Just about every day I receive an email, ticket, comment etc. asking what tool I use for “xyz.”

I’ve been wanting to offer a list for a while and this is as good a time as any. The following list of Internet Marketing tools is composed of the tools I use on a somewhat regular basis. There are others I use as well, but less frequently.

I tried to stay away from the obvious, Autoresponders, Analytics etc.

Here they are in no particular order:

1. The SEO Book Keyword Tool – I use this on a daily basis, primarily for the keyword research of my mini-site and article marketing efforts, but it’s useful for selecting niche phrases on any type of site. Just like any other keyword tool, the results aren’t exact, but it’s worked well for me.

2. Internal PR Checker – While not pretty, this is one of only TLPR (toolbar pagerank) checkers I’ve seen that is up most of the time. It checks the TLPR of all internal pages, which is pretty cool. PR means very little these days, but it’s still nice to see your pages gain some…for your own ego if nothing else

3. Fresh Drop Domain Finder – This is a site I just recently came across, but I’m now addicted to. They show lists of recently expired domains, domains up for auction that are about to end, etc. and they have an excellent search tool. But, be very careful with this tool or any other related tool. There are alot of people out there offering domains with fake data.

4. PC Names Domain Search Engine – This is similar to Fresh Drop (above) but much simpler. It’s quite simply a search engine for domain names. Type in a keyword and it shows a list of related domains. Depending on your niche, you may have to go through a few, but on average I’d say about 50% of those shown are available. I’ve found some golden nuggets with this!

5. Article Post Robot – I’ve been using this for a very long time. If you’re a regular reader you’ve probably heard me mention APR several times in the past. It makes article submission much quicker and easier and allows you to insert multiple titles and summaries!

6. SEO for Firefox – This is possibly one of the most useful and time-saving tools I use. It inserts alot of useful data directly into the search results of Google and Yahoo. You just do a search as usual and directly below each result you’ll see data such as PR, Age, Cache date, Yahoo Links, DMOZ, Alexa etc. It makes competition analysis much quicker and easier and is just neat all around.

7. Rank Checker – This is Aaron Wall’s newest tool from SEO Book, which provides a very simple way to check your sites rankings on Google. This is also a Firefox addon. You just open it up, insert the domain name and the keywords you want to analyze and it shows you the rankings.

8. RoboForm – This isn’t just an Internet Marketing tool, it’s useful for all of your online activity. It works with Internet Explorer and FireFox for sure, and possibly other browsers, although I’m not sure. You enter all of your usernames and passwords and with the click of a button RoboForm inserts the details for you. With all of the UN’s and PW’s we deal with on a daily basis this tool is awesome. I’ve been using the pro version for several months now and I Love it!! You can also insert your personal details for forms if you like. Alot of neat features.

9. Instant Article Wizard Pro – This is the first article “creator” I’ve ever recommended. My initial feelings on this type of software was that it was impossible for software to create an article that was actually readable and useful to others. I can honestly say that I was wrong. I started using IAWP about a month ago and although some articles need a little editing, it’s cut huge amounts of time off of article writing. I’ve been having my sister write my articles lately and she’s been using this and sending twice as many articles than before. Just take a look at the videos!

10. Camtasia Studio – ok, I don’t use this on a daily basis. I’m actually HORRIBLE at video and produce very little of it, I do have a copy of Camtasia and use it on the rare occasions in which I do need to produce a tutorial. It’s very simple to use and understand and produces quality video. This is the industry standard for screen capture. I just wanted to mention it because I do see alot of value in it. If I were a better speaker and teacher I would be using this on a daily basis.

Tools Recommended by Readers – If you have a useful tool to add just let us know about it in the comment section and I’ll add it here. Please no affiliate links or links to tools you own or are affiliate with. Although I’m using some aff. links above, there is no way for me to tell whether or not a tool is recommended because of its affiliate program or not.

Source: Ez-OnlineMoney.com/blog

Selecting the perfect domain name for your website is the most important, and oftentimes hardest, step in establishing a web presence. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you ease the burden of checking available domains and suggesting similar names that are related to your searches.

In this article, you’ll read about 10 neat web tools that will lend you a hand in finding and choosing domain names. You’ll find a variety of search and suggestion tools that have an assortment of features so that, hopefully, you’ll discover a few favorites.

1. Domainr

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find a domain name that end with the popular .com, .net, and .org TLD’s. Domainr is an innovative web tool that helps you explore other TLD’s that have made popular websites like last.fm and del.icio.us stand out from the crowd. Of course, searches will also include popular top-level domains that are available.

