In this post, I am going to share with you some other good tools that I found is very useful, within each section you will find a link, click on that and it will take you directly to their page where you can find out more information.

Gmail

Gmail is a highly recommended (FREE) email service. You may wonder why I am recommending an email account when 99.9% of the population has at least one anyway? Well, the reason for this one above all others is as you will find when joining traffic exchanges and list builders programs etc, many of them insist you to use Gmail.

Gmail has fairly unlimited space, so there’s really no reason for you to keep deleting everything. Instead, just archive it. This will keep only unanswered stuff in your in-box, and everything else is archived, which you can get access to later if you want.

Another great thing about this email service is – custom keyboard short-cuts. Once you enable it, you’ll see a tab at the top of settings, next to ‘off-line’ that says keyboard short-cuts. You can change them if you want, or leave them as is. My favourites are ‘c’ for compose, ‘e’ for archive, the short-cut for ‘select read
conversations’ and ‘go to all mail’. This can save you a huge amount of time. Go to Gmail to find out more information.

HTML editor (Nvu)

An HTML editor is software, used for creating web pages. Although HTML can be written for a web page with any text editor, specialized HTML editors offer convenience and added functions within the suite. You may find that your web hosting already has HTML editing within it, or like WordPress, uses cpanel, but that’s something to look into in your own time. Nvu or Kompozer are free, easy to use and just plain simple if you are new to using them, so they are definitely what I would recommend. Have a look here at NVU

WordPress

I think this is the BEST CMS ever – and it’s completely free! You can install it in seconds if you have a c-panel for your hosting. Just login to c-panel, find and click on the icon called ‘fantasticos’, and on the left hand menu click on wordpress. Then fill in a few blanks and you have it installed!

Even if you don’t have c-panel, you can still use it as a free blog, although you won’t get the exposure this way. You can then do a search for ‘free wordpress themes’ in Google – and get all kinds of high quality designs that you can install in a click of a button – FOR FREE! Its powerful stuff.

In regarding to the wordpress theme, there are many free ones to choose from, but for your long-term business benefit, I highly recommend you to check out these professional WordPress Themes. To download free wordpress software, go here.

AutoResponder

An autoresponder is like an email management service. If you have only a few subscribers, it’s not much hassle confirming them on your list, sending out emails every few days etc, but imagine as your list grows into hundreds and thousands subscribers, how will you cope then?

You need an autoresponder, and it needs to be filled with pre-written follow-up letters so your business runs on auto-pilot. This could be a free report, webinar, audio seminar, or other instant-gratification freebie. It takes a prospect on average 7 times of seeing an offer before they will take action. So this is why an autoresponder is essential. And based on the study, this tool is still the best online method for converting prospects into customers or clients.

A great autoresponder I use and recommend is Aweber. You upload your emails into the autoresponder, then schedule them to go out, daily weekly, monthly, when you choose. It’s a set-and-forget, once you’ve set it up, you can forget about it!

Dropbox

Dropbox is a handy storage service for your files, enabling you to sync files in one location. It’s free to download and you get 2GB of storage. It acts like another hard drive on your computer, a portable one almost, and it’s very easy to use, it’s a quick and easy way to share documents and ebooks. If you want to get more Dropbox space, you can through refer your friends, by doing that, you will earn more space! Take a closer look at Dropbox

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is not only a powerful Internet tool, but it‘s also free. It is possibly the most well-known and widely used of all the web analytics applications. It’s a free tool that provided by Google which can be used to analyze your web traffic to your website or blog.

The up-to-date reports provided by Google Analytics and the easy format is just one of the reasons why Google Analytics is a great tool for you. Most businesses use some sort of tool to track website traffic, numbers and types of visitors, number of pages viewed per visitor, and the various web traffic sources. Google Analytics gives you all this in a free tool with loads of plug-ins.

Google Analytics enables you to view all of your website”s statistics in little graphs and charts. These graphs are not just pretty, they actually mean something. You can find out about your visits and page views, which visitors are repeat customers and which ones are brand new, and you can also see what part of the world your visitors have come from. This information is enough for you to have an understanding of what you need to do to change, or create on your website to increase visits and hold customers attentions better, take a look here.

Few of the resources are not free, and there are also some of the free alternatives to help you sustain the long term success of a genuine online business.

Business Software Essentials

Open Office – For anyone that doesn’t own Microsoft Office, this is free downloadable software that contains the equivalent spreadsheet, word processor and presentation programs like Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint etc. A must for any business, it also works with any existing MS Office files. For anyone creating e-books, this is all the software you’ll need!

PDF Creators

PrimoPDF – This is a free tool for creating PDFs. Most information products like e-books are distributed as PDFs because they can be viewed on all operating systems (e.g. Windows or Mac) and so are universally friendly. The original PDF creator package, Acrobat Writer, will set you back around $500 so this free tool can save you quite a lump sum.

CutePDF – Another great free PDF creator but requires a little extra work to install compared to PrimoPDF.

ViralPDF – You need to check out this site. It is such a powerful product for creating a ton of extra sales and affiliates for your own products or the products you promote. Check out the entertaining “How To” videos that show just how Viral PDFs work. I’ve used them in the past and saw the traffic to my websites increase dramatically and immediately resulting in a great boost in sales.

Graphics Tools and Services

Gimp – A powerful graphic design program, its equivalent in many ways to the expensive Adobe Photoshop software but without the price tag. Works on most operating systems. Pretty cool!

Design Outpost – One of the best places to go for graphic design, all you do is post your project and the amount you?re willing to pay after which the Design Post guys will go to work churning out dozens of different designs for you to look at. They’ll work with you to tweak the designs to best suit your needs. It’s also a great starting place to go look at other designs and logos when trying to get design ideas for your up and coming projects.

Beside that, here are some extremely useful image editors resources list to help you doing great work in your graphic design.

Killer Covers – The KING of graphics and ebook covers Vaughan Davidson doesn’t come cheap but if you have more money than time and want to get started very quickly his “Killer” Website Brand Pack is the best in the business and will be ready within 7 days or your money back!

Audio & Video Resources

Audacity – Audio recording and editing free resource for recording, editing and converting your digital audio files. The support ain’t the best though so you can normally find a bunch of video tutorials on how to use the product on YouTube.

Wink – It is a tutorial and presentation creation software aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel for example). Using Wink you can capture screen-shots, add explanation boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial.

CamStudio – Screen Recorder – You can use this to create some very nice flash tutorials. It allows you to record a video of what is displaying on your screen along with audio if you want to do a voice over. A lot of people are using this instead of paying for the industry standard screen capture tool Camtasia Studio which sells for $299
Camtasia Studio.

Camtasia Studio – Although on the expensive side, Camtasia studio is currently the best screen recorder on the planet and an invaluable asset for creating online video content. You should take advantage of it and get a 30 day free trial of Camtasia Studio.

Screencast: Video Publishing – when you create videos to be viewed online you’re going to need somewhere to store them and then stream them to visitors. If you store and stream them on your own server this can tend to slow up the loading speed of your website and in addition eat up your bandwidth. For a small monthly fee Screencast allows you to do this from their website making everything run much more efficiently.