Apply these 10 resources to your online arsenal and even the Illuminati will be jealous of you.
Warning: Use of these resources may lead to a sudden rise in tremendous growth.
Google Trends is one my personal favorite FREE and most useful online tools out there, and did I mention it was free? You simply type in the keyword or key phrase such as “climate” or “climate change” and simply press “Enter”. Trends will instantly bring up amazing metrics for said term.
The first metric is the wonderfully helpful “Interest over time” showing a line graph of the “internet’s interest” on a 0-100 scale, which you can set for the last 24-hours up, the past 5 years or all the way back to 2004 if your interested in ancient history. Trends also shows “Interest over countries” showing you each countries trending data (on same 0-100 scale) simply by hovering over each country, they even highlight the ones that are highest. Amazing right? And still Google is not done, the final metrics they show are very important, relevant search topics and relevant queries; what other people searched for within the same time period as your search topic. By simply typing in a query, you can establish Illuminati like insight into almost any topic on the web.
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9 BuzzSumo
Speaking of Trends, BuzzSumo has been Trending hard for a while now and for a good purpose, its a goddamn great resource and my FAVORITE paid resource. BuzzSumo allows a certain number of searches before they lock you out, make an account get a 14-day free trial and even if you don’t purchase you can still use about 30% of its tools. Like Google Trends you simply input a keyword or query into the top search bar and let BuzzSumo do it’s dark magic. BuzzSumo will then show how your “query” is being shared on every single social platform and give you an exact up-to-date list of the most shared online content that is being shared.
BuzzSumo also provides a Backlinks finder for any domain which can come in handy for instance on seeing how many your competition has compared to yours (#GrowthHack) as well as Content Analysis Tool & Facebook Analyzer. Unlike all good resources, there’s more.
BuzzSumo has its own integrated “Influencer” finder, you simply search for the specialty keywords you want in your Influencer and POOF a magical list of available, active Influencers are right there with profiles, pictures and contact information. The last feature is their Monitoring tool which monitors your websites main analytics and compares it to your main competitors sites; WARNING this is extremely effective resource. I highly recommend taking breaks because you can easily overdose on its awesomeness.
(BuzzSumo’s Social Sharing Content Tool)
(BuzzSumo’s Influencer Finder)
If you don’t know the name HubSpot and your business is in anyway connected with the internet then you best listen. Created by the Marketing genius that is Brian Halligan; HubSpot.com is the web’s unofficial uncontested Authority on all things Inbound Marketing and their cornerstone produce is their free CRM platform specifically made for small & medium sized businesses. In a nutsell, HubSpot organizes, tracks and streamlines your sales pipeline by way of automating most tasks usually done by a sales team or project manager.
No more messy spreadsheets, spilled coffee, angry outbursts…just clean beautiful automation of all the takes your salespeople hate doing, like data entry. Who likes data entry? Honestly. Say goodbye to it with HubSpot CRM. HubSpot also tracks all deals, sales, proposals and interactions under one easy to read integrated platform. STOP living in the stone age, welcome to 2016 and start automating your CRM with HubSpot, for FREE.
The guys over at Infogr.am set out to do one thing, make it incredibly easy to create Infographics on a free to use web based platform and they…#NailedIt. Infographics are slowly becoming the viewers choice among the vast array of content out on there on the web along with video. Viewers want something engaging, informative and good looking all in one package, and that’s exactly what Infogr.am does.
From interactive maps, countless chart designs, custom logo integration, responsive embeds anything to create your businesses data into a visually appealing brilliantly designed piece of content. You can use for your website, email marketing and social sharing. Put your businesses complex data and information into one piece of beautiful content and you have Infogr.am
Whenever a company Market’s themselves the #1 This and That on the web my inner Marketer comes out and says “Why…” but in the case with Survey Monkey they made me bite my tongue. When it comes to creating fully customable survey’s for gaining vital information from your customers or clients Survey Monkey runs the board with all other competitors.
Want feedback on your email outreach or newsletters? Survey Monkey integrates with most email platforms like MailChimp, Aweber as well as major platforms like Marketo and Salesforce. Need some feedback from your site subscribers or random visitors? Survey Monkey is your answer. Want to see who is the most hated person in the office? Survey Monkey is your answer for that too. All of that stuff is great but one of the most amazing things SM does is their “Content Marketing generator” feature called TechValidate, which gathers all the data you collected through your surveys and pumps out amazing content based customer sales points able to be used by your sales team for instant customer analytics and feedback based on real survey results, truly breakthrough technology here.
Another great thing about Survey Monkey is the fact it can be utilized by simple freelancers to small agencies to enterprise level corporations. You might be thinking well with all these survey’s going out that’s a whole lot of sensitive data floating around, I mean what if someone finds out Sean is the smelliest person in the office, well Survey Monkey’s
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5 Canva
Founded by an Australian trio of designers and educators, Canva has now become the internet’s premier graphic design resource for non designers. The platform is so useful, effective and attractive they now have a slew of evangelists and literal movie stars backing them. Former Apple Exec, Digital Guru and author of “The Art of Social Media” Guy Kawasaki signed on as their Chief Evangelist and even the Illuminati got in on the action with Hollywood actors Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson who signed on as key investors.
