Tools and Services That We Use and Recommend

As a small business owner, you can’t do everything by yourself. We understand – we certainly don’t do everything by ourselves. We get asked sometimes “how do you do it”, and the answer is “with a lot of help – good advice and great resources”.

(Yes, these are all affiliate links. If after clicking through, you find one of these resources to be valuable and decide to buy it, we might get a little something for making the referral. We’ve used all of these services, including many of them on the site you’re reading right now. They’ve served us very well, and we’re proud to stand behind every one of these products and services!)

Site Design: 99Designs – If you want to look like a professional, then you need a professional-looking site. When we need a great-looking site designed, we turn to 99Designs, an Australian company that recently won a Webby award for their concept. Here’s how it works: you post your project as a contest, with the price you’re willing to pay as the reward. Then lots of designers submit entries to the contest. You provide feedback on what you like and don’t like, and they iterate, until the contest is done. The result is a fantastic design based on the best work of a lot of talented designers, without breaking the bank!

WordPress Theme: Thesis – If you’re putting a blog together, and you’re serious about theme flexibility and SEO optimization, then Thesis on WordPress is the way to go. We could tell you all about it, but you’re best off clicking on the link and watching the video – seriously. We use Thesis for Firepole Marketing. Enough said.

SEO Optimization: Scribe – If you’re writing a blog, then you want your posts to be found by people searching for the stuff that you’re writing about. That’s what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. It’s not easy, though – you have to balance keyword densities with meta tags with writing for spiders vs. writing for people… it’s complicated if you know what that all means, but if you don’t, it’s enough to drive you crazy. That’s why instead of worrying about it, we turn to Scribe, a simple WordPress plugin that takes care of all that, so that you don’t have to.

Website Flash Components: Flabell – Once you’ve got your blog or site up and running, you’re ready to add a little extra flare and style. For that, we turn to Flabell for slick Flash components that plug right into your site, and that are super-affordable (think $20 or less). We could tell you about all of their cool components, but you’re best off just clicking through to look at their components and see for yourself!

Email Auto-Responder: AWeber – Now that you’ve got a great, slick and optimized website, it’s time to start capturing leads with an email auto-responder system. There are a lot of email auto-responder solutions out there, and we’ve experimented with a lot of them, but we keep coming back to AWeber. It’s the most user-friendly system out there, at the same time being the most powerful we’ve found, all at a super-reasonable price.

Merchant Account and Payment Processing: Beanstream – Assuming you’ve got a website that is intended to help you make money, you need a way to collect that money from your customers. Most newbies end up going with PayPal, because it’s free and easy to setup. The fact of the matter is, though, that if you’re at all serious about doing business online, you need a merchant account – you don’t want to be sending your customers off of your site, and PayPal doesn’t integrate nearly as well as we’d like it to with most shopping cart solutions. The trouble is that getting a merchant account setup can be a complicated, time consuming process. We know – we felt the same way. Until we found Beanstream. These guys are completely on the ball, the whole process is fast and easy, and their prices are in a class apart from every other processor that we looked at; whereas with the closest competitor we were looking at having to spend about $400 to get started plus about $99/month, with Beansteam it was a mere $50 setup + $20/month. We chose Beanstream, and we think you should to.

Is there a great resource or information product that you’ve used, and refer to? That you would recommend to us, and to other Firepole Marketing readers? Let us know – we’d love to hear about it!