Disclosure: Some links on this page may be affiliate links
Welcome to the Tools & Resources section, a list of “things” strongly recommended for creating content, building and optimizing your business, your mindset, and your income.
YouTube Tools
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VidIQ –> Designed to boost your YouTube views. Get free insights and guidance to keep your YouTube channel growing. |
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YouTube Video Transcription |
YouTube Video Downloady2down.cc/en –> |
TubeBuddy –>A FREE browser extension & mobile app that integrates directly into YouTube to help you run your channel with ease. |
YouTube Summary with ChatGPT |
AI Video Generators
Most AI video generators can create videos in multiple formats, including short-form 9:16 and standard 16:9, as well as other various aspect ratios. However, some platforms are more specialized towards specific formats, catering better to certain content types or platforms. Below is a generalized list for you to explore, with one column focused on tools primarily for short-form videos and the other for standard formats. The majority do both.
Short Form AI Video Makers (9:16 TikTok etc) |
Wide Format AI Video Creators (16:9 YouTube etc) |
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| AICut – Transform Any Niche into Unique Engaging Videos | OBS free software for recording your screen and webcam simultaneously. Great for creating tutorials, courses and software & platform reviews. Create walkthroughs and reviews on anything and everything. |
| Syllably -Turn any idea into faceless videos | Davinci Resolve video editor. It’s incredible, used by Hollywood for post-production, and amazingly, it’s free. There’s a learning curve. But video content is going to be with us for the foreseeable future so if it’s unrestricted video editing you’re after, then it’s worth learning the basics and grow from there. |
| . | Descript full video editing and screen recording with Ai technology thrown in. Game-changing! (and kinda scary what it does). It’s quite new, until very recently has been focused on being able to record your voice synced up with text editing, so change the text, and what you say changes with the text |
| . | Camtasia screen recorder and video editor. I used to use Camtasia to record my webcam and PC screen. However, it costs around $300 but it’s easy to use with lots of features.
One thing is it does not record your webcam in widescreen. It’s fine for using the (square-ish) webcam footage in a corner within your screen recording (which does record in widescreen). However for stand-alone widescreen webcam footage you can use OBS or Capcut. |
| . | CapCut is an all-in-one video editor that makes video creating and sharing easier. CapCut is one of the best video editors to automatically add great-looking captions and it’s free. |
| . | Runway 30+ AI Magic Tools, real-time video editing. Greenscreen and video/image Ai wizardry. |
| . | Pictory script to video creation in minutes. Perfect for YouTubers, marketers and course creators. Save time, and create videos in just minutes.
Simple to use, powerful A.I. does the work for you. Over 3 million video clips. use own voice or A.I. generated voices. Pictory leverages the latest in A.I technology to automatically create videos from your scripts. |
| . | Invideo Convert your script, article, or blog into video in minutes using InVideo’s AI based Text-to-Video editor. 5000+ professionally- created templates.
Discover templates for any use case. Search by platform, industry or content type. Customize a template for your brand using simple drag-drop-replace actions. |
| Filmora – Effortlessly create with a fully-equipped video editing suite powered by AI. This is the video editor I use, very similar to Capcut but with more bells and whistles. | |
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If the video is not for YouTube, TikTok etc, I’ll upload to GrooveVideo to host (store up to 15 videos with a Free GrooveFunnels account) You can also embed your GrooveVideo hosted videos into any page, on your WordPress site for example.
Audio
The top two are the most human sounding like AI text to voices I’ve found so far.
Play AI powered text to voice generator. Instantly convert text in to natural-sounding speech and download as MP3 and WAV audio files.
ElevenLabs Another AI powered text to voice generator, however you can also add your own voice for easy text editing/changes similar to Descript but without the video editing.
Adobe Enhance Remove noise from voice recordings with speech enhancement. Speech enhancement makes voice recordings sound as if they were recorded in a professional studio. (Use this for ALL your voice overs in videos, reels, TikToks etc to enhance with a great studio level output).
