SOME OF MY FAVORITE RESOURCES AND TOOLS BUSINESS

On any given day, I'm asked for recommendations for products, courses, or other resources. In fact, I get so many questions, that I decided to create a resource page as a quick guide to some of my most common recommendations.

Many of the resources outlined here are products or courses I personally use on a regular basis. But even if they are not part of my daily routine, please know that I only recommend things I have personally tested or used, and, therefore can stand behind.

In many instances, the links here (just click on the name in ORANGE) will bring you to a sales page associated with my affiliate account. That means if you click the link here, and then buy whatever is at the other end, I may be compensated for the referral.

Not sure if something on this list is right for you? Click that “contact” link on the left and ask me. Or schedule a 15 minute call for more in-depth questions. 

So, in no particular order, here are the resources I'm liking and recommending right now:

BUSINESS GROWTH COMMUNITIES

TITANS XCELERATOR (Brain Kurtz's Virtual Mastermind) is a community-based program designed for the next generation of direct response marketers. It offers members access to expert guidance, networking opportunities, and resources to help them grow their businesses. As a member, I participate in coaching sessions, hot seat discussions, guest expert presentations, and a supportive community of like-minded entrepreneurs.

NAMS (Novice to Advanced Marketing System) is an online learning community, ideal for consultative professionals (attorneys, accountants, coaches, financial planners, etc.), educators, authors, and other entrepreneurs who want to build online revenue channels in their information or service based businesses. Training covers all essential topics you might want to learn about, from email marketing to online traffic to joint ventures and affiliate marketing, and much more. I've been a member since 2014 and cannot recommend NAMS highly enough!

SOCIAL MARKETING TOOLS

PROMOREPUBLIC is a content assistant for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, & Pinterest, scheduling. PromoRepublic provides you with original, visually engaging, industry specific content that you can customize and schedule to post across multiple social platforms.

APPOINTMENT SCHEDULER

CALENDLY – If you regularly meet with other people as part of your business routine, either in-person or virtually, you probably have had to deal with the annoying back-and-forth of trying to find a mutually-available time to meet. There are a great many tools I've encountered to help make appointment scheduling easier – but none of them has worked for me as well as Calendly. It's a simple, clean interface, and enables you to schedule all kinds of different appointment types, including paid appointments and team meetings. And it seamlessly integrates with Google Calendar, making it simple to schedule around your current availability. 

WEB HOSTING

Like many website owners, I have moved hosting companies regularly, thinking they are pretty much all the same. You know the big name guys… I've been with almost all of them. But after being burned by bait-and-switch schemes, poor customer service, and unexpected server failures that cost me both time and money, I'm thrilled to have found A2 HOSTING. Their shared servers run at lightning speed, and they are highly responsive and easy to work with.

If you are looking for an enterprise level solution, you might want to check out LIQUID WEB. They are one of the best operations out there for handling big sites and lots of data. I take customer support very seriously, and so do both of these companies.

LEAD CAPTURE & LIST BUILDING

NOTE: These are some awesome tools, but you don't need them all. If you need help determining which one(s) may be right for you, feel free to get in touch with me for some guidance.

WISHLOOP is a suite of list building tools to help you grow your email list really effectively using pop-ups, welcome mats, stand-alone landing pages, and call-to-action overlays on third-party websites. It may be one of the most powerful and sophisticated, yet easy-to-use list builders I have ever seen.

UPVIRAL is an extreme list-building platform that can help you explode the pace of list building and the size of your list through intelligent viral sharing

VIDEO COMMUNICATION TOOL

DUBB is a VIDEO page builder, that enables you to create mini landing pages using video and call-to-action buttons. But the part I like the most is that you can build custom campaigns via email or social media with teaser images that drive traffic to these landing pages better than anything else I've seen. Plus, you can create videos and landing pages on-the-fly using their mobile app. It's a genius way to customize outreach emails or post-meeting “thank you” emails, for example.

EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER

GET RESPONSE and AWEBER both provide the greatest flexibility, best integration with external platforms, and to have world-class tutorials and support. They are pretty darn sophisticated, reasonably easy to use, and, unlike MailChimp (which I also like a lot), they allow affiliate promotions on their systems.

…but if you want something that's cheap, powerful, and easy to use, then I highly recommend you sign up for BIRDSEND. It's an email platform from the Indonesia-based team behind the shopping cart and affiliate management platform, ZAXAA.

FORM BUILDER (WITH SUPERPOWERS)

PAPERFORM is my choice (over Typeform, which I used previously) for a lot more than just building “contact” forms. For example, I use it to take payments for services and subscriptions, generate custom auto-response emails to people who request information, notify me “real-time” when a lead comes in, integrate with other tools thru Zapier, build stand-alone landing pages, and use conditional logic to ask relevant follow-up questions. And you know it's good, because I use it for my clients too! Just saying.

