Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Most Recommended
THE TOOLS & RESOURCES YOU NEED TO SUCCEED ONLINE
Welcome to the Resources section, a list of tools, resources, courses and \”things\” I strongly recommend for building and optimizing your business, your income and your brain.
I use every recommendation on this page. Many of the resources listed here are crucial to running a successful online business.
Success Mindset
Books
- Influence – The Psychology of Persuation
by Robert B. Cialdini PH.D. - Atomic Habits by James Clear
- The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
Books can only take you so far, 10 Steps to a Stellar Success Mindset does things differently. It uses hypnosis.
Hypnosis doesn\’t just embed the mindset of success. Hypnosis helps you use your unconscious mind in many other ways – giving you a laser-like focus, unshakeable determination and a strong vision of the future.
Web Hosting
Cloudways
One of the essential tools you need to run your own blog is a blazingly fast website hosting service.
I\’ve been creating websites since the 1990\’s and over the years have tried just about every major website hosting company going. I\’ve also owned and ran several hosting companies with 1,000\’s of clients site\’s, so I know most of the problems people encounter with website hosting.
From shared, sluggishly slow sites with complicated control panels to expensive all singing and dancing \”turbo plus (supposedly) cloud hosting which I managed to bring down to a crawl before eventually crashing with only a handfull of clients sites running.
I spent literally 15 years skipping from one hosting company to another trying to find the ideal hosting platform for my clients and I.
A few years ago I discovered Cloudways
Not only has their service been super fast with awesome uptime – it\’s very easy to use and always kept up to date, but their customer service has been second to none.
Why Cloudways? You NEED an SSL certificate for each website you want to host (the little padlock you see on almost every site indicating it\’s being served over a secure network).
To get a SSL certificate for your site you need a dedicated I.P. – Cloudways provides a dedicated I.P which you can host unlimited websites – And provide up to 100 free SSL certificates for all your domains/sites on the same I.P.
It\’s real cloud hosting! (the majority of hosting companies definition of \”cloud hosting\” is a joke) – you can choose between 5 huge cloud infrastructures such as DigitalOcean, Amazon\’s AWS or Google Cloud so you know your site\’s are going to be fast and have great uptime!
This site is running on Digital Ocean with Cloudways, the only time it\’s ever gone off line was at the same time Twitter went off too, so I suspect it\’s sharing the same services.
I\’m currently using the premium 4GB plan, however I used the 2GB plan the first 2 years and that was fast and ample. If I was to create a new account now I\’d go for the 2GB Premium plan.
* Cloudways and Object Cache Pro have partnered up so you can now save $95 per month on Object Cache Pro as it\’s now included free with 2GB+ plans which is outstanding value for money. *
It\’s also the easiest control panel I\’ve ever used. A few clicks and your site\’s up and running.
A word of caution, they have a very tempting looking slider which is very easy to slide up to a higher plan, but not so easy to slide back down once you\’ve committed, even if just to test out.
Other website hosting companies lead you in with their cheap shared starter plans only for you to discover you need to upgrade to get a dedicated I.P. for an SSL certificate – then if you want more than one website you need to purchase additional certificates and the cost starts getting out of control fast if you want to create various niche affiliate sites.
Click on this link to Get Started Free..
Domain Names
NameCheap
Namecheap has been my domain registrar of choice for 10+ years. FREE privacy protection with an easy to use dashboard. Register a cheap domain with them – pop the I.P in the settings from Cloudways and that\’s it. No messing or additional SSL cert costs as that\’s all covered with Cloudways. Easy.
WordPress Themes & Plugins
Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Architect – the WordPress Visual Editor for Business Builders – Before now, I never realized just how much time I was spending waiting for page reloads while creating content in WordPress.
You can save massive amounts of time with a \”live\” editor like this.
And what I love about this tool is that it doesn\’t just replace the boring and clumsy old WordPress editor, it\’s also a whole sales-page-building suite!
If you build marketing pages and landing pages, this thing is brilliant!
If you use WordPress for your website and want to market anything, then you HAVE to use Thrive Themes! Nothing else compares.
For an all-in-one suite of tools for design, optimization, split testing, e-mail capture, selling your own online courses to login and registration forms. Thrive Themes does it all – and them some!
And it does it all seemlessly, and keeps getting better by the month with all their additions.
The biggest reason why you should delete whatever else you\’re currently using and upgrade to Thrive Themes now is the time you save working on anything is easily worth 10 times whatever the price is.
This thing is brilliant!
Landing Pages
The Fastest Landing Page Builder for WordPress
The success of your online business really depends a lot on just a few key pages on your site. The kinds of \”conversion focused\” pages, where you very specifically turn new visitors into email subscribers, members or customers.
What you\’re about to see here is a new and incredibly easy way to set up conversion-focused pages like this, on any WordPress website. And the best part is: they are already pre-designed and conversion-optimized for you!
If there\’s a faster way to get a professionally designed, high-converting page published in WordPress, I don\’t know it.
E-mail Marketing
For 90%+ of all online businesses, building a mailing list is a top priority.
A mailing list is the key to more traffic, more sales and more personal freedom. There\’s just nothing better than knowing you can send an email with an offer anytime and make $100, $500. $1,000, $5,000 and upwards.
