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These are some of the tools that I use to run this website. All of them provide an excellent level of service and are highly recommended. If you want to improve your ability to make money online, check them out.

Namecheap

Namecheap allows you to register domain names for your websites. It offers a wide range of top level domains, including .com, .net, .org and many other regional variants. If you select a .com domain it costs around $9 per year.

The purchase process is quick and trouble-free (you can use your Paypal account or credit card). Once you’ve registered your domains the easy to use interface allows you to manage every aspect of them, including changing the nameservers and registration renewal.

I’ve been using Namecheap since 2006 and have found them to be highly reliable and good value for money.

Hostgator

Due to the inconvenience of changing servers, it’s important to select your website hosting package carefully before you get started. Hostgator is one of the largest and fastest growing hosting companies in the world and provides a broad range of hosting packages at reasonable rates.

I’ve used Hostgator since 2005 and never had any problems. For $10 – $15 per month you can secure a reliable, good value hosting package with cpanel, near 100% uptime and great customer support. Highly recommended.

Aweber

Whatever niche you operate in, if you want to develop a stable, profitable online business, it’s essential to build your own email list of prospects and customers. Ultimately, the money is in your relationship with your list. And the best way to achieve this is to use an autoresponder service.

This enables you to collect email addresses, then deliver a series of automated email messages and/or broadcasts that are set to be sent at a specific date and time.

Aweber provides the industry leading email autoresponder service. It is extremely reliable, easy to use, packed with features (which are constantly improving) and has an unsurpassed delivery rate of over 99.9%.

I’ve been using Aweber since 2005 and after my web hosting package it’s the most important tool that I use to run my business. Without Aweber, my online profits would be significantly lower.

So if you’ve ever received an email from Midnight Marketing Tips, the chances are that it will have been delivered by Aweber.

Check out Aweber, at present you can get started for just $1 for the first 30 days.

Market Samurai

Market Samurai is an amazing piece of software that automates much of the laborious but essential aspects of keyword research.

It allows you to achieve more in two hours than you could achieve in two weeks of manual research.

If I could buy only one other marketing tool after website hosting and Aweber, I would select Market Samurai, it’s that good. The software is also updated frequently, which means that it keeps improving and won’t go out of date.

Thesis

If you intend to use WordPress to manage the content of your website, it offers a wide range of benefits including ease of use, RSS feeds, the ability to build a community and a vast selection of both themes and plugins.

However, WordPress has one major drawback. In its standard form, it’s poorly optimized for search engine performance.

Thesis is a premuim WordPress theme that solves all these problems and turns your WordPress site into a highly optimized search engine performer.

It also boasts several additional features such as a rotating media box, a widgetized footer/sidebar and it makes use of the nested comments feature introduced by WordPress.

This site uses the thesis theme (with various modifications) and I’ve found it to be an extremely flexible theme that is easy to modify and performs well in the search engine results. Highly recommended.

S3

If you intend to use videos or podcasting to promote your online business, Amazon Simple Storage Service (or s3) is the perfect way to host your content.

It looks more professional than hosting your videos on YouTube, avoids the related videos that YouTube embeds into the video player (which will distract your viewers) and unlike most low cost hosting packages, it will be able to cope with as many visitors as you can throw at it.

And as Amazon s3 uses a simple pay as you go billing system (with prices as low as 18 cents per gigabyte of data transfer), it’s both easy to use and value for money.

EZS3

This brilliant service allows you to create video players to display videos that you host on Amazon s3. All of the videos players on this blog are managed by EZS3.

It’s quick, simple and extremely flexible. Just upload your video to s3, login to EZS3, select the type and size of player that you want to use, then grab the code and paste it into your site.

EZS3 also allows you to secure your videos so that they will only play on your site (essential if you want to prevent people stealing your s3 bandwidth) and provides powerful tracking stats so you can see how many people have viewed your videos.

The owners of EZS3 are constantly adding new features to increase the level of service they provide for their users.

EZS3 is highly recommended if you use Amazon s3 to host your videos and want a solution that allows you to quickly and easily create video players for your content.