Products I Love, Use and Trust in Technology & Blogging
I only talk up products that I know inside out, have tested and used for a good while and tremendously love.
For Products that I use, love and trust in the personal development space, hop over here!
Disclaimer: The products here are current affiliate programs in which I proudly participate. This means when you buy something here, I will make a commission but I also give you a fantastic reason to buy through me so you’re well taken care of!
1 ~ Why I love Thesis:
So many reasons I adore Thesis but for the sake of brevity:
First: Thesis is rich, professional, clean, versatile with a killer layout. It is also powerfully customizable to your needs. All your needs. Other themes: been there, done that many times. I spent hours and days to get things right to no avail. Thesis has been my answer since August 2009.
Second (but just as important as First): The outstanding, unmatched and quick-to-respond-and-solve-your-problem customer support. The forums are very closely watched and Godhammer and Girlie, the brains of this operation, answer any question you may have from basic functionality to super complex hooks and coding. These guys rock.
What are you waiting for?
Click the big yellow banner and go! You can grab your copy directly from this link. What an exciting step toward your blogging journey and how smart of you!
2 ~ Why I Am Crazy about ScreenFlow:
How do you learn to use the technology today? In most situations, the answer is by watching a screen recording of someone doing exactly what you need to learn how to do! I have been watching screenflow training videos and demos for years now and they are incredibly useful in visually showing you exactly what you need to do. It is one of the most effective ways to convey the learning and the experience. That’s where ScreenFlow comes in!
ScreenFlow is an application for the Mac and you can try it out for free. It is the easiest and most sophisticated program that allows you to record your screen and then add video actions and audio actions and other “actions” to your video to convey your message and gravitate the attention of the user to certain parts of the screen. It is easy to learn – I spent less than 2 hours and became comfortable with it! It is also reliable and fast and adapts to your style with so many features!
As a consumer of ScreenFlow videos, I have always been happy and now, as a user and creator of it, I am loving it even more – and recommend it wholeheartedly.
Get it now and go off to create, create, and create some more and pass on your knowledge to others in a very effective way.
3 ~ Why I Find So Much Value in MindManager:
The other day, I used MindManager to create an entire mind map of my social network including my innermost circle and the outer circles, my role models, my favorite social media friends, my business partners and teachers. Because this is a visual map, the best way to express this information is using a mind map.
If you have never mind-mapped, you are in for an exciting new expression of your ideas. Imagine the branches and sub-branches from a tree, where the tree is the core of what you are trying to describe – it can be a project, a book idea, a master plan to tackle a problem – and the branches are the answers on several levels.
Mind maps are great for organization of ideas as well as for generating thoughts quickly and effectively. I love using Mind Manager, both on Mac and PC. And they offer a free trial too, just in case you are on the fence.
You won’t go back to expressing your thoughts the old way!
4 ~ Why I love Blogging products by Problogger:
Darren Rowse is not just a popular blogger that has made it big on the blogging scene. He is a sincere, wonderful, and amazing human being and that to me is the true measure of success. I recommend the products of people that I like and those with whom I am proud to be associated. In the last few years, Darren has produced a few select and extremely useful and valuable products for the blogging scene. I have read and used all of them and am a proud affiliate on the 3 listed below.
If you want to take your blogging game to the next level, I’d trust few others besides Darren to lead the way.
Why 31 Days to Bigger Better Blog (31DBBB)?
The 31 Days to Bigger Better Blog (31DBBB) is one of the most popular products on blogging by the beloved Problogger (Darren Rowse) for good reason: This thing is rock solid!
How I used it: I took my time with 31DBBB, close to a few months in fact. I went through it slowly on purpose while using other learning resources in parallel. I always returned to 31DBBB for best advice. It takes time to really implement, test out and digest all the material in this workbook. I recommend you give it 2 to 4 months and do everything at least once. If you do, you shall see great returns.
You can apply every single day’s challenge to your blog – even the days when Darren gets creative and thinks out of the box! There are no mediocre lessons here. The foundation of this workbook is intact and it builds your knowledge steadily. The tips work wonders. I have followed all the advice from 31DBBB over the last year and haven’t a doubt it has seriously helped to grow Prolific Living.
So 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a no-brainer for your blogging investment and now Darren and team have come up with an even more useful book.
Why Guide to Blogging for Your Business?
I remember Darren’s speech at Blogworld about the moment that he turned his blogging from a hobby into a business and he has turned this into a thriving and phenomenal business. He continues to be a great role model in this area for the blogging community.
While the 31DBBB will teach you everything you need to know about setting up the foundations of a successful blog, Blogging for Your Business takes it to the next scale and shows you how to create a business around your blog.
This book talks about taking the “guessing” out of the game and that is the best approach to time-management and taking the right steps from the beginning. It is the perfect follow-up to 31DBBB.
If you are serious about treating your blogging as a business, Darren’s Guide to Blogging for your Business is going to have a lot of answers that are proven strategies to success.
Why The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing?
Without marketing, you have nothing. You may be the genius next door but if no one knows about you, your genius does not have far to go. Marketing is the one area that I have myself put off and regretted. It does not “take care of itself”. You can build it all you want but they won’t come until you tell them who you are and what you have to offer and how they can get it.
This is a lesson that is above all most important when you are establishing a business and I was so, so excited to see Darren add this product offering to his portfolio. It is a book that has my stamp of approval.
