RECOMMENDED TOOLS
Best Newbie Training Programs
Training is critical when learning how to market online. When getting started -- affiliate marketing is the preferred method to start as a newbie, because you get paid while learning how to sell someone else's products, versus having to create your own. These products in this section on not only the best training products to learn from, but they all have their very own affiliate programs you can sign up for after purchasing them.
MARKETING TRAINING ECOSYSTEM
Parnter With Anthony
Partner with Anthony is a progrma Anthony Morrison created for his students to learn the ins and outs of what it takes to begin building an online marketing business while you make money referring it to other people. The training is built out into session videos that walk you step-by-step. setting up your new business and plugging everything in the absolute correct way. Essentially, Anthony allows you to partner with his products while he trains you.
MARKETING & AFFILIATE TRAINING
Invincible Marketer
This guy is legit. He understands what it's like to be broke. He's also very genuine and responds back quickly when you email him. Not only that, but he teaches in a way that helps you get it quickly. What exactly are you getting? An 'over the shoulder', step-by-step program that takes a beginner with minimal knowledge of generating sales online, and transforms them into a confident, capable and profitable affiliate entrepreneur.
MARKETING EDUCATION ECOSYSTEM
The Four Percent Group
The Four Percent Group by Vick Strizheus is a multi-million dollar, online marketing infrastructure for the modern-day entrepreneur to receive educational and product-centric training. Their training products such as the Affiliate Marketing Masterclass eliminates confusion and overwhelm for most beginners. Create a fee account right now to begin going through courses such as 7 Steps to Freedom or get their free Mass Traffic Blueprint.
BLOG/MARKETING TRAINING
The Authority Site System
This is system is known as TASS. It was created by Mark Webster and Gael Breton. It's different from the Four Percent Group, but the two can complement each other. TASS will set you up with what I believe to be the WordPress best blog creation and long-term affiliate marketing success. The Four Percent Group promotes blog use, but uses a more short-term and higher cost affiliate marketing strategy. Use the link below to get free training in a special webinar offer.
MARKETING/CONVERSION TRAINING
Thrive University
Thrive University gives you FREE access to guides, courses & webinars. This is seriously one of the best places you can go to learn high-end skills for free. Thrive Themes is one of my most trusted brands! If you need to create websites, landing pages and opt-in forms that are built for maximum conversions, this is the right place for you.
TRAFFIC GENERATION TRAINING
Audience From Scratch
Learn how the masters behind Thrive Themes get dedicated fans who can't wait to buy everything they create! And yes, this is possible without paying for expensive ads or posting aimlessly on social media. There are no tricks, loopholes or passing fads that suddenly stop working and leave you high and dry in this course. Only credible information to help you work smarter and not harder to get the laser target traffic you've always wanted sent to your offers.
Essential Online Business Tools
Without these core products you're still in the dreaming stage. That's because having a website is like your hub or home on the internet. It's a place people can learn more about you and validate your credibility. Until you make a commitment here don't even bother doing anything else.
WORDPRESS/WEBSITE HOSTING
WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting is my #1 Hosting recommendation for several reasons. Mainly because of their 99% uptime and multiple security elements like anti-bruteforce shields, anti-ddos protection and cloud technology. This means when hackers hit the servers your site is 100% unaffected, unlike every other hosting plan. Plus, it's scalable, blazing fast, excellent customer service, free SSL, and they migrate or setup your WordPress Site for FREE. It's a little pricier than most plans, but way worth it. However, when I first got started, Bluehost was perfect for me in terms of price and quality.
WEBSITE/BLOGGING SYSTEM
WordPress
WordPress has grown to be the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (CMS) to date. It currently powers more than 30% of the internet and growing at an alarming rate. The .org is WordPress’ self-hosted platform and their .com isn’t. Before you install WordPress, as a self hosted site you will need a domain name and a good web hosting company that knows WordPress.
WEBSITE CUSTOM THEME BUILDER
Thrive Theme Builder
Simply put, this is the best theme your money can buy for WordPress. It's optimized, incredibly fast and 100% fully customizable with a walk through guide on how to put it all together. This comes with your Thrive Suite Membership, which comes with several more bells and whistles for your website along with getting every plugin and new plugin for free. Your site will resemble those of marketing professionals with their easy-to-use drag and drop editor.
LANDING PG/LEAD CAPTURE BUILDER (WP PLUGIN)
Thrive Thrive Architect
This is one of the highest landing page builders out there. It's built from the ground up for business and conversion focused WordPress websites. They've removed every possible barrier between the business idea in your head and a professional presence of that business on your website. Again, this comes with your Thrive Suite Membership, which gives you all the bells and whistles you could possibly need. Clickfunnels is a great alternative if you're against WordPress for some reason. You'll just have to pay a bit more for it.
