best Spinner: A fantastic article spinning tool by Jonathan Leger who really cares about the quality of his software. This is THE BEST spinning product on the market in my opinion (so it’s appropriately named, I guess!). It seems to be updated constantly with new features and I’ve used it extensively for creating spun articles for my niche sites.

Article Marketing Automation (AMA): Use this to distribute your articles to thousands of blogs across the net. The blogs are owned by users of the system so they are hosted on different hosting services and IP addresses which is better in Google’s eyes. You can upload a simple article or an article that you have spun in The Best Spinner. Powerful stuff.

Unique Article Wizard (UAW): Similar to Article Marketing Automation in that it will accept spinnable articles for distribution. However, with UAW the distribution is not just to blogs but to article directories too. The monthly subscription is more expensive than AMA but I have used both services intensively and prefer this one overall.

Traffic Monitoring

Google Analytics: The first thing I do after setting up a new site is to hook up this great free tool. It will tell you an incredible amount of detail about how people find your website online: Where they live, what search term they used, what browser they use, which pages on your site they visited, how long they spent on your site, etc. Incredible stuff and it’s all free! I check this every morning for all of my sites.

Google WebMaster Tools: Another free piece of kit but slightly more pedestrian in pace than Google Analytics. I check this maybe a couple of times each month. It is very helpful for telling you the links Google has found to your website, how often Google has crawled your site and whether it found any problems or broken links. It’s a useful housekeeping tool for you as a webmaster.

Utilities

FileZilla: When you need to get files on your computer up onto your website sometimes you might need to use a program like FileZilla. It is a free and easy to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program which allows you to do exactly this. Sounds complicated but no technical skills are required (it’s no harder than using Windows Explorer really).

Kompozer: 95% of the time I never use website design software (WordPress is so much easier and more effective). However, on the rare occasions that I do need to create a special page or do some HTML, then I use this software. Many people prefer premium software packages like Dreamweaver but I’ve found everything possible that I need to do can be accomplished with Kompozer which is free.

Notepad++: Sometimes you need to work with text files, whether they be articles you’ve written or outsourced or even basic HTML. Editing text files is SO much easier using this program than the standard Notepad program than comes with Windows on the PC. Go get it now, for FREE!

Books

All the tools in the World can’t help you unless you have the knowledge and the correct mindset in your business. Here are some books that I owe a big part of my success to…

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, By Michael E. Gerber: I love this book for a single reason. It absolutely convinces you that you need to systemize your business. Without systems and proper procedures you will never grow big. Mr Gerber explains exactly how to do this in microscopic detail. After reading it I realized that ALL of the people I know online who are making 7 figures per-year or more have these systems in place. I can’t recommend this enough.

How To Make Millions With Your Ideas, By Dan S. Kennedy: The title might smack of a get-rich-quick type scheme but this book gives an excellent insight into the world of direct marketing. What I really liked was that many of the business examples in the book are actually about direct snail-mail marketing. This might sound strange since we work online, but I found there was so much that I could learn and use directly to sell information products on the web.

The 4-Hour Work Week, By Tim Ferriss: Essential reading for all of us internet marketers. Whilst I found some of the material slightly overblown, I learnt a massive amount from this book. The best bits for me were the productivity tips and how to shut out distractions. This might sound a little “unsexy” but trust me, it has made my life so much easier and contributed a huge amount to the success of my online business.

Screw It, Let’s Do It, By Richard Branson: I’ve always wanted to run my own business but I’ve never regarded myself as a “natural” entrepreneur. Virgin boss Richard Branson certainly is and this book was quite a mindset changer for me. Take calculated risks but not stupid risks. If you (like I was) are experiencing some issues in starting out or “taking the leap” then I hope this book helps you as much as it did me.

Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer: Nothing to do with internet marketing this one! I just thought I’d throw it in here because I enjoyed it so much. It’s non-fiction about the journey of Chris McCandless, a young man from Virginia who, quite literally, walks into the wild. I’ve always loved the outdoors and this book captures and explores the human fascination of the wilderness so well. I recommend watching the DVD too.

Did you find this list helpful? Please leave me a quick comment below and let me know…