EpidemicSound Royalty-free music and sound effects. This is the website I use for everything. The quality of the music and sound effects is unmatched. You can create 1,000’s of videos using the music from here without any worries about getting copyright strikes or claims from YouTube. Click here for a 30 days free trial…
Content Creation
Ubersuggest is a FREE SEO tool that enables you to do keyword research, analyze competitors, do site audits and more!
Keyword.io Google autocomplete longtail keyword tool. Get hundreds of keyword suggestions for FREE!
Mangools (the affordable secret 
) alternative to the more expensive Ahrefs and Semrush SEO keyword tools! Start 10 day free trial
Jasper is the highest quality AI copywriting tool with over 3,000 5-star reviews. Start your free trial now
Frase AI for content creation. This is an amazing AI tool for SEO-ing your site/blog articles. Frase AI helps you research, write, and optimize high-quality SEO content in minutes instead of hours.
Originality is a free MarketMuse and Surfer SEO alternative for content optimisation. By using a content optimizer tool, you are ensuring your content is search engine and reader-friendly, ultimately leading to higher traffic and engagement on your site.
ZimmWriter the best Ai content writer for Windows. You’ll also need to subscribe to the ChatGPT V4 API at $20 p/m. Plus “token” costs of around 3000 ish word, great content articles for under 20 cents!
ChatGPT Creating safe artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity… apparently. Mind-blowing Ai for coding scripts, writing articles and even producing meal plans for your dinner if you show it a photo (of the inside) of your fridge. Into version 4 at time of writing with Google’s Ai alternative hot on the heals being incorporated into Google Docs etc.
With Ai generated human like avatars, voices, automated content, image, and video creation, these Ai “tools” may very well make everything else on this page obsolete in the not too distant future.
Top tip: If you want your site or blog articles to be found on search engines, you have to up your game, clicking a button on ChatGPT for a generic Ai written article just isn’t going to cut it.
Images
Photopea.com is a great free online photo editor with all the toys you’re used to in other paid softwares like PhotoShop, Paintshop etc.
https://www.adobe.com/express/
Success Mindset
Books
Goals! How To Get Everything You Want Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini PH.D.
Books can only take you so far,10 Steps to a Stellar Success Mindset does things differently. It uses hypnosis.
Hypnosis doesn’t just embed the mindset of success. Hypnosis helps you use your unconscious mind in many other ways – giving you a laser-like focus, unshakeable determination, and a strong vision of the future.
side-note for any marketers reading this: Do you want to know the biggest pain points of your target market & ideas on how you can help solve them with your product, advice or service? Explore Hypnosis Downloads multitude of categories niches for inspiration.
Website Hosting
After happily using Cloudways for years, I discovered Contabo Cloud VPS hosting for approx 3 or 4 times the server resources at less than half the cost. Over 2 years of use and proven to be very fast and reliable!
Contabo VPS Cloud Hosting
Plesk Web AdminUnless you’re a server wizard who enjoys spending hours weekly updating the server with the latest patches and setting up your sites, domains, and WordPress via a terminal window, then with a Contabo VPS you’ll also need to choose a web admin to help do all this for you, making things much simpler.
The two main web admin contenders are cPanel which many will be familiar with as it’s been the main choice for the majority of hosting companies for years. Plesk is a great alternative to cPanel, better in my opinion as it’s much easier to navigate, plus it’s almost half the monthly cost of cPanel.
A Contabo Cloud VPS Mwith Plesk comes in at less than $27 USD per month.
Best Contabo Hosting Alternatives
WORDPRESS HOSTING FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
If you’re wondering WTF is a Plesk web admin control panel above, and just want an easy, ready to go fully managed WordPress hosting with speed, security, and 24/7 live support.
One-Click WordPress Hosting for Page Builders and Themes
Do you build websites with WordPress page builders? Cloudways comes with some of the best themes & page builders, giving you access to premium versions at a discounted (& free) price.
