Resources

These are all of the tools that I use or have used in my business and blogging career.  Most of them are affiliate links, so I get a little bit of a comission from them.  All of these products I recommend because they are AWESOME!.

Invoicing/Finance

• Freshbooks – Probably the easiest invoicing app that I’ve used.  It definitely leaves some things to be desired accounting wise, but if you couple it with Outright.com it’s pretty killer.
• Outright - Let’s you keep track of expenses and income that are outside of billable work.  It also reminds you of when you need to file certain tax documents and what your estimated taxes are.  It’s no longer totally free, but still great.

Both of these save my accountant HOURS of work.

Video Editing

• Camtasia
• Animoto – This is great for making instant videos.  They can be used for anything and have studio-quality production.  Very cool service.  I use these for my intros and outros for my videos.

Screencasting

• Jing
• Camtasia

Web Hosting

• Bluehost – Been using them for almost 5 years now and I’ve never been disappointed.  Anytime there was a problem, they either fixed it immediately or helped me to fix something that I cause on my end.  The best part about them is that unlike a lot of hosting services, they still have phone support.  Ha!  They are fantastic.

File Hosting

• Amazon S3 (For large files)
• Screencast.com (for my training videos)

Project Management

• Basecamp – I recently switched back to Basecamp from Manymoon because it’s so much easier for my clients to use.

Outlining

• MindMeister – Great mind mapping tool online.  Works well.  Their iPhone app is crap though.
• iThoughts – The reason why I don’t use MindMeister‘s app.  This iPhone app is amazing and exports to multiple formats.  I used this to create an outline for my ebooks as well.

Hiring in General

• Virtual Staff Finder – The point of hiring a VA is to have a trusting and valuable relationship.  If you are a loyal reader, you know how much I despise most services out there that charge a fee to connect with a virtual assistant.  Virtual Staff Finder finds you an extremely talented VA for you, and then takes themselves out of the picture.  You work directly with your VA and build your business together, long-term.  Very cool service, and depending on the VA skills you need, you can find one for around $350/mo.

Hiring for Design

• 99Designs – An easy way to get the best of the best designers to create website designs (and other things).  You can then use your virtual assistant (if you have a developer) to code the site for a client.

Keyword and Market Research

• Market Samurai – Saves HOURS off of keyword and competition research.  Great platform.  I also use this to find local markets that I can sell web development and SEO services to.  If there is low competition for a market, it’s a great way to show opportunity to small business owners.

Article Marketing

• The Best Spinner – This saves my VAs (and me) hours on re-purposing articles.  Rather than having to constantly re-think about how to say a phrase in another way, this spins a new article almost automatically.
• Unique Article Wizard – Shoots all of my articles out to 1000s of websites for backlinks.  Usually with just one shot I am able to get on the front page, or at lest the second page of Google for a well researched keyword, and that’s on a brand new site.   This is a must-have for anyone doing article marketing.

In my opinion, using both of these are pretty necessary if you want to make it easy on your virtual assistants.  Reason being is that you need to re-write articles twice (making 3 articles) to use Unique Article Wizard.  If your VA can just spin the articles quickly, it saves a ton of time.

WordPress Resources (On my youcanworkless.com site)

• My Ultimate List of WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Ping List

Training for Virtual Assistants

• Replace Myself (Bought the lifetime and consistently use it for training) – this is a course for virtual assistants that show them how to do article marketing, SEO, social media marketing, etc.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve had a lot of success moving my business into the SEO market.
• Scribe SEO (This is actually a WordPress/Drupal/Joomla plugin, but is BY FAR the easiest way to teach your virtual assistant On Page SEO.  Just have them use it with every blog post).

Training for ME!

• Internet Business Mastery – Great program for learning to sell information products online and is the reason I’m selling my accumulated knowledge via ebooks and videos.