Constant Contact is one of the major players in email marketing services. If you study online marketing at all, one of the first things that you will discover is that you need to create an email list. Constant Contact can be the provider to help you manage and maintain the mailing list.

There are a lot of different players in the email autoresponder space and Constant Contact’s main focus is the local business owner. If you are an internet only marketer, you will find that Aweber is going to be a better fit for you.

Some of the things that I really like about Constant Contact:

1. Very easy to create a nice looking newsletter
2. Super easy to import names and email addresses from your regular address book without restrictions
3. Good customer support
4. Lots of apps and add on tools that work well with it

The main drawback with Constant Contact is it does not allow opt in by email. In other words, you can’t send an email to listname@constantcontact.com and subscribe like you can with Aweber. Also, some online shopping programs (Digital Access Pass, for example) do not integrate with Constant Contact. If you are selling good or services online, check with your provider before getting a Constant Contact account.

Additionally, the Constant Contact account opt in process is a little strange if you have multiple sites in numerous niches because of the way their opt in forms work.

My recommendation: Go with Constant Contact if you are a local marketer or if you primarily sell from only one website. If you are an internet marketer, go with Aweber.

Overall Rating
• 5.0 from 5

Big Commerce is one of several tools out there that you can use to build an online store for your business. Its main competitor is Shopify. Additionally, there are several WordPress plugins that you can use to build an online store.

Should you use Big Commerce or use WordPress? Well, it depends on how well you know WordPress. If you are a WordPress wizard, you may find WordPress easier to use. If you are more of an online novice, you will probably find Big Commerce easier to use. Either way, its quite easy to find people to help you build your site if you don’t know how to do it yourself.

I found the store builder tool to be fairly easy to use and the webinars quite helpful. They also assign you an account rep who is very easy to get in touch with if you have any questions on how to use your Big Commerce account.I asked my rep several questions along the way and he is always very eager to answer them quickly.

Big Commerce offers a free 14 day package where you can try it out before becoming a full member of the service. This is the easiest way to determine if Big Commerce is right for you. They don’t ask for a credit card. If Big Commerce doesn’t work out for you within the 14 days, the account simply expires.

Overall Rating
• 4.0 from 5

LinkAuthority is one of several SEO tools that you can use to get backlinks to your website. It’s a backlink tool that works by having you submit blog posts to their network. There are several tools out there in this space to choose from. I like LinkAuthority in particular for several reasons.

1. All the sites in the network are pr 2 and above.
2. Spinning is not allowed. While many people consider this a negative, I consider it a positive as not having spinning results in better quality, which protects the network.
3. Duplicate content is strictly prohibited. Like the rule above, this protects their network.
4. Your posts only go to one website at a time. While many will not like this rule, it will also protect the network, much like the rules above.
5. You can either do short articles with only one link, which is very similar to the way Build My Rank works or you can do longer articles and have up to 3 links, which is very similar to Authority Link Network. However, LinkAuthority has a much lower cost of usage. Unlike Build My Rank, which runs a hefty $59 a month LinkAuthority is as low as $10/month and even this is waived if you add a PR 2 or above site to the network.

Like any of the other link networks out there, you will need to make a plan to get content. You can outsource good content quite easily on Warrior Forum or Fiverr and I highly recommend that you do so.

LinkAuthority works on a credit system. You get a certain number of postings that you are allowed per day based on your credits. If you don’t have credits available for the postings you are submitting, they are queued in the system for later postings. One disadvantage is you must use your credits. There’s no banking of credits available. This is the only drawback that I’ve found with LinkAuthority.

Still overall, if you are looking for a good clean network at a fair price, LinkAuthority is a good Build My Rank alternative that you should seriously consider.

Overall Rating
• 5.0 from 5

Chris Baker has a website system called SEO For Local Business that is designed for internet marketers who want to sell web services to local businesses. Chris sells leads of business owners who have been called and surveyed along with email contact info.

Unfortunately, there have been several complaints about Chris’s system from several people stating that Chris’s leads are a disaster. Chris provides you with a list of email addresses, but the ratio of bad addresses is very high. Additionally, there have been several complaints that the “interested business owners” aren’t in fact interested at all.

Holly Cotter, who is a very well known and experienced internet marketer bought Chris’s system and even got so pissed off that she made a whole blog exposing Chris’s scam. Wow, that’s a bad one!

Overall Rating
• 1.0 from 5

Zero Cost Commissions is a product that claims you can make automated commissions from Clickbank. No software or product needed. The sales letter makes this sound like the most awesome product letter. It’s full of hype and promises (first sign that something is a scam).

The reviews on this product on the Warrior Forum and similar products have been overwhelmingly negative. The fact of the matter is no matter how much affiliates dream of a magic button, such a button does not exist. Like the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Do yourself a favor. Whenever someone promotes a crap product like this on your email, immediately unsubscribe! It’s the only way to get rid of these scammers.

Overall Rating
• 1.0 from 5

Traffic Travis is an SEO and Pay per Click optimization tool. It consists of several parts.

The first tool on Traffic Travis is a Keyword Finder that allows you to go on the search engines and determine which keywords are getting traffic. It’s very similar to the Google Keyword Tool. However, this tool checks Google, Yahoo and Bing simultaneously, so you have a full overview of the actual amount of traffic available.

Traffic Travis also includes position and ranking tools. These tools allow you to quickly check to see where your site is ranked on Yahoo, Google and Bing for your selected keywords. If you’re like me and like to “Google yourself” to see where your sites rank, this can be a very handy time saver.

