Below is a list of resources I use, have used or that have been recommended to me. Have a look through them to see what might be of use to you. Some are free to use others are free for limited features, others are paid-for services/software. I try to keep the list up-to-date, but if you find dead links please let me know so I can remove them. If you have any additional links that you feel should be included please let me know and I’ll happily check them out. Please do your own research before paying for anything from anyone listed on this page as they are outside of my influence and responsibility.
Getting traffic
The companies below provide a platform were you can design Facebook competitions in order to capture email addresses and bring in new customers.
Zosocial Facebook timeline contests
shortstack I have used this service. There are some free options, monthly subscriptions for others.
To get ideas from similar Facebook pages you need to find out the page ID you want to find similar pages to. To find this do the following: http://facebook.com/attmarketing, change to the graph sub-domain and put your page at the end so it look like this http://graph.facebook.com/attmarketing
"id": "276308232541945",
Once you have the page ID, you simply add it to the end of this URL:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/?frompageid=ID
replacing ID for the actual number. You will be confronted with a list of similar pages to the one you have entered.
keyword research
Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is a free tool that allows you to carry out Keyword Research.
Wordstream Gives you Keyword ideas, free limited use, with paid option.
Google Insights for Search see what has been searched over the last 12 months to help evaluate good and bad keywords.
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence bings insight into keywords used in search terms
Visuwords is a nifty visual online thesaurus that generates associations between words and can be used as a keyword idea generator.
Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand you will have to sign up to access the tools
Ubersuggest utilizes the “Suggest” data from Google and others. A terrific tool for developing long-tail phrases.
lexFN.com online thesaurus to generate ideas
webconfs lets you see density of keywords on a URL
Toos.seobook keyword density checker on a URL
ongsono keyword density checker on URL
tagxedo turns words — famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters — into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.
tagcrowd visualises text
General Research
Evernote Allows you to save webpages, Clip web articles, capture handwritten notes, and snap photos to keep the physical and digital details of your projects with you at all times.
Google explore allows you to see what’s popular using #hashtags
Buzz feed lets you see what’s trending
Google.com If you want to reach Google.com rather than your local country version enter http://www.google.com/ncr the ncr stands for “no country redirect”
whatismyip Find your own IP address. May need for security setting etc
SEO improvements
If you’re linking to other websites make sure your links are no follow. The code is
rel="nofollow"
and should go in the html like this within the href part of the code.
<a "href="http://www.whateverwebsite.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">whateverwebsite</a>
this will prevent you being penalised by Google and losing link juice.
Quora submit your site and answer questions to improve your sites SEO. It’s free
Powermapper checks your site for broken links, accessability, browser compatibility an SEO
Type into Google Browser “backlink:yoursite.com” replacing yoursite.com with your websites URL to see what pages are indexed in Google.
woorank check how well optimised your blog is once per week check
Google site speed checker gives you feedback on your sites speed and issues that need fixing
Google search console sign up for the Webmaster tools, it’s free to use and gives you lots of insights
Search engine help analysis your website for SEO performance, free version and paid version available.
Seobook offers lots of free SEO tools
Click Tale –free trial, shows how people navigate around your site
Open a webpage and press ctrl+f and type in the a keyword into the box that appears (top right under browser address bar) and this will highlight all the keyword occurrences on the page.
ranking today offers a number of SEO tools
Seo Quake is a free Chrome extension that offers a variety of tools to analyse websites your visiting for things like keyword density and if the page is optimised with title, description and keywords.
Copyscape is a useful tool to check for duplicate content issues that can effect your SEO results
SEO-tools is another page analyser.
Check-domains is a good website analyser.
Check if site has been delisted from Google’s index type the following into your search engines address bar replacing yoursite.com with your actual webpage address ‘site:yoursite.com’
Clicky shows you how visitors behave on your site in the same way as Google Analytics does.
Clicktale offers heatmap tracking of visitor activity.
Opimizely allows you to reconfigure objects on landing page. It has a free option and paid for more advanced services.
Removem outputs anchor text diversity. Words or phrases that are potentially over-optimized are highlighted for manual review.
Word3clean convert word text to clean html. You can also do this if you have notepad on your computer, just copy the text in and out of notepad and the formatting is gone.
Urivalet to view total number of objects (http requests), time to download, object details, document internal links, and external links along with verifying server headers for each.
Seobin gives insight as to what the top ranking competitors are using for titles and descriptions. The best competitor intelligence tool of its type.
Schema-creator tool is the easiest way to get started creating HTML with schema.org microdata.
snippet optimizer tool helps visualize and optimize what is displayed to searchers
Sitemap Generator create “web-type” XML sitemap and URL-list files (some may also support other formats).
Sitemp Inspector validates your sitemap (XML or gunzip), repairs errors, and pings all search engines.
Pingdom tests the load time of a page, analyzes it, and finds bottlenecks
Crazyegg Website optimisation.
Link Building
Check broken links this is a chrome add on for checking for broken links on site
Smallseotools backlink checker
Alexa good for a lot of analysis limited unless on pro version.
Open Site Explorer check backlinks brought to you from Moz
Ahrefs check backlinks to your site.
SearchEngineLand.com – Another white-hat resource. While their content includes much more industry-insider news, they also provide original resource and data-driven case studies. Definitely a resource to put in your RSS reader.
