Internet Tools For Creating Multiple Streams Of Income
Every good internet income building aficionado needs to build up their toolkit. This is my suggested resources for those looking for the right tool for the job. Many of them start free, then you can upgrade to paid solutions later. There’s loads of free tools here that are invaluable, so bookmark this page and return when you’re in need.
Feel free to link here if you find it useful or want to share with others. Please let me know if there are any broken links!
Keyword Research | Website Competitive Research | Payment Processors and Gateways | WordPress | Stock Photos and Imagery | Social Media | Task Tracking | Hosting | Web Design | Email Marketing
Keyword Research
Shows basic analytic information about keywords people search for. Just plug in the keywords you want to research and show all the information.
Google Search Based Keyword Tool
Plug in your site, or any one elses and get tailored potential keyword results. Not sure how accurate the monthly search totals are – as far as I can tell this tool is part of the Adwords suite as well.
Non-Country Regioned Google Search
Ever wonder what results are really at the top of Google’s search results? Use Google without country regions applied. Ie. For me in Australia Google always shows results tailored to my country – not good for keyword and competitive research.
Once you’ve found a few keywords you’d like to scope out head over to Google Trends. Here you can compare search trend data for multiple keywords. This is huge – it can mean the difference between thousands of visits if a similar keyword is trending to perform better over the coming months.
Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
This free keyword generator can generate relevant and similar keywords to the keywords you enter. It actually does a bit better job than the Adwords Tool above from Google.
Website Competitive Research
Compare the grading of your site against millions of other websites from around the world using a range of variables. Also does basic competitive analysis.
Payment Processors and Gateways
The world’s most recognised online payment processor (thanks to eBay). Allows you to accept credit card payments on your website quickly and easily with minimum fuss.
The perfect solution for processing and deliverying information products such as eBooks and other files people are paying you for. Integrates well with Paypal and handles all processing and delivery. Also has provision for managing affiliates.
WordPress
Plugins
The most popular search engine optimization plugin for WordPress. And for good reason. Lots of customization possible.
Aside from the obligatory Akismet Spam protection, this is hands down the best anti-spam plugin I’ve used. It’s simple in design and completely eliminates robotic automated spam scripts of any kind. The site is in Russian, but don’t let that stop you. The plugin works by inserting an invisible captcha field (don’t worry your visitors don’t need to fill anything out) which will prevent submits on your comment form from auto commenting bots.
This plugin emails me a copy of every website’s database that I use on an hourly, bi-daily, daily, or weekly basis. Extremely handy if anything were to go wrong. I’d advise setting up a separate Gmail account for this.
Themes
I use this basic, powerful framework in many of my own websites and a lot of customer websites. It’s is quite lightweight, so expect to get your hands dirty in some PHP from time to time to get it to do the things you want.
The ultimate paid theme. It’s pretty much the opposite of Hybrid with loads of functionality built in. Optimized for programming novices, but it holds lots of hidden power in it’s framework. Paying for something like this is worth it if you don’t want the hassle or don’t have the know how to do things yourself.
Stock Photos and Imagery
Flickr Creative Commons Search
Flickr provides a whole section to search for images uploaded by copyright owners that just want an attribution link. Feel free to use and alter any of these images (according to the licensing agreements of course). Just remember to link to the image owner’s profile page when you do.
A free stock imagery website. Sign up for an account and start searching and using images. No attribution necessary for most images, though do check each image’s terms when you download.
Social Media
This is an awesome aggregation services to provide you an all-in-one panel for managing your social media services. I personally use this for reputation monitoring and keeping an eye on my Twitter and personal Facebook accounts. Best of all, it’s free and looks like it will stay that way.
Task Tracking
Not just a cool play on words – Teux Deux = To Do – this is a simplistic yet powerful web based “to do” tool. It’s not weighed down with loads of features which also means that it is missing some things. But, what I do have to say is that it’s the only electronic to-do list program that I’ve used for more than a week. It’s been months now and I’m finding it incredibly handy.
Hosting
This is the hosting company that I use for this site and many others. Their services allow you to buy one hosting account and host many domains and subdomains with them. This means buy one hosting account and load up many sites off the same account. It’s mostly shared hosting, but you can purchase your own dedicated IP which puts you onto a virtual machine.
Web Design
This nifty little firefox plugin can literally save you hours while trying to colour match images, title and much more exactly. Save the guess work – this tool lets you wave your mouse over a colour and extract the HTML colour code.
In our overly litigious society it’s good to have a plan to protect you and your websites. Check out this fantastic resource that provides free disclaimer statements for any website. Simply contruct a link containing your website’s address and you’re done. Place the link in the footer of your site and your visitors can have access to your very own disclaimer absolving you of any nasties.
Email Marketing
MailChimp is a cool professional grade email processor and list builder that lets you build an email list for your business for free up to 500 subscribers. This means you can start out your email building campaign for free, and upgrade later when you have the ability to earn from your email list by referring and selling products.
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Photo Credit: batega
This is a good list.
There’s a seminar in the Bay Area going on here in a few days where they’re charging like $150 to teach people about – pretty much – these tools.
Too funny.
Lol.. This list will be around for a lot longer than their seminar! Most of these are free tools, a couple are paid ones, but all in all there’s nothing here you can’t find yourself online with a bit of searching. I’m just eliminating “the searching part” so you don’t have to spend hours doing it
Thanks for saving me a few of those valuable hours with your tools list, Josh. There is some really good stuff here!
No problems Dave! Glad you found my list useful. Check back, it’s going to grow a little more very soon