Traffic Travis also includes basic PPC analysis tools. With these tools you can track which ads are currently running pay per click campaigns. Once you track who is running today, you need to log back in at a later date and check it again. The ads that are still running are generally making money and you can use those ads to model your pay per click campaign. This tool is ok, but I prefer other PPC web tools like PPC Web Spy.

My favorite tool with Traffic Travis is the Keyword Analysis tool. With Keyword Analysis, you can quickly determine the strength of the competition of your keyword. This tool includes a handy star ratings page where it tells you how easy it is to get ranked. I’ve found the ratings to be quite accurate. If it shows as “easy,” sure enough I’ve moved up in the rankings quite easily.

With the Keyword Analysis tool, you can also find out if the competition is using the proper h1 tags, their backlinks and if the title is matched to the keyword. If you get your title, the h1, number of backlinks, pagerank and more. You can easily see which things you can improve upon to move up in the rankings.

Overall, Traffic Travis is an excellent tool and a welcome addition to any internet marketer’s arsenal.

Overall Rating
• 5.0 from 5

WP Syndicator is a plugin for WordPress that makes it super easy to increase the search engine rankings for your WordPress blog. Sure enough, after using this plugin, my sites are in fact ranking higher in Google.

All you do is install the WP Syndicator plugin and create sites at the selected web 2.0 properties. At the time of this writing, those properties are: WordPress.com, Typepad, Blogger, Live Journal, Tumblr, Multiply, Plurk, Friend Feed, Xanga, Identica, You Are, Blellow, Bright Kite, Vox, Twitter.

You can set up as few or as many of these sites as you want. What will happen is the syndicator will make a site on all these properties similar to mine here. It does take some time to get the web 2.0 sites set up but it’s quite easy outsource the site set up by using Odesk.

WP Syndicator is a great plugin and works exactly as advertised. I plan to use it on all my sites.

Overall Rating
• 5.0 from 5

Would you like to get your blogs and websites for the Ultimate Search Engine Loophole built for cheap? How about really cheap. How does $5 an hour sound to you? I’m not kidding, $5/hr! For things like data entry, I’ve gotten things done for $2/hr. I’m very serious!

That’s outsourcing for real and my all time favorite outsourcing site is Odesk. What makes Odesk different? For starters, they have this really cool time tracking system so your provider can’t cheat you. They also have a review system similar to Ebay where you can review your transactions. Finally, Odesk handles all the payments to your provider like clockwork, so even if you are working with someone overseas, you can pay them quickly on your credit card.

Before you get too far into oursourcing, you really need to know what you are doing, what countries are the best to work with and how to find and manage talent. I highly recommend that you listen to John Jonas’ free Replace Myself conference call before you get too far into it. It would also be a very good idea to check out the Web Operations Manual by Marlon Sanders.

So, sign up for Odesk and the Replace Myself call and then figure out what tasks you can outsource now. Then, go post something on Odesk for free and see what happens. You never know who you might meet on there.

Overall Rating
• 4.0 from 5

One of the new and super popular players in the outsourcing game is Fiverr.com. Fiverr has a super simple concept. Everything is only $5. Well, it sure makes negotiating the price easy!

When Fiverr works, it’s one of the greatest tools around. I’ve gotten some awesome things on there. Some examples of this are graphic design, Facebook promotion, Tweets, You Tube views.

However, I recently got burned on Fiverr and I’m not going to use them any more. The reason for this is because Fiverr uses a feedback system where you can rate your provider. However, if your provider is a scammer and you leave them a bad review, Fiverr bills you the $5 anyway. That’s right, you have to pay whether the gig was a good one or a bad one. This is a load of crap if you ask me!

Supposedly, you can email customer support and they will get the $5 back in your account (as opposed to a refund like it should be), but I’ve not heard back from them about that yet.

There are a lot of “Fiverr like” sites out there and I’m going to be looking at alternatives. In the meantime, I did just send an order to Clickfive.net and was quite impressed with the results.

Update: Fiverr is even more pathetic than I had recently reported. I sent them a dispute by email for the bad gig. I also disputed it by pay pal. Instead of refunding my money, they closed my account and kept the money I had earned for the gigs that I had completed. WTF???

Internet marketers, please, please forward this to your friends. We don’t have to put up with this crap! There are better legitimate services out there.

I realize that it’s only $5 but it’s the principle of the matter. Some ones to try out include dealerr.com, Tenbux.com, Gigbucks.com, Gigbux.com

Overall Rating
• 2.8 from 5

Push Button Letters is a great little software program from Marlon Sanders to help you get a sales letter published. If you are like me, figuring out what to say in your sales letter can be confusing and frustrating. Push Button Letters comes in a cd format. You load the cd, answer a few questions and a few minutes later you have a sales letter that you can use for your website.

Push Button Letters make it easy in a step by step manner to get your sales letter published. They have these nice little templates, so once you enter in the blanks, your sales letter is in HTML format in the color that you want, with all the right fonts in all the right places and all you need to do is load it on your website. Very easy to figure out.

My only complaint is I wish that they would do an update to make the resulting letter a WordPress site. If you were using the sales letter on a blog, you could always use simply paste the resulting letter into your blog and ignore the template that Push Button Letters makes.

Marlon recently added some amazing bonuses like a fly in script, fly in ads, limited time offer scripts and more. Just the bonuses alone are worth more than the price of this product.

Marlon’s customer service is some of the best in the business. They are available very quickly by email or you can do live chat. I had a few questions and they always get on chat with me in just a couple of minutes. I wish other internet marketers were as set up as nicely as Marlon Sanders.

Overall Rating
• 5.0 from 5