2. Dot-o-mator

Dot-o-mator is a web tool that suggests site names based on prefixes and suffixes that you’ve entered (keywords). Alternatively, you can use a category of prefixes (like “Tech” or “Games”) and suffixes (like “Hardware” or “Web 2.0 words”) to generate suggested site names for you. It’s a helpful tool for, at the very least, obtaining inspiration for a site name.

They also have a fun tool called Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator that generates “Web 2.0″ site names like “Yakidoo” or “Zoompulse”.

3. BustAName

BustAName is a robust and feature-packed domain finder that uses linguistic data to help you search domains. BustAName allows you to save and manage/organize your searches for later use. It has a “List of Words” feature that advise you of similar words to your search – which you can then organize inside folders.

Available domains that are returned can be sorted in a number of ways such as “by quality (readability)” or “by length” for easier viewing. Though the web tool is very intuitive, the creators have a video tutorial on how to utilize BustAName.

4. Domain Tools

Domain Tools is a set of domain name search engines that will help you uncover relevant information about certain domain names. They have a “Whois” search that reveals records about the party who registered the domain, a “Suggestions” search to help you find similar domain names, a “Domain Search” which shows you what TLDs of a domain name are available, and domain names that are “For Sale” or “At Auction”.

5. Domize

Domize is a fast, Ajax-based search engine that you can use to rapidly check the availability of domains. Domize has a widget that you can install on your website to provide a domain search engine to your visitors. Domize also has an iPhone app – because domain name inspiration can hit you at anytime (hopefully you have your iPhone with you when it happens).

6. squurl

squurl is another fast Ajax-based domain search engine. It has a “Suggestions” feature to help you discover similar domains to the ones you’ve typed.

7. DomainsBot

DomainsBot is a domain search engine that has an “Advanced” search feature so that you can conduct a more customized and refined search. For example, you can set the maximum domain character length to eliminate lengthy domain names from the results or exclude domain results that have a hyphen (-).

8. dnScoop

dnScoop tries to estimate the value of a particular domain based on several statistics such as site traffic, links pointing to the domain, and other factors. This will help you gain some insight on the value of a particular domain name in case the name you really want is “for sale” and you want to see if the asking price is fair, or to make an offer to a site owner that owns the domain you really want.

9. StuckDomains

StuckDomains is a database of expired domain names that previous owners have not renewed. This can be an opportunity to find a domain name that doesn’t involve odd names like “fujiyakuku.com”.

10. Nameboy

Nameboy is a popular domain name generator. This straightforward web tool asks for a “Primary Word” and “Secondary Word” that describe the topic of your website, and based on your input, it suggests possible domain names.

For example, typing in “web” as the Primary Word and “superman” as the Secondary Word returned results such as webhero, supeweb and supermanweb. There’s a “Rhyme” option that tries to suggest domain names that rhyme with the search phrases, but the feature didn’t seem to work on the above example.

Source: SixRivisions.com

uTorrent was very slow for me until recently I applied a few tweaks. Here’s what I did.

Note: Some of the settings mentioned below are optimized for 256k connection. If you want to calculate the optimal settings for your connection, check at the end of this tutorial. But I suggest you to read the entire tutorial for guidance on other settings.

First go to Options>Preferences>Network

1. Under ‘Port used for incomming connections’, enter any port number. It is best to use a port number above 10000. I use 45682.
2. Randomize port each time utorrent starts: UNCHECKED. I leave this unchecked because I have a router. If you do not have a router or a firewall, and want extra security,check this option.
3. Enable UPnP port mapping (Windows Xp or later only): UNCHECKED. I leave this unchecked because I have experienced it slowing down speeds. It is not needed if you manually port forward.
4. Add utorrent to Windows Firewall exceptions (Windows XP SP2 or later only): UNCHECKED (do this only if you have windows firewall disabled)
5. Global Maximum upload rate (kb/s): [0: unlimited]: 22 (for 256k connection)
6. Protocol Encryption: ENABLED. I would recommend everyone to enable this. This can help increase speeds with many ISPs.
7. Allow incoming Legacy Connections: CHECKED

