Resources We Love

 Pow­ered by Max Ban­ner Ads 

So you are ready to start build­ing your online busi­ness! Great. When I started I didn’t have a clue where to start. I’ve spent hun­dreds of hours and thou­sands of dol­lars to develop a team of part­ners and ser­vices that I trust and which pro­vide good value. Here are some that I per­son­ally use and rec­om­mend to you with­out reservation …

Where To Get Your Web­site

Do you need a web­site and don’t know where to go or what to do first? You could go to a web designer. The advan­tage is that you have a pro design­ing your site. The dis­ad­van­tages are that: a) it can be expen­sive, b) it can often be a lengthy process, and get­ting small changes done can be both #a and #b; c) you really should learn to do some web changes your­self. I often want to change my copy or a price, or per­haps put up a “Spe­cial” for a spe­cial occa­sion. If you can do it your­self you are miles ahead.

We use a lot of “min­isites” to quickly put up web­sites to sell our prod­ucts. They are sim­ple, uncom­pli­cated sites designed to sell just a few prod­ucts. We get dozens of high-quality tem­plates from EZminisites.com. They are easy to mod­ify and they pro­vide a wealth of online video tuto­ri­als and a really handy forum. We def­i­nitely rec­om­mend them as an inex­pen­sive way to quickly get a sim­ple web­site up and run­ning smoothly. You can see an exam­ple of a suc­cess­ful site we built on one of these tem­plates here. Click the link above to learn more about EZminisites.

When you need some­thing more than a sim­ple, one-page tem­plate, you needn’t look fur­ther than Tem­plate Mon­ster. They offer thou­sands of tem­plates, includ­ing CMS tem­plates for Word­press, Joomla, Dru­pal and oth­ers. It is really an enor­mous selec­tion. Check them out below:

We use Adobe Dreamweaver to build and mod­ify our web­sites. You can get a free trial of Dreamweaver 8 by click­ing here.

We use Adobe Pho­to­shop exten­sively to pre­pare graph­ics and pho­tos for our web­site. Learn­ing to use Pho­to­shop is one of the essen­tial tools of a web designer/entrepreneur. You can learn more and down­load a free trial by click­ing here.

Where To Host Your Web­site

We have over 40 dif­fer­ent web­sites, all run­ning on one “Reseller Host­ing Account” at HostGator.com. This type of account gives me the capa­bil­ity to sell web host­ing to oth­ers, just as if I were a big inde­pen­dent web host­ing com­pany. I could even brand it myself any way I wish. I don’t pro­mote that ser­vice to the gen­eral pub­lic, although I could (I just don’t want to pro­vide tech­ni­cal sup­port to a lot of peo­ple at all hours), but I do sell enough host­ing accounts to friends and busi­ness asso­ciates to cover host­ing all of my own sites for free and return sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars per month in profit. You can’t beat a deal like that. Man­ag­ing a host­ing account is easy and for me — just plain fun. I very highly rec­om­mend Host­Ga­tor.

Where To Get Beau­ti­ful, Inex­pen­sive Images For Your Website

You want beau­ti­ful pho­tog­ra­phy and attrac­tive graph­ics on your web­site. Where do you get them? We buy a lot of pro­fes­sional pho­tos for our many web­sites and know what a huge impact good pho­tos have (both Rick and Kim have degrees in pho­tog­ra­phy). Some stock pho­tog­ra­phy agen­cies charge a for­tune but you can get good pho­tos for only a cou­ple of dol­lars each at Dreamstime.com.

How To Host Videos For Your Website

You can put videos on your own web­site. We have done that a lot and it has worked fine. How­ever, when you reach a cer­tain amount of traf­fic you may have prob­lems. We now store our video files on Amazon’s S3 stor­age sys­tem. You can get an account with them directly. It is a very inex­pen­sive way to host your videos and other files and server them robustly, all over the world. To put your files on Ama­zon S3, we use and absolutely love a ser­vice called EzS3. It makes putting your files up there and man­ag­ing them super easy.  I highly rec­om­mend you give them a try.

Shop­ping Cart Software

Are you look­ing to setup your shop­ping cart but don’t know where to start? Or are you frus­trated by try­ing to get your shop­ping cart and autore­spon­der sys­tem set up and work­ing the way YOU want it to work? If so I have the answer for YOU! There’s a way for you to learn exactly how to get your shop­ping cart and autore­spon­der sys­tem set up and cus­tomized for your busi­ness… WITHOUT hav­ing to wait for a web­mas­ter, WITHOUT hav­ing to pay through the roof for expert help, and WITHOUT hav­ing to mess around with hard-to-understand help menus and user guides. You see Christina Hills (The Shop­ping Cart Queen) took out all the guess work and made a 5 step tuto­r­ial for you to get your shop­ping cart setup and cus­tomized specif­i­cally for you quickly and eas­ily. Click The Link Below To Get Started.

What are “key­words” and why do you need them? Find out here …

Key­words are how poten­tial cus­tomers will find you in the search engines. You use them in your own adver­tis­ing to tar­get just the cus­tomers you want click­ing on your ads. Here is a really cool tool that I’m using to spy on my Adwords com­pe­ti­tion, and come up with more key­words I can use for my cam­paigns. It’s It installs right into your web browser and I can’t even tell it’s run­ning when my browser’s open. It is a great way to “spy” on your com­pe­ti­tion to see what key­words they are bid­ding on in Google Adwords. Visit PPC Web Spy to learn more.

Add Amaz­ing Ani­mated Slide Shows To Your Videos And Web Pages

Ani­moto is just the coolest thing! Turn a folder full of pho­tos into a mind blow­ing slide show video that your clients will love. They will think you are a genius, so don’t spoil that magic by telling them that you made it in min­utes with Ani­moto. If you are asked to pro­duce video slide shows for wed­ding recep­tions, anniver­saries, birth­days… you will go crazy over it. You just have to try it.

Print­ing Your Direct Mail And Adver­tis­ing Pieces

Direct mail is not dead and it is a very impor­tant com­po­nent to any good mar­ket­ing plan, from your busi­ness cards to prod­uct pack­ag­ing and brochures. Print Place is our “go to” place for qual­ity, inex­pen­sive print­ing. We use them reg­u­larly and have always been com­pletely sat­is­fied with the qual­ity of their work and the prices are really a bar­gain.  Tip: get good busi­ness cards and hand them them out freely. (Maybe get some images from Dreamstime.com men­tioned above — that’s where we got ours).

Share on Facebook