10 Tools You Should Be Using (But Probably Aren’t)

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I wanted to post something yesterday, but didn’t have any time to do so. I honestly barely had enough time to sleep. I’ve been working on landing pages and new campaigns for the past two straight days. When I stopped last night, I realized how much longer everything I do would be without the basic tools I use on a daily basis. Inspiration followed, and here we are. Below is a list of ten tools I’m currently using that you should probably be using too. They’re presented in no specific order, and I don’t have a vested interest in anything listed here.

1 - Google Apps for Business

Branded google apps. For your business. On your domain. Badass, right? Gmail (with 25 gigs of storage), Google Docs, Calendar, Contacts, etc. plus you can add on third-party apps to the dashboard. I’ve currently got Mailchimp in there. Best part, it’s only $5 per month per email account you add. Adding this to z6evolved.com was the first smart thing I’ve done in a while. My calendar and contacts sync with my BlackBerry (thanks to GSync) and unlike my other mail accounts on other servers, this one actually has damn good spam filtering. It’s worth the pittance I pay for it every month.

2 - Workflowy

Workflowy is better than a pen and paper for organizing your thoughts. It’s like a mindmap, but more intuitive (at least, in my opinion). I use it to outline campaign ideas, ideas for blog posts, etc. I’m not an organized man and this helps me stay on top of my projects. For those of you who prefer a real mindmap, see #4.

3 - Wunderlist

This is the other half of the “Keep Bil Organized” package – basically a to-do list. Simple. But it works, and it works well. I use this to outline my day. Before I used Wunderlist, I would get 10% of the work done that I needed to do, and spend the rest of the time distracted. Since I’ve incorporated this into my daily regimen, I’m getting a lot more done and wasting a lot less time.

4 - Bubbl.us

Some of you won’t like the notebook outline style of Workflowy. For people who prefer a real mindmap, there’s Bubbl.us, a somewhat cartoony but very useful mindmap software. They refer to it as a “brainstorming software” but let’s call a spade a spade – it’s a mindmap. It’s fast, it’s free and it’s easy to figure out. There isn’t much more to say about it than that.

5 - AffExpert Tools

I first started using this tool set when I joined the StackThatMoney forum. This is pretty much everything you could ever need to run a PPV campaign, short of tracking and hosting. Plus they’ve got some social ad tools, too (most importantly a PoF Ad Spy which is damn handy). I’ve talked to Besmir and he’s a great guy and very helpful. He’s gone out of his way to help me smooth out some code problems on some landers recently – the guy really knows his stuff. It’s no wonder his tools work as well as they do. If you’re running PPV traffic, you probably want to look into this.

6 - TinEye Image Search

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. What is that? You give it an image, and it finds that image, and other similar images, online. Really great if you want to start stalking the girl who’s picture you’re using in your dating ads… not that any of you would do that. Legitimately, it can be an incredible resource for finding images for dating ads. Throw in one that you already like, see what comes up, and visit the pages they’re posted on. A lot of times you’ll find collections of useful images this way. Google also recently released their own Reverse Image Search for Google Images, but since I’ve been using TinEye for a year or two now, I figured I’d give that top billing since it’s always worked for me.

7 - Clickheat

Clickheat is a simple script – it tracks where people click on your lander, and gives you an overlay heatmap so you can see exactly what people are clicking on. It’s always fun to load up these heatmaps and see when people are clicking on dead space in your lander, or things that aren’t clickable. Interestingly enough, I had a lander once where people kept clicking on the dead space in the top right corner, for whatever reason. It had an incredibly high number of clicks. So I threw a call to action button there and my CTR jumped through the roof. Go figure. Either way, this is an alternative to Clicktale and the like, and is a good option if you’re just starting out and can’t afford those services.

8 - Bo.lt

This site is like HTTrack, if HTTrack actually worked. You give it a url, it rips the page (perfectly, no less) and you can edit it. Then, it will host it for you and give you traffic analytics – or better yet, you can download it yourself. This is incredibly useful for making quick landing pages for testing purposes. If people are interested, I may do a tutorial on that one day soon. Bo.lt is invite only right now, but if you ask around people will have invite codes, since when you join your membership link is good for 3 accounts. If you’re a member of the STM forum, check the thread there, a bunch of us have posted membership links you can use to sign up. If not, go to their website and give them your email address. The waiting list isn’t too long generally.

9 - TrendsBuzz

I don’t see TrendsBuzz getting enough love. This site has the top trending topics for most of your big players – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, Alexa, Wikipedia, Blogpulse, Search.com and Wordtracker top keywords. I take a quick glance at this before sitting down to come up with new campaign ideas, especially when working on PPV campaigns. Most people know that getting behind a popular topic is a quick way to make money, and this site will make it a lot easier to figure out what’s popular right now.

10 - Amazon Cloud Drive

It’s Amazon. It’s cloud based storage. It’s 5gb. And it’s free. I shouldn’t have to say any more than that, really. I use mine to backup important stuff like landers, ad images, target lists, exported stats, etc. I’m paranoid about having my computer crash (again) and losing everything (again) so this gives me a pretty secure way to store my files. If you don’t like Amazon for whatever reason, you could always use DropBox.

And there you have it. Nothing game changing, nothing fancy, but basic tools I use on a near daily basis to get my work done faster, easier and more efficiently. Hopefully there are some things on this list that will help you guys too. Are there any tools you use that I didn’t include on the list? If you leave them in a comment, I’ll see about doing a part two with all your recommendations.