Options>Preferences>Torrents

1. Global Maximum Number of Connections: 130 (for 256k connection)This number should not be set too low or the number of connections made to your torrents will be limited. Setting it too high may cause too much bandwidth to be used and can cause slowdowns.
2. Maximum Number of connected peers per torrent: 70 (for 256k connection)If you see that the peers connected to a specific torrent are exactly this number, or very close, increase this number to improve speeds.
3. Number of upload slots per torrent: 3 (for 256k connection)This depends on how much you want to upload to other users. Do not set too low or it may affect download speeds.
4. Use additional upload slots if upload speed <90%: CHECKED
5. Maximum number of active torrents: 2 (for 256k connection)
6. Maximum number of active downloads: 1 (for 256k connection)
7. Enable DHT Network: CHECKEDThis is recommended to be checked to improve speeds. More people will be available for sharing if this is checked.
8. Enable DHT for new torrents: CHECKED
9. Enable Peer Exchange: CHECKED
10. Enable scrapping: CHECKED
11. Pre-allocate all files: CHECKED
12. Append .!ut to incomplete files: UNCHECKED

Options>Preferences>Advanced

net.max_halfopen: 50

If you use Windows XP SP2, patch tcpip.sys with LvlLord’s Event ID 4226 Patcher to get better performance.

DO NOT CHANGE THIS OPTION unless you have Windows XP SP2 and have patched tcpip.sys.

You can also patch tcpip.sys with xp-Antispy

If you have a firewall

• Open up the options/preferences/settings for the firewall – usually your firewall will have an icon to click in the taskbar
• Look for the keywords “allow list” or “programs”
• Add the application you want to give access to the internet
• Make sure to save your settings when you are done

If you have a router

1. Go to start>run>type cmd, press enter>type ipconfig, press enter
2. Remember both your ip address and your default gateway
3. Type in your default gateway into your default browser, a password prompt may come up. The default username and password are admin for my router
4. Under ‘Applications’ fill out one line for each p2p client you use
5. You need to use your ip address, the correct port range and set either tcp or udp
6. You can find and change the ports in the actual p2p client’s settings, just make sure they are the same in the router
7. Most p2p apps need both tcp and udp checked, if you are not sure check your p2p client’s FAQ
8. Save your settings

Check PortForward.com to forward ports for uTorrent.

Some of the settings I mentioned above are relative to my bandwidth.

How to calculate optimal settings for your connection

In order to apply the following tips you need to know your maximum upload and download speeds. You can test your bandwidth over here.

Maximum upload speed

If you use your Maximum upload speed, there won’t be not enough space left for the files you are downloading. So you have to cap your upload speed.

This is how I calculate my optimal upload speed…

upload speed * 80%

Maximum download speed

Setting your maximum download speed to unlimited will hurt your connection. So use this to calculate your optimal setting.

download speed * 90%

Maximum connected peers per torrent

upload speed * 1.3

Maximum upload slots

1 + (upload speed / 6)

Disable Windows Firewall

Windows Firewall hates P2P and so disable it and get yourself a decent firewall like Zone Alarm.

And last optimize your Internet Connection with TCP Optimizer.

Know any other tricks to increase uTorrent’s download speed? Please share them here.

Source: JohnTP.com

Image editing software has become ubiquitous in this digital age. Whether you’re creating a web interface or simply cropping and enhancing your family photos – you’ll need your favorite image editor to do it.

In this article, you’ll find the top image editing applications currently out in the market.

Last week, readers of Six Revisions were asked what they thought was the best image editing software. Over 150 people responded and here, you’ll find the pick of the litter.

5. Pixelmator

Pixelmator is a fast and powerful image editing software for the Mac operating system. With its intuitive and beautiful Graphical User Interface (GUI), support for layers to organize your document, a large assortment of painting tools, and simple-to-use photo correction tools – Pixelmator is an excellent pick for Mac users who don’t quite need the features (and price tag) of Photoshop.

4. Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor much like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, and Xara X. Its default file format is web standards compliant Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) under W3C’s specifications. Want to learn more about what Inkscape has to offer? Check out this list of articles and presentations about Inkscape.

If you’re interested in finding more open source and free alternatives to Photoshop, you may want to read this list of ten open source and free alternatives.

3. Fireworks

Fireworks is Adobe’s image editing software for the web designers. It excels in several areas over its big brother Photoshop, namely in high-fidelity prototyping of sites and a workspace environment that’s optimized for web designers. It is also a raster and vector hybrid, being able to work with raster-based images and vector-based graphics better and more symbiotically than Photoshop.

Fireworks is a popular tool of choice for many web designers and was once voted as one of the top tools for web designers.

2. GIMP

GIMP – which stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program – is a feature-packed and powerful open source image editor that can be used in all major operating systems (Linux, Mac, and Windows). It has a customizable interface so that you can easily set the view and behavior of GIMP.

It has a huge set of retouching tools that will allow you to perform advanced image retouching and manipulation. The GIMP outputs your work in many common formats like JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, and even PSD (Photoshop’s native file format).

