Products I Love, Use and Trust in Blogging and Online Marketing
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 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!
3 ~ 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! It has been INVALUABLE to me for my programs and recording my webinars and SO MUCH MORE. Plus, I just LOVE the user interface. These guys did a fantastic job with this application.
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.
4 ~ 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!
5 ~ 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.
6 ~ Why You Need Aweber for your Email Marketing:
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!
7 ~ 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 only).
But that is just one perk. FreshBooks has beautiful looking invoices, excellent user interface, organization beyond what I could do on my own, and it 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.
8 ~ 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!
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