If you’re looking for a WP Engine alternative for managed WordPress hosting and 24/7 live support, Kinsta has you covered. Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, their WordPress hosting is optimized for speed and performance.
WordPress Themes & Plugins
Thrive Architect – the WordPress Visual Editor for Business Builders – Before now, I never realized just how much time I spent waiting for page reloads while creating content in WordPress.
You can save massive amounts of time with a “live” editor like this.
And what I love about this tool is that it doesn’t just replace the boring and clumsy old WordPress editor, it’s also a whole sales-page-building suite!
If you build marketing pages and landing pages, this thing is brilliant!
Astra is the most popular theme of all time
Fastest, Lightweight, and Highly Customizable WordPress Theme with SHED LOAD’S of website and e-commerce templates ready to use.
JNews – News – Magazine – Blog WP theme
The JNews WordPress theme is the current theme powering this site.
You can also use Elementor and other page builders with JNews
ThemeForest have thousands of WordPress themes to start your new website with a bang. Beautiful templates for the world’s most popular content management system.
Domain Names
NameCheap
Namecheap has been my domain registrar of choice for 10+ years. FREE privacy protection with an easy to use dashboard. Register a cheap domain with them – pop the I.P in the settings from Contabo and that’s it. No messing or additional SSL cert costs as that’s all covered with Contabo. Easy.
Website Speed
10Web Booster
10Web Booster is an all-in-one solution for optimizing websites. It implements dozens of speed optimization techniques from simple minification to JS delay and works surprisingly well. I’ve tried a lot of speed boosting plugins and services such as Cloudflare and 10Web Booster beats them all! You can speed-up 6 pages on your WordPress site for free.
E-mail Marketing
For 90%+ of all online businesses, building a mailing list is a top priority.
A mailing list is the key to more traffic, more sales and more personal freedom. There’s just nothing better than knowing you can send an email with an offer anytime and make $100, $500. $1,000, $5,000 and upwards.
But how do you build that list in the first place?
Thrive Leads: The Ultimate List Building plugin For WordPress
There are many other opt-in plugins out there, but this one is on a completely different level. There are many plugins that give you some options for adding opt-in forms to your site.
But this new plugin takes a different approach: these guys have taken the best conversion optimization technologies and the most advanced list building strategies and crammed them all into a single plugin.
I’ve swapped out my old opt-in plugins for Thrive Leads and immediately seen a 200%+ increase in opt-ins.
It makes ALL the difference from breaking even on your ad spend to doubling or tripling your initial investment – and that’s before you start following up with your autoresponder!
E-mail Marketing (Autoresponder)
AWeber
# UPDATE: I’m moving/moved my email marketing over to the Systeme platform below.
I’ve used AWeber for what seems forever. 20 years (maybe, if they’ve been going that long)? I’ve tried others, (spending 2 days just trying to fathom out how to set-up a simple follow up automation before throwing my PC out the window and heading for the pub) .
The ease of use of the AWeber dashboard makes all the difference of being able to stay sober and quick implementation of creating a new campaign for the latest launch or product/service you’ve discovered and want to promote.
Become an email marketing pro in no time with their “How to grow your business with email marketing” PDF. Plus, you’ll get access to tons of fantastic templates that help you get up and running quickly.
Best AWeber Alternatives
GetResponse is the best alternative to Aweber. They’ve lots of ready to use templates to get you up and email marketing fast. In addition to great looking email templates, they also have a Free Website Builder for Professional Websites all integrated and perfect for hitting the ground running.
