Everybody has their favorite tools. While tools don’t make you money directly, they do help make your life a lot easier by automating certain processes. So, tell me, what tools do YOU use?

That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. I’ll tell you what tools I use and hopefully in doing so, you’ll get a decent idea of what kind of tools YOU should be using for your business.

The first thing that I use that I would be totally lost without is an autoresponder service. The reason I go with a service and not with a self installed script is because I don’t want to have to worry about spam complaints.

If you email your list using your own server, you are responsible for any spam complaints and if you get enough of them, you could get shut down by your ISP.

Personally, I use Aweber because they have a ton of features and their delivery rates is excellent. You’ll probably do just as well with Get Response or one of the other big names. The top autoresponders have great delivery and they take all the burden of spam away from you.

Another tool I would be lost without is an ad tracker. I place ads all over the Internet. When a sale comes in, I want to know where that sale came from. This way, I know what advertising I’m using that’s worth while and what advertising is a total waste of time.

The ad tracker I use is my own custom made with PHP and MySQL. Of course, I don’t expect you to create your own script. There are plenty of good services out there. Just make sure you use one of them. You really need to know where your traffic and sales is coming from.

Third tool that I would be lost without is my keyword tool, personally I love NicheBot which is a paid service. I do a lot of niche marketing. I am constantly looking to see what keywords have a lot of searches but not much competition. This is a very time consuming process even with the tools. Without them, it would be almost impossible.

There are many good free keyword tools out there, most of which get their results from the free wordtracker, now that the overture tool is no longer updated. It doesn’t really matter which one you use. But I suggest that you use one and stick with it. That way you’ll get used to how it spits out data and as a result, you’ll get very adept at using it and the speed at which you work will increase over time simply because you know just where to look and for what.

These three tools are at the very top of my list. There are obviously many others, but without these three, my business would be a lot harder to run and manage.

Autoresponder, ad tracker and keyword tool.

Don’t have them? Get them fast!

© Neil-Harvey.com