Here are a couple of articles you may wish to take a look at if you’re interested in learning about the GIMP:

• 10 Websites to Help You Master GIMP
• 25 GIMP Video Tutorials to Help Get You Started

1. Photoshop

Not surprisingly, Photoshop is the winner by a landslide, garnering over half of all the total votes. Photoshop is what comes to mind when image editing is involved there’s very little that can be said about it that hasn’t been said already.

With an insurmountable amount of features that help you manipulate and enhance photos as well as create web graphics, all while helping you manage your workflow and image editing environment – Photoshop comes in at numero uno as the best image editing software currently in the market.

Source: Six Revisions

Want to modify your pictures and make them fun? Don’t know how to edit those photos using picture editing software such as Photoshop?  Well don’t worry because there are many websites out there that will do all the hardwork for you and produce fun pictures that you can plan with.  These websites are great to checkout if you are bored and want something to do.  They are also very fun to play with if you just want to make your pictures interesting and exciting.  There are probably even more than the 15 mentioned below but check these fun websites and see what you can do with your pictures!

One thing to keep in mind is that most of these websites are FREE! That is one of the great things about the Internet.  Most people don’t want to have to pay for 15 fun websites that can edit your pictures.  Luckily for you that most of these are free.  So check them out below!

1) PhotoFunia – This is one of the hottest photo editting websites out today! What it allows you to do is to add cool backgrounds to your photos or it puts you in the background.  You can select from a large list of effects and then all you need to do is add in your picture and it will put you into that effect!  You can also see premade ones that other people have done.  This website is all hosted in numerous languages.  Below is an example of an effect I did on myself:

2) Fun Photo Box – Very similar to PhotoFunia.  However if you aren’t able to find the effect you wanted with the previous website you should definitely check out this website because it has a wide of of additional effects you can use on your photos!

3) HairMixer - Ever wondered what you or a celebrity would look like with a particular haircut?  Well ponder no more.  With this website you have the ability to mix and match hair from two people.  You can select a photo on the left and a photo on the right and then you can mix their faces and hair to see how it would look.

4) Photo505 – This one is very similiar to the first two but has more effects! So if the first two websites weren’t enough for you I’d consider checking out this website for fun effects that will keep you busy for days on end!

5) YearBook Yourself – The title of the website itself so make it pretty clear what this website is all about.  Basically what you do with this website is you register with the website and then you have the ability to select a picture of yourself and put it in the yearbook.  It is a pretty neat tool.  Check it out and see what you look like in the YearBook!

6) Loonapix – This website is a bit different then the rest of fun picture editting websites because it gives you the ability to do effects to your pictures, face effects, photo frames, ad photo trims.  So there is a few more options with this website that is sure to keep you busy for hours!

7) Magmypic – This one is a lot of fun!  You can take a picture of yourself and use it to create a magazine cover! There is also a section on the website where you can rate other peoples magazine covers! You also have the ability to select either magazine or comic book covers.

8 ) Your Own Wired Cover – This one is similiar to the website above but has additional options.  You are able to choose the logo color, create cover headlines, and upload a photo.  If #7 above did not give you what you wanted then check this one out and see if you can find what you are looking for!

9) Hollywood Hair Makeover – This feature is pretty neat because you can stylize a picture of yourself with celebrity hair and makeup.  All you need to do is upload your photo, try on new star styles, try on tons of lipstick, and try the best beauty buys from their annual list.

10) Write On It – This website is fun because you can create multiple types of pictures.  You can create captions, fake pictures, and fake magazines.  You also have the ability to battle other people on the website for who has create the best image!

11) Dumpr - Like many of the other websites above you can use this website to apply many effects to your pictures. There are lots of great effects here to try so check it out.

12) Montagraph – This website allows you to take an original picture and then erase part of the picture where the face was and then add in your own picture to make a new picture.  See below for an example of how this works.

13) My Heritage – This website uses advanced face recognition technology to produce celebrity morph pictures and many other pictures.  My Heritage also has fun effects such as Celebrity Morph, Look-alike Meter, Celebrity Collage and Tag Photos.

14) Letter James – Letter James is a website used to put writing effects into your photos.  So if you have a photo of say a beach and you wanted to add writing to the sand you could do so with this website!

15) Personalized Money – Have you ever wanted to put your face on a dollar bill or even better a $100 bill?  Well here is your chance to do so.  With this website you can choose the type of money (dollar, yen, etc), upload your photo, optionally re-position the photo, and then download the final image!

