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Okay it’s 2.45am and I’m lying in bed as once again I can’t sleep, my brain seems to fire up when I’m the most tired it’s really annoying. Anyways I thought I’d write about the tools I use everyday to run my online business successfully.

1 Mozilla firefox, I prefer this browser over internet explorer for a whole bunch of reasons but the main points being it’s faster and safer.

2 Xmarks is a add on/extension for firefox and it saves me so much time, I actually love it. It saves all your Internet user names and password so you don’t have to keep entering them for each site you visit but more that it also saves all your bookmarked sites and synchronizes them on their server so if I’m using my laptop as I often do or the home pc I’ll have all my user details and bookmarks on each computer, and if save new stuff on the laptop it’s automatically sync’d to my other computers. It’s brill.

3 Another cool add on for firefox is the seo toolbar, there is a few variation of this but the one I use can be downloaded from seobook.com. This is a browser toolbar that refreshes on each website you visit and tells you useful information such as the websites page rage, inbound links, website age and lots of other cool seo information tools. It’s also cool for spying on your competitors sites and analysing your own website.

4 As far as email clients go you can’t get better than Mozilla’s Thunderbird I switched to Thunderbird on a friends recommendation and I’ve never looked back. The best features are that it’s fast and easy to use. I had many problems just setting up an autoresponder in Outlook, the office version not outlook express which does not have the same problem.

5 On the subject of email it’s always good to have a online based email client for when your on the move and can’t access your computer and don’t want to mess around with your hosting providers email interface, I’ve used hotmail for as long as I can remember. It works and so I like it. Though it’s worth noting I’ll probably switch to gmail in the near future because sometimes your hotmail emails can be delayed.

6 Google analytics provides a wealth of information about the people visiting your website, I highly recommend you install this free software onto your website. You can you it to find out just about everything on your visitors but I normally use it just to find out basic information about my websites performance such as the number of visitors in a month, the most popular source of traffic, my most popular webpages.

7 Google website optimizer is very useful. Have you ever wondered which page on your website is better? The website optimizer allows you to split test different page variation and measure the results. You’ll be suprised with the big difference small changes can make to your website.

8 Google webmaster central is another great tool provided by Google, it’s allows you to monitor how google see’s your website. So you can check what pages of your website are included in google index, notice of any broken links or problem pages when googles spider crawls your website. You can also see a list of all the websites that have links to your, and finally my favorite bit search queries which allows you to see all the times your website was shown in google and for what keywords, including your position for those keywords.

9 Whilst were on a Google roll I may as well include the Google adwords keyword tool which gives you an insight into what people are typing into Google. You just need to enter a some keywords or a keyword phrase and the tool shows you all the relevant keyword search with a load of top information including: Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, Competition, Estimated Avg. CPC and some other details. This tool is extremely useful and you should be using it if your not already doing so.

Okay I’ll leave you with these tools for the time being.

Make sure you use them and put what you learn into practice, there no point learning everything and doing nothing.

Hope you liked this post, let me know your thoughts and what tools you use everyday.

Thanks

Lee

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