Resources

Building a Website

• Hosting services – A hosting service is where you will store all of your website files.  Typically, most services are about the same price.  What you want to look for is customer support, ease of use and reliability.  It also helps if they happen to be the best price!  The hosting services below are the ones that I have personal experience with.
  • BlueHost - Bluehost is  a website hosting site that has great support and offers one-click WordPress Installation.  It is the hosting service that I use for all of my websites and the link is an affiliate link.
  • GoDaddy - GoDaddy is probably the most popular of all hosting services, at least they advertise the most.  I have used GoDaddy and had a good experience.  The price is about average and they have a lot of great features.  On the downside, they offer a lot of services so you will be receiving emails about purchasing “extras”.
• WordPress Themes
  • Free Themes – You can get a lot of themes for free just by searching through the WordPress installation.  There are a lot of nice themes out there.  I use free themes for a few of my niche sites.
  • Thesis - Thesis is a completely customizable theme in which you can edit every aspect with point and click.  I use this theme for every other website I use, including this blog.  I have created a YouTube video about this theme in my “Videos” section.  It is a premium wordpress theme, which means you have to pay for it.
  • Woo Themes - Woo Themes is a site with premium custom-made WordPress themes.  I have not personally used Woo Themes but I hear good things about them.

Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research

• Google’s Keyword Tool – Absolutely a must-use tool for anyone wanting start a niche site or gain competitive advantage over popular keywords.  You can use this tool to find out how many people are searching for a particular keyword string on a monthly basis.
• Alexa - Alexa.com is a website that allows you to search the popularity of websites.  It also shows page views, ranks and some other statistics.  Simply type in the URL and find out how popular the site is.
• Google Analytics – Google Analytics is not much a tool for SEO but it allows you to track visitors to your website.  Sign up for Google Analytics, paste the code on your website, and start tracking how many vistors a day you have, how many page views you get, where the traffic is coming from and how long people are staying on your site!
• Search Engine Genie – Search Engine Genie is a site that has hundreds of SEO tools you can use to see how well your site is optimized for search engines.  I use it to see where my niche sites are ranking during the optimization process.
• Google Sitemap Generator – Create a sitemap for your website to allow Google to make crawling your site more efficient, increasing your SEO.
• Keyword Suggestion Tool – Type in a keyword and this tool will generate suggestions based on popularity.  This will help you optimize your site with keywords people are searching for on top of the keyword you are targeting.

Hardware and Software

• Blue Snowball Microphone - For Voice-overs and audio I use Blue’s Snowball microphone.  I like it because it creates great sound but only cost me $100.
• Wacom Bamboo Tablet – A nice addition to my iMac, this tablet lets me draw pictures, create flow charts and add animation to any screen recording.
• ScreenFlow – ScreenFlow is a screen recording software for Mac.  I tried Camtasia and ScreenFlow both at the same time and found ScreenFlow to be easier to use.  Camtasia has a lot more editing techniques but when recording screen shots that contain video, the video is not as choppy with ScreenFlow.