Converting traffic
Landing Page Generator
Thrive Landing Pages Wordpress plugin is great for converting your WordPress blog posts/pages into dedicated mobile responsive squeeze pages and sales pages with a simple drag and drop interface built right into your WordPress dashboard.
Content Creation
Stock Photos – High Quality Blog post images
Gratisography – free use as you please, high resolution pictures for personal and commercial projects. Just click on your selection and download the high resolution version. New pictures added weekly. No copyright restrictions
Pixabay free stock photography
ISO Republic stock photography provides high quality, free photos for creative’s covering architecture, nature, people, textures, urban and more. It’s aimed at designers and developers who don’t have the budget for quality photos.
Magdeleine is a photo gallery for your inspiration. Magdeleine offer a daily pick and feature high resolution pictures
New Old Stock – Vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions
PicJumbo – Totally free photos for your commercial and personal work. Only limitations include redistributing and selling
Stocksnap.io – Beautiful free stock photos with hundreds added weekly. No attribution required either.
Gutenberg,org – Public domain – offers over 49,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. Many of which are free from copyright (in USA). As public domain you can repackage this content in any number of ways to create your own products (check copyright law in your country first)
ulib.org Public domain with lots of free content
StockSnap – they offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of.
Pexels – Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.
Unsplash – Probably the best known of the free stock sites.
Burst – Burst was launched by Shopify to help new businesses find quality images for their marketing.
Foodiesfeed – Looking for high quality, mouth watering food photography, Foodiesfeed is where it’s at.
Picjumbo – With new content uploaded daily, Picjumbo offers a wide range high-quality images for categories ranging from people through to technology.
kaboompics – Kaboompics is one of the most popular sources of free images for lifestyle, interior design and specialised bloggers in World.
Handy Content Tips
Ctrl+alt+C = copyright © symbol
Opt-ins
Optinskins used by some high profile bloggers.
Thrive Leads the new improved version of Hybrid Connect which I use on this site.
Email providers
Mailchimp I use this and it’s free giving you 2000 emails to send per month for no charge.
Mailpoet is a WordPress Plugin that is also free and Works inside your WordPress installation.
Aweber is one of the most popular providers for internet Marketing.
Measuring performance
Split Testing
Split test webpages via these providers –
Website options
Worpress is what I use for all my sites. It’s free, well supported by designers, and has lots of free themes and plugins to add functionality.
Bluehost If you use the self hosting option for your WordPress website you will need to buy hosting space. Bluehost is one of the best I’ve used.
Blogging Platforms – no hosting required
Article directories
If you don’t want the hassle of setting up a self hosted option, but just want to blog check out these free platforms.
web 2.0
Article Spinning
Motisetisation methods
Advertising Networks
Tribal Fusion (you’ll need 500,000 unique visitors a month)
Automating sales
E-commerce store
Store coach information for setting up an ecommerce store from someone who’s experienced at doing just that.
Selling on Amazon and Ebay
Jim Cockrum engaging content relating to selling on Amazon and Ebay. I have subscribed to his email list and find the info useful, but haven’t actually followed his advise, so can’t comment on the accuracy of it.
Membership Payment solutions
Affiliate Networks
Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate)
Membership sites
Nothing here yet
Ebooks
Podcasting and Video
Tubeoffline is the latest kid on the block and currently better than the others I’ve found
Keepvid allows you to download Youtube videos to your PC.
Download youtube videos without a downloader – remove http:// from the URL and add “ss” after www. i.e www.ssyoutube.com/
Dailymotion post videos to this site like youtube, can also stream through it.
Camtasia Record desktop video and you can write on screen with this also
Movavi Screen Capture just £49 for full version.
free music archive Free music for videos and podcasts
incompetech Royalty free music
artlist £16 month unlimited music
Jing When you install Jing onto your computer, you can take screenshots of whatever you see on your screen (and add graphics like arrows and things like that to them) and you’ll immediately get a link you can use to share that image. Beyond that, and the feature I use the most, is you can screen record using the software too. So, instead of taking a single-framed screenshot and sharing that, I can record an entire video up to 5 minutes in length, and after recording it’ll give me a link to share.
Screencast-o-matic free screen recorder. Works great limited to 10 min video capture, which is fine. I put the separate recording together via Sony Vegas video editing software.
Online-covert convert wma files to wav files to use in audicity software.
Audicity audio software editing.
Mattesar – free and royalty free music under creative commons
Leadplayer plugin Wordpress allows you to add a opt-in or call to action button at end of video.
Auphonic is a great tool to use online to improve the sound quality of Podcasts or audio files, even if the audio is part of a video it will let you split the audio from the video if you like. Removes noise and humming from audio. There are monthly restrictions on free version.
Wistia is a paid for video hosting platform ideal for private video hosting or membership only videos. Has built in in-depth analytics.
FreeSFX Sound effects for video or audio content
Convert any Youtube video into a GIF – type gif in front of youtube in the URL i.e. www.gifyoutube.com
Productivity
Basecamp is a project management tool that allows you to connect with virtual assistants.
Security
1Password generates and stores passwords for various things you sign up for online so that you only have to remember one master password.
Buy and sell Website
Empireflippers I have purchased a few websites off these guys in the past, check them out and listen to their informative podcast to learn about buying and selling websites.
Flippa is one of the better known sites for buying and selling websites, but beware there seems to be a lot of junk sites for sale on here, so you need to surf through the crap to find the golden nuggets, without much guidance from the Flippa team unfortunately.