March 18th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

As an online marketer, web entrepreneur, blogger or whatever else you want to call yourself there are certain jobs that become part of a daily ritual. Some of the most common of these include checking e-mail, checking your Adsense balance and making small updates to web pages/templates. Over the years that I’ve been doing this I’ve always looked for ways of making things just that little bit easier and quicker, I’m sure somebody once said time is money? So these are 4 programs that I use daily, in fact I probably rely on these four as much as my browser and they are just as integral a part of my online money making.

1. GetMail Evolution – The latest version of my mail forwarding program. GetMail simply takes mail from one account and forwards it onto a number of other accounts. The whole reason it exists though is because of Microsoft’s unwillingness to provide open access to Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live Mail accounts. GetMail can natively forward on messages from lots of these accounts (Paid or older than a certain age) or with the help of another program called FreePOPS can forward from just about any mail account (including restricted Hotmail accounts, AOL, Yahoo etc). The whole reason I need this software is because I’ve used (and still use) several throw away Hotmail/Yahoo accounts to sign up for advertising services/other services that I thought might be a bit spammy. Besides, didn’t we all start with a Hotmail account? GetMail Evolution lets me gather up all these legacy accounts without checking them manually and dump the mail into 1 of 2 GMail accounts. It’s great to be able to use one of these throw away addresses keeping my real GMail address for real people I know. My daily e-mail check now involves checking a few Gmail accounts, 1 for work and 1 for personal and a couple run for clients.

2. Massgrid GAlert – So once I’ve got all my mail nicely sorted into my GMail accounts the next step is to check them for new mail. I could login and check them individually but I prefer to have some sort of notification utility that would tell me when new mail has arrived. MassGrid GAlert does exactly that for as many GMail accounts as you like. Even better is once you know you have new mail it’s a simple 2 click process to have your GMail account logged into in your browser, no need to enter username/password details. Another great feature of this software is that you can colour code your accounts so you get a certain colour popup. This allows you to see at glance if your new e-mail is important business (e.g. red) or just a friend forwarding on some smut (e.g. green).

3. Adsense Alert – Another utility that removes the need to manually login to a website to check something, this time your Adsense earnings. For some people Adsense is not important, for me it is. I can use my Adsense earnings to gauge how every other Ad network is performing on a given day. Higher Adsense to me usually means more page impressions, more visitors and a higher income (certainly across my other PPC networks). The trouble with Adsense is that checking your earnings can become addictive and a big drain on your time. That’s why I wrote Adsense Alert. All it does is login to your Adsense account every hour and update your earnings amount which is accessible through an icon in the tray area of the desktop. It has a got a couple of extra little features like being able to set 5 daily goals (that can trigger either a popup to appear or an e-mail to be sent) and the ability to have your earnings displayed as part of the Adsense league. This is just a bit of fun and a way of getting a free followed link from www.themakemoneyonline.net

4. NotePad++ – I write web pages, scripts and programs in more languages than I care to remember and whilst it’s great to have an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for those big tasks when it’s just a case of a small change here and there I don’t see the point. I was using Notepad for these types of quick edits for a long time but it was and is lacking many of the features that I’d like. The main one was the ability to check syntax as I type. Whether it be HTML, PHP, JavaScript, C, Pascal or anything else the syntax is important and NotePad++ has the ability to check these and many many other languages. It also features much better find and replace functionality for those global template updates and the ability to save with encoding for certain operating systems. This really saved me one day when I broke a clients PHP mailing script by saving it with Windows encoding by accident. There are lots of text editors out there, I’ve tried lots and paid for plenty but to date I’ve found NotePad++ to be the best, it also happens to be free.

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