Recommended Tools, Books and Resources

Thought about creating a recommend resources page which I can always refer to my blog readers. Please bookmark this page for your reference because as I experiment and learn about new tools, I will update them here. Enjoy!

Disclosure: Please note that the tools and products that I recommend are based on my experience and some of the products earn me a commission if you purchase them through links on this page at no extra cost to you. I am recommending them because they are helpful to me and I trust these companies and not because of the commissions I may earn. Still I recommend do not spend money on anything you don’t feel comfortable or it is something you really don’t need.

Books

  • ProBlogger Book By Darren Rowse [Amazon | Flipkart]: The best book on blogging by the best online blogger, Darren Rowse where he shares secrets of blogging your way to a six-figure income. You can read my article on where I shared Better Blogging Tips after reading the book.
  • Get Rich Click By Marc Ostrofsky [Amazon | Flipkart]: One of my personal favorite book that focuses on changing the way we think about making money online and explains how anybody without any money or investment can make a fortune online. I have taken few hints from the book and answered one of the most asked question mostly by Indians – How to Make Money Online Without Investing a Penny?

Blogging

  • WordPress: The best blogging platform. Open source, free and easily customizable with lots of plugins. All of my blogs use WordPress and I offer Free WordPress Installation Service as well.
  • SiteBuildIt: SiteBuidIt provide all the tools, hosting, and support you will need to get your website online. SiteBuildIt is designed for non-techies, so you don’t have to be a web genius or Web Guru to get started online. Have referred many of my non-techy friends to SBI and they are very happy.
  • THESIS Theme for WordPress: WordPress Theme cannot get any better than Thesis and all my blog runs on Thesis Theme including IMTips.

Forums

  • vBulletin – For online forums I use vBulletin and prefer vBulletin over other free forum scripts. I don’t recommend latest version of vBulletin i.e. vB4 and you can see why here. Go for vBulletin 3.x as of now.

Hosting

  • Bluehost: If my sites are not hosted on my dedicated server, they are hosted on Bluehost. Very easy to use, excellent customer service and highly recommended for your first site. BlueHost is one of the recommended hosts by WordPress itself.
  • Hostgator: BlueHost don’t offer month on month payment option and many of my readers want monthly payment option to get started and if you are looking for month on month payment option for best shared hosting solution, I recommend Hostgator.
  • MaxCDN – If you want to speed up your website by serving static content like CSS Files, JavaScripts, Images and other static content through content delivery network. I use MaxCDN for IMTips.
  • Amazon S3 – For Go4Expert I started using Amazon S3 + Cloudfront as CDN but when I started using MaxCDN for my other sites including IMTips, I really liked it and now I am using Amazon + MaxCDN both for Go4Expert and only MaxCDN on other sites.

Product Distribution & Shopping Carts

  • Clickbank: The most popular digital products retailer. Costly, but comes with an amazing affiliate program for your products. Check out my Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank.
  • Paypal.com: Paypal is just ok for selling your own products, but you’ll anyways need an account with PayPal to accept payments from ad networks, clients, advertisers …

Keyword Research

Email Subscriptions & Marketing

  • Aweber: The best email opt-in and email marketing service. I use AWeber on all my blogs and you can read my AWeber Review.
  • GetResponse: I use AWeber on my blogs but have seen good support by GetResponse for my clients and heard good things about GetResponse from them.

Advertising Stuff

  • Google Adsense: You can make money by placing relevant ads on your website that are generated from advertisers using Google Adwords. You can place Google Adsense Ads on any site that is within the Adsense’s Terms of service but if you don’t have an account with them you can apply for new account only for sites that are online for at least 6 months old.
  • BuySellAds: BuySellAds is an online marketplace that makes it really simple to find advertising opportunities on related websites. You can read about my BuySellAds Review for publisher.
  • VibrantMedia: VibrantMedia is global leader and pioneer in InText advertising and you can read my experience about them in my VibrantMedia Review
  • InfoLinks:Infolinks is yet another InText Advertising that has Global inventory for Ads, so you can monetize non US, UK traffic with infolinks. Read my Infolinks Review

Analytics

  • Google Analytics: Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. A must have for any type of website.

Outsourcing / Freelancing

If you are a freelancer, you can use these sites for getting freelancing jobs.

  • Elance: You can hire experts in any technology you can think of. I am also available for consulting at Elance.
  • vWorker: Yet another marketplace but with a difference. vWorker does not charge any fees to freelancers for placing bids on projects and so you get lot of lower priced bids for the same task but it also means you have lot more proposals for your project to find right kind of expert.
  • Odesk: Another outsourcing marketplace Like vWorker and Elance.

Link Building

Traffic

  • Traffic Building Tips – The Ultimate Guide – Having issues building traffic to your site? The 4000+ word Ultimate Traffic Building Tips is the best and complete resource available online to help you get started with real traffic to your site.