DOMAINS & EMAIL
Name Cheap
Namecheap is a leading ICANN-accredited domain name registrar. Buy all your domains here and keep them in one spot. Need a business email account that matches your domain. No problem! Namecheap makes registering and managing domains and private business email accounts easy and affordable. So much that they have about 3 million customers and more than 7 million domains under management. I use it because it's been the most universal when working with other hosting and third party app providers.
EMAIL/CONTACT MANAGER
Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign isn't the cheapest tool on the block. However, their customer service, onboarding, and superior A/B testing features make it shine high above the rest. I also love their powerful follow-up automation building system that takes sending emails to a whole new level. This level provides one of the best customer experiences I've seen in an email manager. Again, I use the best of the best, but if you're looking for something a lil cheaper I would go with Getrepsonse as a close secondary product
Payment and Subscription Gateways
If you were like me and always wondered how to accept online payments to sell your products, prevent access to certain pages, or convert people to expiring offers, well look no more. I've found everything that you would need to do that with right here.
PAYMENT GATEWAY
ThriveCart
Now you can finally start earning an income from selling anything you want. And not just any income. You can be confident that ThriveCart makes it super easy, so that you get the highest converting cart pages for the most amount of money with their sleek designs and onetime offers. And did I mention upsells and affiliate campaigns to allow other people to promte your stuff? Yes, you can do that too and much more.
SALES CONVERSION BOOSTER
ConvertBox
These aren't ugly static popups! In short, you can drive more leads and sales by engaging the right visitors at the right time. This allows you to deliver a more personalized experience with smart, high-converting on-site messages. Start boosting your engagement with more personalized messaging with multi choice funnels, countdown timers, tracking and much more.
MEMBERSHIP MANAGEMENT SOLUTION
Wishlist Member
With 'WishList Member' you have a powerful tool to protect your pages via membership gateway at your fingertips. This one tool takes the time and frustration out of trying to prevent access to content you should be getting paid for. Moreover, you can build full out membership sites with multiple levels of access.
COURSE CREATION SOLUTION
Thrive Apprentice
By now, you should already know Thrive Themes is a beast of a company with several phenomenal products. Thrive Apprentice makes no exception when it comes to creating and selling your very own WordPress courses. Once again, you get all these badass products when you become a member by purchasing Thrive Suite.
Advanced Marketing Tools
Generating leads and engaging your audience are a must if you want to make money online. These tools not only help engage your audience, but they convert them into buying customers no matter what you have to offer.
LANDING PG/LEAD CAPTURE BUILDER (WP PLUGIN)
Provely
With Provely you'll get an increase in website conversions. It works because for some reason when a prospect knows someone else has just purchased or opt-in to your lead magnet it's proven that they are more than likely to do the same thing. So, after someone has opt-in to a form proof will display a verified recent customer activity notification in the bottom corner of your screen. Another more expensive option is Proof. I have yet to test Proof out, but I hear good things about it.
WEBINAR AUTOMATION
Webinar Fuel
This is hands down one of the best automated webinar systems I've used to date. It's built for internet marketers by internet marketers. It's an automated webinar software that plays your webinars (recorded videos) as evergreen events. Furthermore, it offers next level automation by including all the bells and whistles you would need such as email notifications, chat features, contact management, tracking codes, split testing, dynamic registration widgets, and much more. There is no other automated webinar experience that actually feels like real live webinars on the web or mobile than Webinar Fuel.
CONTENT MANIPULATOR
Spin Rewriter
As you learn about SEO (search engine optimization) or article marketing and want to easily produce original articles and backlinks for 80% less time than you will want this. I've personally used it to rewrite my PLRs, creating instant content that I can use as articles and even lead magnets to give away or sale. The spinning software allows you to input text (like an article or blog post) and then create randomly generated variations of it by replacing or rearranging selected words, phrases and sentences within paragraphs.
KEYWORD RESEARCH & ANALYSIS
Mangools
This is a powerhouse system of tools that I use to help my website articles get found, gain tracking, and outrank my competitors. Their number one tool is most likely their keyword finder. You can literally find hundreds of keywords with low competition. That means people have a better chance at finding your articles on search engines when searching for these keywords you'd use in your article. Their suite of tools also includes SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis, Rank Tracking, and Backlink Analysis.
Advanced Intelligence (AI) Copywriting
Anyword
With this predictive performance tool, you'll never worry about what to say again. This can literally create and optimize all your copy writing needs. If you are writing ad, landing page, social media post, blog, email, SMS, or anything related Anyword can save you time and headache. We're talking about created copy that targets your key demographics in seconds, and it only gets smarter as you use it.
