An entrepreneur is only as good as his tools and if you’re going to be doing business online you’ll need to be willing to spend a little money on some quality tools.
I often get asked what kinds of tools I use, and aside from pointing them at my own plugins & products, I like to tell people about products that I find really useful and well-made.
This list includes marketing tools, hosting, plugins, SEO stuff, shopping carts and more. I’m constantly updating this list as I come across great new products and services.
Finally, I recommend these tools because I use them myself. I’ve tested all of the below and find the quality to be good enough that I would recommend them to my closest friends.
My Recommended Tools
Bluehost - Great cheap hosting (get a pro account, it’s worth it).
EJunkie – shopping cart hosting from $5 a month. Great value – I use it on all my products instead of hosting it myself. Handles your affiliate program for you too.
MailChimp – Email marketing system. If you don’t have an email list already, use this. It’s free for less than 2000 subscribers.
Fiverr - get people to do things for you for $5. Good for boring SEO tasks.
Mercurial – An excellent versioning system, similar to git and svn, but I find the workflow quite nice.
Social Monkee - A great link building service that submits links to social services for you. It’s great because you can spin the content it submits.
BackupBuddy – Fantastic plugin for WordPress that helps you backup your entire website (including multisite if you use it), plugins, themes and the whole database. You can then restore and even migrate to another server. Very handy and worth the money.
Author hReview - Add Google Rich Snippets to WordPress, this is hands down the best plugin for running a review website