FUNNEL & PAGE BUILDER

CONVERTRI is cloud-based landing page and funnel builder. At first, I didn't think I needed ANOTHER landing page builder. But then I saw the sophistication of this platform and the speed which pages loaded… and I was sold. I'm now moving almost all my landing, sales, and other custom pages to Convertri. There are MANY options out there. This is the one I use (and I love it).

SHOPPING CARTS & AFFILIATE PLATFORMS

THRIVECART is easily the smartest shopping cart system I've used online. With it, you can build checkout pages and one-click upsells, add bump offers, recurring payments, and a whole lot more. Plus, it gives you the ability to add affiliates to any of your products. In 2021, they also added a course/product delivery module as part of their package.

iDEV AFFILIATE is a feature-rich 3rd party plugin you can use to connect al of your existing tools, track affiliates, offer coupons, and more. It includes integrations to over 175 different tools to make connecting-the-dots easy, and their reporting is super detailed.

JV ZOO, WARRIOR PLUS, and CLICKBANK are three other platforms that are widely utilized in the online marketing world. They allow you to make sales through affiliates without needing your own shopping cart or payment processor.

MEMBERSHIP SITE MANAGEMENT

NOTE: These are some awesome tools, but you don't need them all. If you need help determining which one(s) may be right for you, feel free to get in touch with me for some guidance.

PRODUCT DYNO is a cloud-based platform that allows you to create full membership sites (like the other two options I've listed here). But you can also use it to protect content or documents on any page you manage online (provided you can add a line of code to that page). If you sell (or plan to sell) any kind of digital content, anything from ebooks and training, to plugins, desktop tools or web-based, software services this is worth your consideration.

AMEMBER is a VERY sophisticated WordPress add-on to manage your own membership (protected access to your products) as well as affiliate program. It has a lot more features than those, but they're the main reason I recommend Amember instead of a typical “plugin.” Incidentally, this is kinda technical, so they even provide free installation as part of your purchase.

WEBINAR TOOLS

WEBINAR NINJA and DEMIO are my personal choices for webinar platforms. They are both built for ease-of-use. Neither has the bells and whistles you'll find on “marketing” focused webinar platforms (which, for the average business, is just fine. Of course, if you're looking to sell on your webinars, you might want to have a look at WEBINAR JAM.

FACEBOOK MESSENGER CHATBOT

MOBILE MONKEY came to the party a few years after competitors like ManyChat and Chatfuel, and, in doing so has been able to skip ahead on the learning curve and innovate in the area of chatbots for marketing, while its competitors are still overly technical (and intimidating) for most users. Facebook's Messenger is a marketing channel that both B2C and B2B businesses cannot ignore, and this tool will help them get more out of it, through automation and integrations with their existing marketing activities.

OUTSIDE THE BOX MARKETING

CARDSFORCLIENTS.COM – I use this awesome direct mail service to build relationships with prospects and existing clients by sending automated greeting card and gift campaigns. Relationships, after all, are the cornerstone of a longer lifetime value of your customers. This service is especially useful at developing a direct mail program that's inexpensive and highly targeted (something your competition isn't doing).

MARKETING BOOST is a super low-cost way of adding extreme value to whatever you offer for sale. Use this service to bundle free vacation or hotel or restaurant discounts with your offer. While other businesses are racing to the bottom on price, I've used incentives like these to stand out from competitors in both capturing leads and making sales.

CONTENT FOR YOUR WEBSITE

CONTENT STUDIO – Not too keen on creating lots of original content, but still want to benefit from the authority (and search engine rankings) that great content can bring you? The answer is content curation, and this tool is the top of the line when it comes to finding, formatting, and publishing exceptional curated content for both your website as well as content to share on social media.

SCRIPTED is a membership service that provides businesses a marketplace connecting businesses with highly-skilled and vetted content writers who can produce everything from blog posts to emails to infographics (and a ton more). 

DONE-FOR-YOU CONTENT FOR COACHING & TRAINING

COACH GLUE & CONTENT SPARKS are two terrific sources of done-for-you content. There are a great many content, Private Label Rights, and template providers out there who produce some pretty mediocre stuff – but that's definitely not the case with these two sites, which create done-for-you programs, courses, presentations and more for, with an emphasis on materials for coaches, trainers, and business consultants.

PLR ME offers a similar range of high-quality done-for-you content, but is focussed mainly in the self-help and personal finance niches.

IDPLR is a repository of general content that you can use for lead magnets, website content, email content, and lots more (they even have PLR software) on just about any subject you can think of.

GRAPHICS CREATION TOOL

CANVA has become my go-to design tool for just about any job – from logo design to social media posts to blog and social headers to print materials.