GrooveMail uses tagging & segmentation technology combined with behaviour based automation to take immediate action on purchases, refunds, subscriptions, form fills, abandoned carts, specific email link clicks and so much more. (GrooveMail is part of an all-in-one marketing platform, similar to Systeme)
I’ve never used Mailvio, however I’ve been very close to trying them out as I’ve heard good things, maybe more suited to larger lists and not as trigger happy to getting your account banned for the occasional spam complaint (i.e cold email marketing;)
URL Shorteners
Easy Affiliate Links (for WordPress)
This is the WordPress plugin tool I use to shorten URLs and make them “pretty.” It’s great for creating URLs that you send in emails or share out and about. The free version works for most people, but there is a paid version.
Sales Funnel Builders
A New Shift In Running Your Online Business?
Until very recently, I would steer people away from using “sales funnel builder” platforms as you can do almost everything these platforms do usingmanaged WordPress hosting, ThriveSuite and AWeber, for much cheaper.
However, that was before Systeme came along.
(Note: Apart from a handful of sites/funnels hosted on Systeme & Groove, the majority of my websites, including Income.tube are now running on Contabo cloud hosting, using ThriveSuite and connected to Systeme for the email autoresponder via a Zapier zap. If you intend to create articles for a blog on your site, this is the way to go).
I’ve used Clickfunnels, who’ve excellent sales and marketing training and strategies (which usually come at additional cost) however, $299 a month for less features).
Builderall (darn near impossible to point an existing domain name to your pages/funnels).
Groove (previously known as GrooveFunnels) I bought the lifetime “Pro” deal at $1,400 2 or 3 year’s ago when in beta mode as at the time it promised unlimited email’s autoresponder, along with webinar funnels and all the advanced bells, toys, whistles and shiny things any online marketer would ever need.
However (for some unknown reason??!) apparently they ran the whole email marketing platform from a single I.P address which was blacklisted within a few days of launching due to someone spamming, who’d have guessed. So their email autoresponder went off-line for maybe a year-ish.
They’ve now (sort of) got their shit together and everything seems to be working, I’m using it to host videos with great marketing features like magic buttons that appear at a certain time on the video (so you can use it like a webinar sales video) and I’m sending traffic to a site hosted on their platform which is working great.
However (#2), getting into year 3 and it’s still not quite out of beta mode just yet, plus the “unlimited” email subscribers has automagically shrank to 50,000 on my plan??
The main reason I’m using Systeme for my autoresponder is there’s a Zap to easily connect to via the ThriveLeads plugin on my site’s, (you can also use Zappier Zaps’ with Aweber & Getresponse autoresponders).
There’s nothing to connect a 3rd party site such as this WordPress based site to GrooveMail, suggesting to me, that their email platform is only really intended for handling emails opted directly into landing pages hosted on their platform. Yes I could probably get something working using another 3rd party SMTP email service such as SendinBlue, but that can get expensive and defeats the purpose of forking out $1,400 in the first place.
With all the features, it’s a very powerful marketing platform, but for the time being I recommend using the (less features but easier to use and plenty for 98% of online marketer’s) Systeme platform.
The features, speed and ease of use of Systeme puts ALL the others to shame.
Get the World’s Easiest
All-In-One Marketing Platform
Systeme has all the tools you need to grow your online business
- Create Sales Funnels
- Send Marketing Emails
- Build Websites
- Manage Your Affiliates
- Create Online Courses
- Automate Your Marketing
The cherry
on top? You can get started for free. As in free forever if you’re sticking to one site/funnel and e-mail autoresponder campaign! Create your free account now..
5 FREE Marketing Tools To STEAL From Marketing Leaders
Marketingexamples.com serves as an extensive library featuring top-tier marketing examples across various categories.
https://marketingexamples.com/
Growthinreverse.com offers deep dives into successful email newsletter strategies and monetization methods.
Milled.com provides access to successful campaigns from various popular brands.
Reallygoodemails.com for advanced email filtering options based on user behavior can optimize targeting and engagement.
Designing landing or pricing pages with mobbin.com
Design tools on designstripe.com provide customizable illustrations and 3D mockups.
Watch this video on how to use the above links for your marketing.
Saved the best free tools for last…
Every tool you need to work with
Images in one place
