Call them job aids (job aides?), templates, cheat-sheets, exercises, or what-have-you. I’ll call them resources and tools. The hammer needed to get the nail in the supporting member of your home… the ruler to measure for the right cut… the laser-level to ensure you’re ‘true’ on your work.
Below are tools that I’ve created, assembled, and have found useful in doing everything that I do, online and offline. I hope they serve you well.
There’s a “right one” (tool or job aid) for every job – pick it and hop to it!
Disclaimer: Some of the links are affiliate links. At no cost to you, the associated company gives me a very small “finder’s fee” for recommending a product I like to a new person. If you find this list useful, then please say thank you by going through these links. Thank you!
Here goes that gigantic list that took me MANY trial and error years to get together. Hope it helps you in your journey.
Great American Toolkit
- The Constitution of the United States – includes the transcript of the original Constitution (old-school language usage and all), the Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10), and Amendments 11-27 all in one package.
- White House Daily 1600 – good source for relevant White House news articles, current events, and some awesome photographs. Can also sign up to receive it in your email inbox as a newsletter.
- Presidential Actions Page – great place to keep up with the latest Executive Orders (EO’s) and other actions coming out of the White House.
- Presidential Twitter (okay, his @POTUS one, too) – whether you like President Donald J. Trump or not, respect the office and know this is the number one stop for hard-hitting information (and sometimes outrageous bants).
Entrepreneur Scripts & Tools
- iPIG Script (Information Product Idea Generator) – over 707,000 random information product ideas waiting for you to create some awesome content using them as your brainstorming seedlings. Outsource these ideas, too!
- Dollars Per Living Hour (DpLH) Calculator – it’s time to finally put a number to the tasks you do (and don’t do!). Until you understand the reality of your costs, opportunity costs, and total investment values you won’t be as effective as you can be.
- Industry Leader LINKS – full of some of the best resources for entrepreneurial ventures including: business development, copywriting, authorship, making money, and so much more.
Content Creation / Outsourcing:
- eLance – I am quickly finding this to be an awesome source for talented folks looking to tackle projects of all sizes. With a well defined job (and a discerning eye) you are sure to find a good worker for a reasonable price.
- TextBroker – great place to find all ranges of writing. I usually aim for 3 star articles for my other sites and they 95% turn out great.
- Fiverr – people doing all kinds of awesome stuff for $5. I used them for cheapo articles, logos, ebook covers, SEO audits, and even resume reviews. At the end of the day, hey, it’s only $5.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk – micro-tasks done in bulk. I’ve used them for audio transcription for ~$0.35 per audio minute (I’ve had it done for cheaper, too, but user feedback led me to believe that was a bit low). They do much more than just this. Crazy un-user-friendly website, but valuable services.
Hosting / Domains:
- iPage – great service, great control panel, amazing customer service, and pretty dang affordable, too. SideWages is hosted with iPage.
- InmotionHosting – have a bunch of niche sites here as well as my personal development authority site. Pretty solid service with good customer service.
- NameCheap – great place to pick up domain names. Good interface, free privacy protection, great tools.
- Dynadot – not sure what all they do, but I know (and use) there bulk domain name lookup tool. Look up thousands of domains at a time.
- Bust-A-Name – very cool domain name brainstorming. I use this before ordering all of my domains to see what all’s available and for any ideas I might have missed.
- Lean Domain Names – this site is both an amazing blessing and horrible curse. You enter a work you want your domain name to include and it finds a metric-butt-ton of available names in less than a few seconds. Awesome tool but it gives such great results it makes it so hard to choose one!
Mailing List / eMail Marketing:
- MailChimp – not only is the email marketing too free to use for up to 2,000 subscribers (2,000!), it’s slick, clean, very tough on the bad guys, and fun to use. You’ve heard it once, and I’ll say it, too. START YOUR EMAIL LIST AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
Design / UX / WordPress / Themes:
- StudioPress – home of the Genesis Framework and some awesome themese to boot. I’m using the framework and the Executive Pro theme here on this site and it’s been working very well. I’d like to say it looks pretty snazy, too!
- Color Picker – I used this to grab the hex color code for whatever color I am trying to come up with when messing around on my sites. Simple, quick, easy.
- Color Scheme Designer – awesome tool for helping narrow down your website’s color theme / scheme. Great interface, too.
- Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography – get technical with your typography. I use this to figure out line-spacing vs. font size vs. website width when I have no idea where to start.
Leveraged Spreading:
- IFTTT – stands for “if this then that” – great way to automate a few of your tasks. I can’t begin to explain how much you can do here… you just have to check it out.
- BufferApp – I don’t use “the Twitter” as much as I probably should, but when I do I can get a little out of hand. BufferApp helps me spread out my tweets in a more “digestible manner” and I think this makes the world a better place.
Publishing / Shopping Cart:
- Gumroad – I found this one in the middle of 2013 and have since dubbed it the “e-junkie killer.” No need for a merchant account – straight up credit card processing in a few simple clicks. And it’s slick as all get-out.