Canva literally cannot be any easier to use, hats off to their UX Design team because their website is unbelievable easy to navigate ANYONE, literally ANYONE can use it. Simply select your template (or choose your own dimensions), that range from Letter Heads, Twitter backgrounds, Facebook banners, Business Cards, Invitations, Infographics and more.
(Canva’s beautiful UX Design and Dashboard)
Once selected turn that blank white canvas into a beautiful piece of content by simply just dragging and dropping from their pre-stocked inventory (images, text styles, backgrounds, overlays, etc) or upload your own images and blast away. There are almost NO limits when it comes to Canva and you’ll become addicted the second you create your first canvas.
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4 Snip.ly
Snip.ly is a wonderful simple online resource which packs a hard punch in a little body. Simply use Snip.ly to integrate a Call-To-Action or “CTA” button onto any website. It can do such things as drive traffic to your site, collect emails or find new social followers. A “CTA” is essentially an instruction attempting to provoke an immediate action by the viewer such as an link, response, answer to a question, etc.
These can be incredibly effective as you can choose to put your own CTA on ANY website out there, however NOT every site allows Snip.ly but most do. How does this work? Simply grab the URL you want your CTA to come up on, enter a custom message, a button and then a link to your url.
(Put your Snip.ly CTA button on NYTIMES.COM!!!)
The Free plan allows 1000 clicks per month along with Snip.ly’s own Analtyics dashboard which keeps track of all your conversions, their basic plan starts at $29.99/mo which is a pretty damn good deal for the amount of conversions you can generate with the right placement. By selecting the right website with a link to your social media page, new blog post on your site or any other option then just sit back and watch your conversions increase like magic.
Think of replacing those annoying ads in your Gmail Inbox with useful information on all of your contacts, now wake up out your dream and welcome to Rapportive. Rapportive is a Social CRM plugin for Gmail by way of their Google Chrome & Firefox plugin used for Gmail only at the moment (I know RIGHT!!! Errrrgh) although as they scale they certainly have the potential to integrate into any platform which has a list of contacts such as Outlook, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, etc. SO back to what Rapportive actually does.
Rapportive collects your list of contacts and then runs their emails through LinkedIn matching it to the persons profile then extracts their information from their LinkedIn profile displaying it on the sidebar where those annoying ads usually are. Sounds technical? See how easy it actual is once implemented below;
Simply choose your contact by hovering over the email address and BAM instant access to their current company, current position, current location, contact information, website name, etc. This comes in handy much more than you think, for example; before sending an email out to Joe Smith who you haven’t seen in two years you remember you forget his job title, now enter Rapportive; NOW you can see that Joe Smith is the CEO of his own company not the assistant to Warren Buffets assistant anymore.
Another use of Rapportive is an ingenius Growth Hack allowing Rapportive to extract anyone’s email, as long as it’s a public email. Let the masters at Distilled.com explain here.
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2 MEGA
If you haven’t heard of the Internet Illumanti’s Grand Master Kim Dotcom (genius programmer, entrepreneur and online anonymity activist) then your about to get a rude awakening. After the lawsuit with his old company Megaupload.com (which he WON by the way), the former German relocated to his compound in New Zealand and bore his latest creation simply titled “MEGA”.
Forget Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box or any other free cloud storage platforms. Dotcom’s years in the making MEGA platform offers a FREE 50GB of cloud storage on the world’s most most secure cloud network. Not only that MEGA features full blown encryption of all files you upload and an option to decrypt a file to share publicly or to a friend if needed. They also have an amazing free client for both Windows and Mac with a brilliant “Sync” folder that sits right into your menu bar (where your former Dropbox folder is located) where you can simply throw in any files you want uploaded and just like that they are in the cloud. The encrypted, 100% secure cloud named MEGA…a name so fitting for Dotcom and his legacy.
I save one my other (yeah I have about 654 favorites) for last. Anygrowth is easily one of the best online resources for any business looking to up their digital marketing game, especially for Small & Medium sized businesses. Anygrowth is an online platform that offers over a dozen automated marketing tasks from On-site SEO analysis, Targeted Guest Comments for Backlink Generation, Keyword based Lead Generation that collects URL’s – Emails & Names for your query, Twitter email extractions, Website email extractions & a Bulk email verifier to sift through all non-active emails collected (and that’s only scratching the surface!).
I think its safe to say, Anygrowth is THE ultimate growth resource and toolkit. By focusing on pure Lead Generation through the most profitable channels of social, email & content, Anygrowth is the KEY to gaining more influence, conversions, traffic and leads to your business with pure 100% automated tools, no coding skill or marketing knowledge required.
Honorable Mentions:
Free Stock Photos by Adobe Online, Access to millions of roytalty-free images, graphics, vectors & more for content creation.
HemingwayApp, the easy 100% FREE amazingly simple content editing tool made for writing online.
SEMrush, Shames me not to include this on the list but SEMrush has been around for a while most people know of them but that doesn’t mean they are still the ultimate SEO and SEM toolbox.
- Rapportive Video Growth Hack: https://youtu.be/bQnO6Yv9SnE
- Snip.ly Video How It Works: https://youtu.be/gcXkjcvnta4
- Anygrowth.com Tools: https://youtu.be/1_udqAmZ8js
- SurveyMonkey Promo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoDTZuDk5pU
- HubSpot CRM promo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i48PWB3Xo28