Webmaster Tools I Use (seriously, I do)

One of the things that really helped me when I were getting started as an affiliate were reading about which tools other affiliates were using.

I have made this list where you can see what tools and services I’m currently using. I’ll probably write some guides or reviews at some point, but since I don’t expect to earn any money from my blog, it may be a while before I get around to it. You can send me a PM on PAL if you want my opinion on any of them.

Visitor Tracking

Clicky – free/paid
Clicky will show you reports of the visitors to your website, much like Google Analytics.

You can track 1 website for free (up to 3.000 page views/day), which makes it easy to test it.

ClickTale – free/paid
I use ClickTale to see how my visitors move the mouse around on a page and what they click on. This has helped me understand a lot about my visitors and what they are looking for and how to make them click my affiliate links. Unless you have a lot of experience with web usability and creating landing pages, I sure that you will learn quite a bit by using the free version of ClickTale (400 pageviews/week).

They also have a pretty good blog where they post articles about web metrics (some of it is a bit “salesy”, but there are some real gems in there too).

See a video demonstration of ClickTale.

WordPress Related

WordPress theme: Thesis
Thesis is my preferred WordPress theme, since it is very developer friendly. Its main strength is that it is made with customization in mind, so you can make all the changes you want in the code and CSS, and it still won’t take you more than a couple of minutes to update the theme to a new version (thats right, it is actively developed).

See a gallery of Thesis sites
Thesis demo video

Online Tools

Google Adwords External Keyword Tool – free
At the moment I do almost all my keyword research with the “Google Adwords Keyword Tool” combined with my own visitor statistics. There are a lot of people who will try to sell you keyword research tools, but after trying a couple of different ones out, I went back to using the free one from Google.

Elance
Buy articles, sell articles – Make money!

Nozbe – Paid
Nozbe is an online GTD application. It basically help you keep track of everything you need to do, which allow you to not worry about it, since everything is stored in Nozbe.

TeuxDeux- Free
This is the best online todo list “thing” I have ever used. It is basically just a calendar, where you can write todo items for each day. If systems like “Getting Things Done” seems a bit excessive to you, this will suit you perfectly.

Watch Elance introduction video

Software

RoboForm
This is a password manager. It will remember all your passwords for you, which makes it possible to have a complicated unique password for all of your websites, affiliate accounts and whatever else you use a username and password for. It makes my life much easier, since I don’t have to think about usernames/passwords, ever.

Download free RoboForm trial (direct download link)

KeePass – free
Free software that does roughly the same things as RoboForm. If you are on a tight budget or need to have access to your passwords from a Mac or Linux, you may want to look into KeePass intead.

FileZilla – free
A free FTP client.

Evernote – free
This is an awesome note taking program, which works on both PCs and Macs. In addition you can also access your account online. I use it to save snippets of information about the projects I’m working on, as well as storing all sorts of weird stuff that I want to remember fx. movies and TV series that I want to watch at some point.

Paint.NET – free
Lightweight image editing software. I really like Photoshop, but I like Paint.NET when I just need to make a quick change to an image fx. change the format or scale it down a bit, since Photoshop can be slow to open. If you don’t have experience with Photoshop, or can’t afford it, Paint.NET may be a good alternative.

Other

Ironkey
USB drive with built in encryption and self destruct mechanism. It is pretty expensive compared to the kind of drive you can pick up at your local computer store, but to me it is worth it, since I don’t have to worry about breaking it or having someone steal it and run wild with some of my personal data.

I have been carrying one of these in my keychain for 2 year and while it has gotten a lot of small scratches on the surface, there are no signs of real damage.