Productivity Tools
Generating leads and engaging your audience are a must if you want to make money online. These tools not only help engage your audience, but they convert them into buying customers no matter what you have to offer.
PASSWORD MANAGER
LastPass
This has been the best thing for me since sliced bread. Seriously! I never have to worry about wasting time on those silly forgot password links. Also, if you aren't already using a password manager, you're probably using the same few passwords on many different websites or you've got notes or spreadsheets with all your passwords written down. Both of those are terrible for your online security. This will fix all that.
LINK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Build Redirects
No matter what business you're in you need a link management tool. I also used Clickmagick. Actually I prefer Clickmagick when it comes to tracking my sales in more advance funnel building. They are both excellent and your more premium link trackers and managers to track who clicks what and how along with instantly redirect traffic without actually changing, editing and re-uploading. You can also set specific rules like geo-based targeting, ip redirection, conversion based redirection.. and so much more!
LINK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Click Magick
Like Build Redirects, Click Magick is a link management tool to help you track, test, and improve your marketing. However Click Magic is more robust, has better customer support and contiues to build out features their customers want on a monthly basis.
NOTE TAKING & IDEAS
Work Flowy
WorkFlowy is an outlining app used to take notes that runs on the Web. Although it looks like a word-processing document, it becomes so much more. Unlike Evernote or OneNote, you don’t need to open up new “notebooks” or “notes” to add stuff too. Instead, everything in WorkFlowy is part of an organized list all on one nested page of sub sections. The link below gets you 250 more free items per month. Workflowy is a notebook for lists. Use it to be more creative and productive.
CALENDAR, APPOINTMENTS, & BOOKING SYSTEM
Acuity Scheduling
Acuity is one of the best scheduling tools I've used and I've used quite a few. Acuity Scheduling for me has the most pieces from all the other schedulers out there packaged into this one tool. The Interface is super easy to navigate through, which gives me complete control with things like locations, employees, getting paid, and collecting everything I need to know about a client or customer as soon as they schedule with me. Even if my opinion didn't matter, it's my clients doing all the boasting about how easy it is for them.
Screen and Video Recording Software
Without these products my video and marketing would have been in trouble. These will enhance you value driven content to your audiences.
RECORD & CREATE VSL
Easy Video Sales Letter
EasyVSL has a community of over 40,000+ now, boosting it to the #1 Video Sales Letter Creation Software on the market. You can crank out very professional looking videos with all the bells and whistles. Although you can use Camtasia or Screenflow (below), I highly suggest Easy VSL if you're interested in saving serious time or you're only interested in making VSLs. VSLs get your message across better than text or audio, because of the visually appealing and higher converting connection than 'normal' sales letters.
CONTENT ENHANCER
Snagit
Snagit lets you share what can't be put into words. Easily create custom images and videos for demos, feedback, reviews, and more. Snag any image and enhance it with effects or create a quick video or screen clipping. Then share your creations instantly with anyone no matter what you're working on. I love Snagit because it helps me eliminate confusion of what I may be trying to communicate to someone else.
VIDEO & SCREEN RECORDING (MAC)
Screen Flow
With video being everywhere nowadays, ScreenFlow for mac users is almost non-negotiable. ...You need it or you will eventually need it if you hope to scale and grow your business. ScreenFlow is an award winning and easy to use video editing, screen recording and sharing tool. You'll love your ability to create screencasts, video tutorials, presentations and so much more.
VIDEO & SCREEN RECORDING (PC & MAC)
Camtasia
Like I said with ScreenFlow, Camtasia is no different. It just happens to be a MAC's alternative for Windows. Some minor differences include the price. Camtasia runs $100 more and can be ran on both a MAC and PC. Camtasia also has a few more options and can seem more complicated or ideal for expert users.
Great Reads For the Entrepreneur
It's true that most people get far more value out of the books than out of all the tools they ever used because of the amount of value you can get for the price. Below are some of the best books I've read or have been told would be the most beneficial for building an online business.
Don't Make Me Think
BY STEVE KRUG | 2006
This book talks about the problem with web sites. Put simply, most people put too much content on websites and they wonder why they don't have more engagement. Every chapter is loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veterans alike. Beware... It may completely change the way you think about web design.
How To Win Friends & Influence People
BY DALE CARNEGIE
This book is an all time best seller on winning people to your way of thinking. Moreover, changing people without arousing resentment. Bottom line and in all seriousness -- read this book and you will master the principles of human relationships!
Think & Grow Rich
BY NAPOLEON HILL
Although this may sound a bit cliche, this book is an absolute 'must read' for anyone wanting to succeed in life. Although it's dated, the principles are timeless. The topics are dense and effective at allowing the reader to both reflect and take action.