Resources

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The idea of this section is for me to list some sites and tools that I find useful. I’ll add to this as I blog about them, so expect this list to continue to grow.

Article Marketing Sites

Write articles and submit them for free to these sites for some great backlinks and traffic. These are my top 3 but there are many more out there like these. Read this post for more article marketing tips.

• Articles Base – After a certain number of submissions, your articles will be automatically approved. Also, some automated blogging plugins grab articles from this site, so there is a good chance your articles will be reposted on other blogs. You can include up to 3 links in your articles, plus 1 in the author box.
• Ezinearticles – Probably the best site for traffic. Not my favorite site, because it takes so long to get an article approved. They are also very strict about copied content, so be sure you submit unique articles.
• Go Articles – Auto approved articles. They also don’t check for duplicate content, so this one is cheap and easy.

Creating Content and Whole Websites

• The Best Spinner – Just as the name implies, this spinner works great for writing unique articles.  Huge synonyms database makes writing a unique article (that still makes sense) simple.
• Niche Site Platform – Use this script to build websites that promote products from EPN, Linkshare, Commission Junction, Adsense, and more.

Finding Freelance Work

Mechanical turk from Amazon is a great place to have articles written cheaply.  You can read my article about Amazon Mechanical Turk here.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk – Pay workers around the world to complete small tasks. I use it sometimes for small article writing.
• Fiverr – Find work for $5 per job.  Pay easily with Paypal.  Best for small jobs.
• Elance – This is where you will find the best of the best. Hire programmers, writers, testers, etc.  If you want to have en entire eBook written, this is the place the checkout.  I use this for bigger article writing jobs.

Keyword Research

There are various methods for researching your niche site keywords as I mention in my post Researching Your First Niche Website.  The google keyword tool is a popular free tool.  The two most popular paid tools, which can make the process a lot quicker and simpler are the following:

• Market Samurai -This does basically the same thing as Micro Niche Finder, but I’ve not used it as much yet, so I’m still learning all of it’s secrets.
• Micro Niche Finder – The first keyword tool that I purchased when I first started building niche sites. Great for quickly finding keyword competition, searches per month, etc. Has a nice brainstorm feature to help you find new niches.

List Building

• Aweber – The best and easiest mailing list software on the market. Hundreds of form templates to choose from and all kinds of tools to track statistics for your list. Great support and lots of tutorials.

Web Hosting

• Hostgator – Low prices. I’ve had no issues with them and great support when I’ve needed. Simple to install a wordpress blog and be up and running within minutes.

WordPress Tools

• Akismet – Hey, it’s free and comes with your WordPress installation – but I often times forget to activate it.. That is, until I start getting bombarded with spam comments. I quickly make use of this plugin and 99% of all spam is blocked.
• All in One SEO Pack – Great for adding custom keywords, titles, and descriptions on individual pages. Many other features for automatically optimizing your SEO. Also check out Platinum SEO for some of the same features.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Use this to automatically generate a dynamic sitemap for your blog. A sitemap is essential to help the spiders find all of the pages on your site.
• CommentLuv – Allows your readers to link back to their most recent blog post, encouraging more comments.
• PHPBay – A WordPress plugin for adding ebay listings to your blog. You can read a more detailed description of PHPBay here.
• Elegant Themes – High quality, premium WordPress themes. I purchased the developer license so that I can use these themes for customers when doing web design. Here is an example of a site I designed with one of their themes – Lakes Heating and Cooling.
• Comparipress Plugin – Allows you to compare multiple affiliate prices for certain products within WordPress. Read my Comparipress review here.