Advanced Resources & Tools

advanced resourcesI’ve put this page together for all the Internet Marketers and info product business owners out there who already have an existing business and are looking for tools and resources to help take their business to the next level.

As your business grows, I know it can be hard to know which tools and resources are the right ones to invest in, so I’ve made this list of the applications, websites and services I have used in my own business.

I only recommend resources that I trust, and have tried or used in my own business. I still use most of these tools now, and those that I don’t is only because of my switch from PC to Mac.

Tracking & Testing

  • Go Try This – This is an awesome online app that allows me to track all of my affiliate links in one place. It also means I can change an affiliate link on the fly if I want to test a different offer or if the merchant changes the details, and it will update across all of my sites. GTT also has loads of cool features for split testing which are really handy when you get into the testing and conversions optimization stages of your business

Business Centralization & Affiliate Management

  • Nanacast Business Centralization – I know I mentioned this in the main resources section, but I wanted to touch on just how powerful Nanacast can be for your business. The ability to easily roll out new products, as well as setup upsells and downsells on the fly can have a dramatic impact on your business. That, coupled with the powerful affiliate system which makes your products super easy to promote, means you really should look at upgrading to Nanacast as soon as you can afford it if you’re selling information products, or you’re probably leaving money on the table.

Product Creation & Screen Recording

  • Camtasia (PC & Mac) – The industry standard screen capture software. Allows you to record on-screen action or presentations with audio – which makes it a fantastic training and product creation tool.
  • Screenflow (Mac) – Another fantastic screen capture application. Has many of the same features as Camtasia and also allows you to add some cool effects to your screen recordings.
  • Keynote (Mac) – If you’re going to create presentations on a Mac, you should use Keynote. It has many powerful features and makes creating beautiful looking presentations a breeze
  • Powerpoint (PC) – Powerpoint makes it easy to create great presentations you can use as part of your products or sales materials
  • Snagit (PC) – You often need to snap images of your screen when creating products, blog posts or other sales materials. Snagit makes it easy to create and edit these sort of images. Snagit for Mac is now available in beta version – click here for access.

Video & Cloud Hosting

  • Amazon S3 – Streaming high quality video and other media can eat up your hosting bandwidth, and also be very slow on traditional servers. By using Amazons Cloud computing platform, your data is syndicated across computer networks around the world so you can stream data faster, and amazon only charge you a minimal amount.

Mind Mapping & Process Mapping

  • Mindjet Mindmanager (PC/Mac) – This is the professional solution for creating mindmaps for planning, organization or idea brainstorming. I use mindmaps to plan out all of my products, and they’re also great for showing other people various processes in your business.
  • Freemind (PC/Mac) – A fantastic open source alternative for mapping out your plans and ideas as mindmaps.
  • Omnigraffle Professional (Mac) – If you want to create process diagrams and other diagrams for your business such as flowcharts, Omnigraffle makes it easy.

Business Organization

  • Roboform (PC) – If you’re anything like me you’ll find managing all the logins you need to run your business a nightmare. Roboform takes the hassle out of this by storing them securely on your system. You can store multiple logins for any one site, and also setup automatic form-filling to make logging in much faster.
  • 1Password (Mac) – Offers most of the same features as Roboform, only for Mac.
  • Things (Mac/iPhone) – This software makes it super easy to manage projects and tasks with it’s to-do list system. You can organise to-dos by project and schedule them so you can see what you have to do urgently, and what you have put off for another time.