Every business needs a marketing strategy. For a blog and products and services that you create around your blog, you need a special type of marketing: online marketing. And I cannot say this enough: You need the online marketing aspect. You can get it here from Darren’s awesome book or somewhere else but don’t forget about it.
5 ~ Why I Love Scribe:
I love that all of my SEO (Search Engine Optimization – a term you will get to know intimately in the blogging world) is so integrated now. Just the fact that Scribe gives me a Content Score for every single post encourages me to go for 100% every time. You learn to do your Title Tags, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords in a well-laid-out system and if you score poorly on your SEO, you know *exactly* what is wrong and Scribe gives you specific suggestions to fix it and move on. I am loving it and it has eased my headache about SEO and increased my traffic in response. These guys are well worth the money and I’ve been with them almost a year now.
What are you waiting for?
Click the nice picture banner below and go! Get Scribe now! What an exciting step toward your blogging journey and how smart of you!
6 ~ How Premise by Copyblogger Rocks:
So I thought I knew how to do landing pages, sales copies, what have you. Then I ran into Premise, the genius product by Copyblogger. The art work is so great, you just want to hover around it and inhale it in. The colors are gorgeous. The whole layout is so brilliantly done and so simplified that you wonder why it wasn’t around sooner.
I have used Premise two different ways. One is to use the whole template and layout for the landing page, such as my Australia and New Zealand Circle of Influence meetups, and one where I used the standard WordPress page layout with Premise buttons, and for that, check out the Fear Crushing Travel Guide page. So however you end up using it, trust me that you will end up LOVING it!
7 ~ Why I Totally Recommend bluehost:
As a new blogger, it is so easy to get caught up in a million things. Heck, as a pro blogger, you get caught up in even more things. But one thing I have learned is that the stuff that is invisible to your readers is the stuff that sometimes makes or breaks it, choices like which hosting company you should go with. That’s the stuff you cannot leave up to chance. That’s the decision that has to be made correctly the first time.
I think you might be hard-pressed to find a hosting company that rocks like these guys. I have used others that I love and will soon promote as well but bluehost is hard to beat on customer support front (super important to bloggers!) and on cost front (lowest in the market, these guys rock)!
It’s up to you but nearly 3 years of blogging says go with this professional hosting company.
8 ~ Why I Absolutely Love & Believe In Pippity:
Sometimes, you just get lucky. I looked high and low for months to find the ideal email popup form for my site. It had to be void of intrusion to my readers. It had to look stylish, professional, gorgeous and it had to be absolutely reliable. It was pure luck for me to meet the developers of Pippity at a conference and to spend weeks beta testing this baby in its early stages. The developers are phenomenal people, super smart and have excellent taste and versatility built into this popup.
Now I am proudly running it with amazing results, which grow every day. If you have seen the other email pop-ups, I have to tell you that they are – well, not pretty. However, everyone knows that a stylish and well-done popup works well and does not run your readers away.
Don’t lose out on subscribers who may not otherwise see your email form or know that you want to send them great stuff. Anyway, don’t wait long and don’t look further. If they pleased someone as selective and doubtful as me, they will please you too.
9 ~ Why I Love Aweber:
One of my regrets about the incredible journey of blogging has been the same regret as other intermediate and even pro bloggers – go ahead and ask them! – and that is the fact that I started my mailing list too late in the game. My goal is to make sure that no one else has this regret!
Your mailing list is your golden opportunity to attract subscribers with whom you can build a two-way relationship. Your RSS feeds and your random traffic and even your Feedburner emails are all one-way, you providing fantastic content but no way to customize those emails to your reader base.
The good news is that I started with the BEST company out there after doing my research: Aweber Communications! These guys rock. I chose them over all others because they provide a month-free service and they have LIVE support where you can talk to someone about your problems on the phone, the traditional kind without the wait and the hassle and with an amazing staff. The features are brilliant, the system is efficient, the information about your subscribers is invaluable and the entire work flow is extremely user-friendly.
What are you waiting for?
The best part about these guys is that you get the first month for FREE – otherwise, I would probably need more lovin’ to be convinced! Click the nice picture banner below and go! Get on Aweber. What an exciting step toward your blogging journey and how smart of you!
10 ~ Why I love Fresh Books:
My brother asks me the other day if I am sick of PayPal fees yet? I say, of course but what am I to do? Then he tells me about FreshBooks. So long as you choose the right option, and your customer or client pays you with Paypal, FreshBooks and PayPal have agreed to a 50 cent flat rate per transaction! Unbelievably sweet! (This is US-to-US transactions though).
But that is just one perk. FreshBooks has beautiful looking invoices, excellent user interface, and lets you create and track customer database and every activity and it actually makes the process of billing joyful and easy!
What are you waiting for?
Get nice and organized with FreshBooks.
11 ~ Why I love WPTouch Pro by BraveNewCode:
You have got to get your blog looking sharp and professional for the mobile users. No question about it! The mobile users are growing by leaps and bounds and if your blog looks as it does on a browser when they bring it up on their tiny screens, how likely are they to read your smashing article? Hmmm. I am not that likely myself.
BraveNewCode people have the best mobile app and the free version is brilliant and works extremely well. I used it for two years. But it lacks some features. For one, I really wanted my comments to be threaded so that the reply would be right under the original comment, making it look like the conversation it really is. Plus, there are a ton of other features along with more reliability and stability in the pro version.
What are you waiting for?
Don’t waste your time looking anywhere else. These guys have the mobile world wrapped around their fingers! It is a one time fee and it is worth it. Don’t lose those mobile readers.
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