Are you struggling to find the right keywords to optimize your site and drive more traffic to your site? I know I have in the past until I found these 3 tools that I now use for all of my websites. It is important to use the right keywords because without the right keywords you will generate very little to no income with the wrong keywords and it will be difficult to generate traffic.  With the wrong keywords there is a lot of competition and therefore makes it difficult to generate traffic naturally through search engines.  Especially when you are creating a niche website it is important to have the right keywords.  All niche websites will fail unless they have the right keywords.  Without anymore delay here are the Top 3 tools I use to generate very successful mini-niche websites:

Research of Keyword Worth
- Spyfu – gives you a rough estimate of the cost per click for particular keywords.  It will also give you useful information such as: clicks/day, cost/day, search results, etc.  You can also enter domain names and get information on them as well.

Research of Competition
- Google Keyword Tool – this helps you research competition and the amount of searches to particular keywords.

Research of longtail keywords
- SEO Book – I use this one to get an idea of how many people search for certain keywords and spinoffs of those keywords. I look for keywords with over 100 views per day.  With these topics I create pages for my niche websites.

So there you have it.  My Top 3 keyword research tools that I use to make successful mini-niche websites.  Try them out for yourself and see how you like them.  If you have any other tools you use to for keyword research feel free to share in the comment section below!

One great plugin for WordPress that bloggers should install is Google Sitemap Generator.  What it allows you to do is automatically create a sitemap for Google Webmaster Tools.  The benefit of creating a sitemap for Google is that Google is more likely to index your blog quickly and therefore you will start getting traffic via Google search engine.  So when setting up your WordPress remember to install this plugin if you want to get indexed with Google more quickly.  Also note that whenever you edit, create a new post, or delete a post it will automatically update Google and update the sitemap with Google.

One great website I stumbled upon a few months back is CubeStat.com.  What this website allows you to do is enter in the domain of a website you are interested in and get some interesting information about that website.  After you type in your domain name and click “Check” you can see your estimated Website Worth, Daily Pageviews, and Daily Ads Revenue.

If you keep reading further on the page results you can see the following information:

• Alexa Rank
• Quantcast Rank
• Compete Rank
• PageRank
• Backlinks
• Google Indexed Pages
• Yahoo Indexed Pages
• Live Indexed Pages
• Dmoz Listing

All of this information is very useful when working with your blog.  It is good to know how successful your blog is on the web.  Even though this information is just an estimate it is interesting to compare your blog to others on the web to see how far off you are to being as successful as they are.

One thing I do when creating a new website is always after a week check my stats and than after a month or so I come back to check my stats again just to see how my blog is progressing.

Check it out for yourself @ CubeStat.com.

One of the newest search engines recently released is cuil.  If you have not checked out this search engine you may want to because it is a bit different than the traditional search engines such as Google.  One of the main features that cuil.com is that it boasts it searches three times as many pages as Google and ten times as many pages as Microsoft.

Instead of ranking the website by popularity it is ranked based on the websites content and relevance.  Once a page is found by certain keywords the rest of the page is analyzed and ranked based on its content.

Cuil then offers helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want.  Cuil also does not collect data about your search habits so your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.

Some of the new features with this new search engine include:

• drilldown menu that shows up on the right after doing a search and lets you drilldown through lists based on your keywords and gives you suggestions of something that you may be looking for
• a feature for tabs that would bring up multiple tabs based on your search since you may be looking for a few different type of things – example – Cars would bring up: All Results, Used Cars, New Cars, Rental Cars, more…
• there are navigation suggestions that come up when you start typing something in to the search engine.  It will then bring up a list of suggestions that you can select from
• when doing a search it will, if possible, bring up a image to show on the search results and the search results show more like a magazine then in a linear fashion like most traditional seach engines

Just recently released was Google’s new web browser Google Chrome.  If you haven’t heard about this new browser developed by Google then it is definitely something you should check out for yourself.  It has some new features that we are familiar with like tab browsing but it also has plenty of new features and it is very fast.  Some of the features include:

• opening a new tab will show you your most visited websites, search engines, as well as recent book marks and closed tabs
• another feature is that it uses up all of the your monitor by having a very small menu bar that is still powerful to have all the features you need
• one of the best features I believe is the crash control feature.  What you can do is right click the top bar of Google Chrome and select task manager and view all the tasks running in Google Chrome.  You can end tasks through this feature so that you don’t have to close the whole browser and start over again like Internet Explorer or Firefox
• another nice feature is Incognito mode which allows you to view visits and then close the window and none of the information will be stored once the window is closed
• with the feature of safe browsing Google Chrome will warn you before visiting a site if its suspected of maliware of phlishing
• you can also very easily add all your import settings from other browsers with a few clicks of the mouse