Last Updated – 07 November 2011

Ever wondered what are the tools I use to help me make money online? I make money through my websites and in order to do this I need traffic (visitors to my websites), 99.99% of the time I don’t pay for this traffic. Been there, done that, didn’t like it very much. This doesn’t mean that I don’t need help from time to time, there are lots of tools and services out there that can genuinely help webmasters. In no particular order these are the resources I use to help maintain my websites as well as make more money from them.

Link Building

With Google in particular there is still nothing more important for getting search rankings than backlinks. In an ideal world we’d all like to only get 100% natural backlinks from other webmasters who have found our content, rated it and so linked back to it. Unfortunately in order to find our content it has to be ranked. Anybody spot the obvious “cirucular” problem here? That’s why there are so many link building services out there. Lots of them are utter crap, these aren’t.

LinxBoss – Hands Free Linking

I’ve already written about LinxBoss here and here. It takes a little time, isn’t cheap, but it does work. In fact it works incredibly well. I’ve used them in some extremely competitive markets and the results have been outstanding. LinxBoss on its own can out perform plenty of so called “SEO Gurus” selling ranking services for many hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.

Build My Rank – Higher Quality Links

A high Page Rank network at an affordable price. Build My Rank can be used in 2 ways. First of all you can write your own unique posts to be published on their network, linking back to your original content (By unique we really mean UNIQUE, you can’t post spun content to the BMR network, they’ll just turn it down). The second way is to use their outsourcing program where you just tell them how many links you want for each keyword. It is much easier, has guaranteed approval but does come at the cost of $2.50 per post. There are other cheaper 3rd party article providers available but I just prefer using the integrated solution. Once a post is live on their network they backlink it providing an extremely high indexing rate. Of all the posts I’ve had go live I’ve never had one not indexed by Google.

Magic Submitter – Link Diversity

Magic Submitter, the tool that saved me from the content scraping bar-stewards in the days post Panda Update. Initially I only used it in order to help get pages indexed quickly (within an hour in most cases) thanks to it’s excellent bookmarking service. Since those days the software has been expanded on numerous occasions and provides multiple sources of getting backlinks for your content. From Blog Networks, to RSS sumbmission, to Article Directories, to Video posting, to Micro Blogging to Social Bookmarking and much more. It even has it’s own project manager and scheduler that makes it very easy to recreate the sort of link wheels that some people are charging thousands of dollars for. If you’re looking at local affiliate marketing in particular then this is a must have tool. You just have to look past the crappy sales page and and take a leap of faith with this one, it’s a tool which could save you a fortune and hundreds of hours in the long run.

SEO Smart Links – WordPress Plugin

It’s not all about external links, your internal linking structure can also provide a pivotal role. I recognised this early and even wrote my first (and only) wordpress plugin to do automatic interlinking of posts on my WordPress blogs. I was very happy with the results from my handy work. SEO Smart Links takes this to an extra level or two, it decides on the best keywords and also provides a host of other options. I use this on every single WordPress blog I own and you should too.

Article Writers

Fresh content is what the search engines love. We should all be writing our own content, I certainly write almost all of mine (all except a couple of tight niches where I just don’t have the knowledge). However sometimes it’s just not cost effective or we need a helping hand. There are plenty of people willing to write articles for a price, these are the services I use most often.

Textbroker – Cheap Articles

To be honest it’s not very often that I don’t write the original content for my websites these days. There were times in the past when I had twice as many sites as I do now and I genuinely needed help, Textbroker was always my service of choice for getting good quality affordable articles. Even today there are occasions where I think it would be cool to have a page about a subject but I just don’t know enough about it or have the time to research it properly, in these instances I still use Textbroker. When it comes to content for my own websites I only ever use 4 or 5 star rated authors and to date there are very few articles I’ve had to reject.

My Article Express – Easy Spinning

Ever thought about using a network for backlinks but were put off by the need for writing loads of articles and spinning them? You’re not the only one (you also might want to check out LinxBoss)! My Article Express offer a service that does away with the headaches. I first found them from using Unique Article Wizard, what MAX were doing was providing complete article sets for UAW (including variations, titles, resources etc). However even though I don’t use UAW anymore it is easy to utilise My Article Express spun article sets in any number of other services (Magic Submitter for example).

Keyword Research

I don’t do hours of research looking for keywords to write about. Instead when I think of something I’d like to write about I use my keyword tool of choice to find out what phrase/word order is best to target. Doing things this way has delivered a better experience for my site vistitors, that’s my experience anyway.

Market Samurai

I’ve been using MS for ages and will likely be using it for a long time into the future. Inlcudes keyword research and competition analysis so you can see in depth in a matter of minutes whether what you want to do is worth persuing. If I’m looking for a new market to start a website in or about then Market Samuari is still the first tool I go to for ideas. Not only that but its ranking checker module (for easily finding out how you are doing in the search engines) means that I’ve been able to do away with my costly WebCEO subscription. Market Samurai is possibly the best money I’ve ever spent on a webmaster tool.

Website Quality

And by website quality I primarily mean broken links and missing tags. You can use Googles webmaster tools to find a lot of problems with your website but there is a free tool available that gives that little extra detail, including problems with meta tags, image alt tags and much more.

WebCEO

The website quality module is just one of those things that you have to use every couple of months to help keep on top of your website. It will track through and identify many problems that may slow down the render of your website, affect your search rankings or even just make your website look unprofessional. As well as the quality checker WebCEO is still my FTP client of choice.

So there you have it, those are the webmaster resources that I use day in and day out. There are of course plenty of others that I’ve tried over the years that for one reason or another I no longer use, these are the ones that have stood the test of time and if I wasn’t using them and more to the point, happy with them, there’s no way I’d recommend them to you.