But how do you build that list in the first place?
Thrive Leads: The Ultimate List Building plugin For WordPress
There are many other opt-in plugins out there, but this one is on a completely different level. There are many plugins that give you some options for adding opt-in forms to your site.
But this new plugin takes a different approach: these guys have taken the best conversion optimization technologies and the most advanced list building strategies and crammed them all into a single plugin.
I\’ve swapped out my old opt-in plugins for Thrive Leads and immediately seen a 200%+ increase in opt-ins.
It makes ALL the difference from breaking even on your ad spend to doubling or tripling your initial investment – and that\’s before you start following up with your autoresponder!
E-mail Marketing (Autoresponder)
AWeber
# UPDATE: I\’m moving/moved my email marketing over to the Systeme platform below.
I\’ve used AWeber for what seems forever. 20 years (maybe, if they\’ve been going that long)? I\’ve tried others, (spending 2 days just trying to fathom out how to set-up a simple follow up automation before throwing my PC out the window and heading for the pub) .
The ease of use of the AWeber dashboard makes all the difference of being able to stay sober and quick implementation of creating a new campaign for the latest launch or product/service you\’ve discovered and want to promote.
Become an email marketing pro in no time with their “How to grow your business with email marketing” PDF. Plus, you’ll get access to tons of fantastic templates that help you get up and running quickly.
URL Shortener
Pretty Links
This is the WordPress plugin tool I use to shorten URLs and make them \”pretty.\” It\’s great for creating URLs that you send in emails or share out and about.
The free version, Pretty Links Lite, works for most people, but there is a paid version.
Automatic linking – Pretty Link Pro allows me to take a keyword such as “Cloudways” and every time the word Cloudways appears in my pages or posts, it will automatically link to a pretty link of my Cloudways affiliate link.
Hit tracking & custom reports – for each redirection you setup, you have the option to enable hit tracking on the new link which will track all future clicks on that link. By taking advantage of this feature you have the ability to run custom reports in which you can analyze your link performance based on date ranges, individual links, or groups of links.
A New Shift In Running Your Online Business?
Until very recently, I would steer people away from using \”sales funnel builder\” platforms as you can do almost everything these platforms do using WordPress and my recommendations above, but much cheaper.
However, that was before Systeme came along.
I\’ve used Clickfunnels, (feel like a sheep being led through one sales pitch to the next whilst being charged $99 to $299 a month for the experience).
Builderall (darn near impossible to point an existing domain name to your pages/funnels),
BLOWN $1,400 on Groovefunnels. aka Groove, (into year 2 and still not working).
The features, speed and ease of use of Systeme puts ALL the others to shame.
The Easiest & Fastest Way to Grow Your Online Business
Systeme has all the tools you need to grow your online business
- Create Sales Funnels
- Send Marketing Emails
- Build Websites
- Manage Your Affiliates
- Create Online Courses
- Automate Your Marketing
The cherry on top? You can get started for free.
Create your free account now..
Video
If you haven\’t sussed it yet. The vast majority of people (as in, almost all your client\’s and potential customer\’s) can\’t be bothered reading a few paragraphs of text anymore, in fact, if you\’ve made it all the way down here reading this page, I want to congratulate you.
People\’s attention spans are getting shorter. Even with video, if you\’re not throwing in lot\’s of b roll footage and waving your arms around while talking to keep people\’s attention you\’ve lost them to a shiny object to the side of your video or a FB message notification.
So, along with the above web/sales page and email marketing, you must use video in your marketing!
A few video tools I\’ve found useful
- OBS free software for recording your screen and webcam simultaneously. Great for creating tutorials, courses and software & platform reviews. Create walkthroughs and reviews on anything and everything.
- Davinci Resolve video editor. It\’s incredible, used by Hollywood for post production, and amazingly, it\’s free. There\’s a learning curve. But video content is going to be with us for the foreseeable future so if it\’s unresrticted video editing you\’re after, then it\’s worth learning the basics and grow from there.
- Descript full video editing and screen recording with Ai technology thrown in. Game changing! (and kinda scary what it does). It\’s quite new, until very recently has been focused on being able to record your voice synced up with text editing, so change the text, and what you say changes with the text Now with screen and webcam recording so I\’ll soon be using this instead of Camtasia.
- Camtasia screen recorder and video editor. I use Camtasia to record my webcam and PC screen. However, it costs around $300 but it\’s easy to use with lots of features. One thing is it does not record your webcam in widescreen. It\’s fine for using the (square-ish) webcam footage in a corner within your screen recording (which does record in widescreen). However for stand-alone widescreen webcam footage you can use OBS.
If the video is not for YouTube I\’ll upload to GrooveVideo to host (store up to 15 videos with a Free GrooveFunnels account) You can also embed your GrooveVideo hosted videos into any page, on your WordPress site for example.
Systeme also provide free video hosting on their free account.
Audio
EpidemicSound Royalty-free music and sound effects. This is the website I use for everything. The quality of the music and sound effects is unmatched. You can create 1,000\’s of videos using the music from here without any worries about getting copyright strikes or claims from YouTube.