Resources
Here are some of the more useful resources that I have found, and in most cases use on a regular basis!
Many are free to join or download, some are commercial products which I feel offer exceptional value for money. As in all things check out what's on offer and decide whether you will actually make use of it!
Autoresponders
Web Hosting And Domain Registrations
Membership Sites
Traffic Tools
List Building Tools
Membership Tools
Autoresponders
There's not a lot I can say about autoresponders except you NEED one, notice the NEED bit! For any serious marketer trying to run a business without an autoresponder would be like trying to run a restaurant without a kitchen!
For those of you on a really tight budget you could try one of the free services, but make sure it's one that allows you to upgrade your membership when you are ready.
My recommendation would be to immediately get yourself a quality responder service, miss out on other things if necessary but not on this. Without a good service behind you building any sort of client or customer list is almost impossible after the first few hundred members.
Get Response
My choice of responder. Absolutely first class service, great deliverability, fast support and fantastic features. I have been with them for a few years now and cannot remember having a single problem with the service in all that time.
For less than the price of a coffee each day you have a world beating service, check them out here
Aweber
The other major player in the responder market is Aweber. Again they have a great reputation and offer a fantastic service
Web Hosting and Domain Names
If you are still using free hosting services, and expecting to build a business, stop right where you are! Free hosting services DO NOT WORK.
How would you feel if you were looking to buy, say a brand new computer, and the web address was http://freehosting.net/dodgycomputers
Would you part with hundreds of dollars of your hard earned cash? I know I wouldn't...
Act as though you are a professional business and your customers might just believe you.
No free web sites, no yahoo or hotmail email accounts. They do your reputation no end of damage.
Domain names and hosting are cheap, believe me I know cos I've set up services of my own just to help you.
Register a domain name for as little as $1.99, get quality hosting for around $5.95 a month and you're good to go!
Web Hosting
Creative Web Hosting
Creative Web Hosting is a company that I set up to provide hosting for a few of my newsletter subscribers.
It has now grown into a complete hosting service running hundreds of sites, and growing rapidly.
Over the past three years that I have had this service running I can count the number of genuine support issues on the fingers of one hand. Rock solid servers, fully specified data center based in the USA for speed, and loads of capacity
Hosting starts from as little as $5.95 a month, read all the specs by clicking here
Domain Names
Creative Webs Registration Services
Domain names start from as little as $1.99, or at least they do with the service that I supply :-)
Loads of features, lots of choice. Get a couple of new domain names and add them to one of my hosting plans and you are in business. Most of my plans allow for 3 or more 'addon' domains as well as the main domain name so in effect you could run multiple domain names on one hosting account up to the plans limits. A very cost effective way of getting started
Global Domains International
This company provides all you need in one neat package, a domain name, hosting, site builder, email addresses, and an affiliate program!
Get everything you need to build your website plus earn money from reselling the very same service...
Membership Sites
I believe strongly in the benefit of using, and possibly owning, a members only site.
They promote an exchange of ideas, help you with finding products that you can use yourself, in some cases add to your stock of products for sale, and often prvide a source of inspiration that can jog you out of a period of inactivity.
Join as many as you can, I have listed some here that I have been able to procure free, or heavily discounted membership, for my personal referrals.
Dynamic 4 Marketing.com
This site is the brainchild of four of the internets most successful marketers, only launched in April 2008 so bang up to date.
I have been allowed to gift you a free membership, worth a genuine $97, so simply click this link to get started
The Marketing Bronze Club
This site is a great resource for a number of software tools and ebooks that can help you to build and add content to your sites in a fairly simple manner.
Highly recommended, and it's free!
Click Here to get your membership
Traffic Tools
Sometimes it's fun to get a service for nothing or in exchange for a very small amount of work. These tools fall into that category
Free Traffic Bar
This is a toolbar that sits at the top of your browser window and serves ads, yours included. For every couple of ads that you see your ad is shown on someone elses browser. It doesn't generate huge amounts of business but over the years I have seen a couple of dozen sales attributed directly to this traffic.
It installs in seconds and is easy to use, need I say more?
As the name says it's free so grab a membership now Click here to join
Blazing List
This is a new program to me but it is run by a long time business aquaintance of mine, Bram Smith, so I know the program will do all it says it will.
This one has the potential of sending serious traffic to a site of your choice, AND build you a list of members at the same time.
Instant Buzz
Yes I know that this program has been around for ever, but have you ever stopped to think why that is?
Simple, it works!
If you are not a member you can join for free, will only take you a couple of minutes
Claim Your Free Membership Here
List Building Tools
In their simplest form these tools HELP you to build a list of members that are willing to receive promotional emails from you, as you will from your upline members.
There are many different formats, some offer paid options which allow you to mail members that are not in your downline, others give you credits for reading emails which you can then use to mail others.
Some give you a list of members in your downline which you can then add in to your own responders, others hide the details of your referrals and control all the mailings themselves. My personal choice is for the systems that DON'T give you the email addresses, far safer and less likely to give you spam complaint problems in the future!
Some are hugely complicated, some are a total waste of time due to inefficient servers that fail to send mail correctly.
I have listed a few that work for me, just bear in mind that there is no system that works without some input from you!
ListJoe
A fairly new one in my portfolio but with reasonable results so far, get your membership here
Blazing List
This is a new program to me but it is run by a long time business aquaintance of mine, Bram Smith, so I know the program will do all it says it will.
This one has the potential of sending serious traffic to a site of your choice, AND build you a list of members at the same time.
Membership Tools
Here are a few ways that I use to generate new affiliate signups for my various programs.
Please bear in mind that there is no such thing as guaranteed signups that will make an effort! Many will sign up to a program and then never lift a finger to make anything happen (and then complain that the program 'doesn't work'
Just realise that this is a fact of life and work on the principle that for every 50 signups you will get one that makes a huge difference to your profits :-)
I had one such member join me in SFI a few months back. Within six weeks he had introduced sixty three new members, of which five were also very active.
These are the ones to encourage and nurture along to key team players.
Guaranteed Signups
This is an emotive subject as there are many firms out there that take your money and then fill up your program with fake signups, many times all from the same IP address!
But there are a few that do work really hard on fulfilling your order in the best way that they can.
One such program is called, funnily enough, Signups Guaranteed.
I use them and have found that the affiliates generated are better than the average