- TradeBit – only made a few sales here, BUT this is an idea treasure trove. It’s also a great place to host your “smoke test” or experimental products at no cost. Testing grounds.
- Easy Digital Downloads – completely free shopping cart plugin for WordPress that allows you to host your own files and sell them right on your site. Takes a little bit of setup, but you get secure download links and 100% of your sales. Great for testing product interest.
Internet Ninja Tools:
- Google Keyword Planner – where it all began in my keyword researching education. It’s free, it’s Google, and it’s necessary if you don’t have a better tool available. Make sure you login to get more results.
- Long Tail Pro – I used to use the Google Keyword Planner (formerly the Adwords Keyword Tool) exclusively for researching keywords. I only ever use long tail pro now just in the time it saves me to have a list of 50-100 (or more if you don’t filter as heavy as I do) keywords to sift through on simple posts to new niche sites.
- WP Import – never press “Add New” button in WordPress again. This thing can import 100’s of blog posts in seconds and is an absolute MUST for batching.
- Keyword Researcher – long tail keyword golden nugget locator. Super fast, super slick, and it almost feels like you have a secret view into the deeper workings of the human race. Powerful information that is useful alone, but even better when vetted through a keyword researching tool like Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai.
- Market Samurai – long tail keyword vetting tool, explorer, and new keyword generator. I liked the full version a lot but I’m still using the timed-out trial as the keyword researcher function is top-notch. This beast is a little slow though.
- Xenu Link Sleuth – free software that does some freaking amazing link checking and following. I’ve only used this to find super huge lists of expired domains and it was an indispensable part of the process. Caution – it will totally own your traffic while it runs… and the creator’s website is… interesting.
Podcasts (Listen and Listing):
- Stitcher – I use this app daily for keeping up with all my favorite podcasts. Not everyone has made the switch so you might still have to use iTunes or direct downloads, but this app rocks.
Audio (Royalty free)
- Incompetech – free, music, always, awesome, and tons of it. Support this dude – YouTube would be background-music-less without Kevin MacLeod. Seriously.
- ccMixter – both free and paid music. A bit of a mess and you really have to keep your eyes peeled for the license information, but can be a good source.
Images (Royalty free)
- Microsoft Office Clipart Gallery – so much more than just clipart now. There’s some pretty high quality stuff here and it’s all absolutely free. Watch out for over-used images though.
- Flickr Creative Commons – be extra careful here. There are some good photos but you absolutely have to check the license information and if the image is legitimately attributed to the person that posted it. Something like TinEye can help here.
- BG Patterns – nice, quick, and simple site for creating some repeatable tiled backgrounds all for free.
- Icon Finder Free – this site is an icon aggregator so you have to really pay attention to the license information, but it’s a nice starting point for finding free images and icons.
- Vector Silhouettes – used it a few times to find some nice, free, vector silhouettes. I think there are tons of ads but I’m blind to them now.
Video (Royalty free)
- YouTube – they have videos! hehe, but seriously, when you search for something you can filter for those videos listed as Creative Commons (CC). Again, exercise caution as some folks will upload stuff that isn’t theirs and list it as CC when it’s actually not.
Phone Apps / Websites / Desktop Synced Stuff:
- Dropbox – file storage in the cloud. And I used to HATE this idea with a passion. But man… I made the switch to SSD storage on my laptop, backed everything up, put my workable files on DropBox, use the desktop app, and the android app… let me tell you it’s amazing to have everything ready at the tip of your fingers.
- Google Analytics – data from the traffic that hits your websites. And by ‘data’ I mean a metric boat-load of data. Not all of it is necessary, but some of it is essential. I’ve tried the other analytics apps and I keep coming back to this one.
- 1Tap Cleaner – great little app for cleaning up some of the junk that’s just laying around on your phone.
- Dolphin Browser Mini – fast, simple, and makes you smile when you surf the web on your phone.
- ES File Explorer – simple, quick, super-robust, comes with a media player / gallery / text editor / more, and can be a ‘root explorer’ if your phone’s rooted.
- GTasks – great little todo app that works nicely with Google Calendar task lists.
- Google Reader – for reading the 100’s of blog post headlines I go through daily in search of the 1 or 2 golden nuggets. This is the reader I keep coming back to.
- K-9 Mail – quick, very robust, and it has a freaking quiet time feature so the little blips and bloops don’t wake me up. Have it checking 7+ accounts all day long.
Software:
- OMM writer (Ver 1 is Free)
- Paint.NET (Free)
- Notepad++ (Free)
- Filezilla FTP (Free)
- 7-Zip (Free)
- Audacity (Free)
- Sony SoundForge
- Avira Antivirus (Free)
- Bulk Rename Utility (Free)
- FastStone Photo Resizer (Free)
- Irfan View (Free)
- Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (Free)
- MP3Gain (Free)
- MP3Tag (Free)
- PrimoPDF (Free)
- Office 2016
- VLC Media Player (Free)
Got any Hints for Me?
Leave a comment below if you’d like to recommend a site, resource, product, or tool. Thank you!
Here are some other file resources I have available, too: