Useful Internet Marketing Tool Of The Day:

1. E.ggtimer

You must be asking yourself why I chose a simple timer to be one of my top tools.
“Why the *%$& did she choose a simple timer as one of her top tools?”

To be honest, I love simple things. Simplicity is beauty and it just rocks. It’s the simple things like this that gets the job done fast because it simply does what’s only needed.

I tweeted this the other day and people sent me DM’s(Direct Messages) on Twitter with mixed reactions. Some people that loved it, reTweeted it. Those that disagreed, sent me links to timer applications. Believe me I have most of the Timer Apps for Mac out there but this is my “go to” tool. It is just so simple, effective, you can type exactly the time you need and it stops you from what you were doing in your browser.

2. Moleskine Notebook (or Imitations) – The Good Ol’ Pen And Paper.

I love moleskines because I can keep it in my pocket or purse every time, plus it’s paper sleeves are very versatile. I don’t want to always be in front of the computer so I bring this around to remind me of my goals and other things I brainstorm about. Sometimes an idea just pops into my head and I could write it down instantly which is great because I trained myself to ignore things….meaning I disregard and forget things.

BTW, writing things down has been proven to be able to make people take action more often compared to typing it into your cellphone or other digital stuff. This alone makes this the best productivity tool!

3. Mindmapping Software

Have you ever encountered a task that you really want to do, but you eventually learned you have to do so many things to finish the task, then you started doing it and you got lost in what you were doing and suddenly quit? No? ………..

Hmm…that was embarassing. So how about this?

You signed up at Facebook, you needed to add friends, look at their pages, comment on their photos, go to your site, upload your photos, go to another friend’s site to check their apps, then you add the apps, then you have to tag faces, then poke someone, invite your best friend to play Mafia Wars, send your BFF a Frappe with the Starbucks app, become a fan of Obama and check your recommended friends. Easy right? Here’s the but. BUT you have to teach that to your un-computer savvy grandma. Your best option? Either write instructions or show graphics.

OR….

Let’s say you want a business but you don’t know how to start because you have too much on your mind. It started with a few stuff that you wanted to take action on but your friends with “experience” told you to do this and that and your Take Action list kept on growing and you just wanted to quit because of the too many things you had to do. Best thing to do is take it slowly, step by step. Map it out and go from there. You’ll see what you don’t really need so you can take action only on those critical steps to get you where you want.

You can also map out your ideas, prepare your strategy or organize plans. It’s really handy and you can just print it out if you need to.

My favorite mind mapping softwares are Freemind which is freeware. OmniGraffle Professional for the Mac and Mindjet Manager for Windows. I mainly use OmniGraffle when I have my Mac with me. Nowadays, as long as I have internet connection, I prefer using Mind Meister which I can access anywhere and I can also have partners share their opinions.

4. A Cellphone/Smartphone

I don’t really like having a phone around since some people like to waste my time but it beats having to bring a camera, a voice recorder and I get to text my mom if I wanted to!

The important functions I recommend for a cell phone are:

- A speedy camera with at least 2 mega pixels (preferably 4).

Please avoid those slow loading phones. When you turn on the camera, it should load instantly.

- Voice recorder.

This is important especially if you are into online businesses or writing. You can easily have it transcribed or you can play it back and type it yourself.
Internet capabilities is a bonus but not really critical.

5. Things (To Do List)

I use a To Do List mainly to list my 5 Daily Tasks nowadays. I was referred to Soho Notes by @mdtoorder on Twitter. I checked it out but I just prefer the simplicity of Things better.

Things just gave me a better interface to work on, intuitive design, ideal for outsourcing tasks and a bring anywhere iPhone app.

6. Blog Assist, Marsedit and Pages (Blogging and Wordprocessing)

I don’t suggest this for everyone, but if you are a blogger, then using a dedicated blog editor is a great tool that will save you time. There is a free tool called Qumana and another paid one called Blogo but Marsedit gave me more flexibility so I went with it. I have a few other blogs so I use this to remember everything and easily edit anywhere.

I use Blog Assist (recommended by @mikenichols0) for quick plugins of code. This goes really well when posting on your blogs. It makes sure you don’t mess up with the code spellings.

My word processing tool of choice is Pages from iWork. I use it’s full screen mode most of the time to stop me from getting distracted. I also use Text Wrangler (mainly for my Tool #7) as my main text (*.txt) editor. It saves a lot of time compared to Notepad or TextEdit.

For Windows, I always suggest Windows Live Writer for blogging and the all mighty MS Word

7. Quicksilver (Mac Only)

You should see this in action to understand it.

In short this is like Spotlight but on steroids. It can run, learn history and access everything without even opening any software. I use this mainly to Append text to my text files but Shutting Down my Mac instantly doesn’t hurt. For example, I run into something I’d like to research more about, or maybe I wanted to share in the future, I’ll invoke Quicksilver and Input what I wanted to the text file without ever opening it. Yes, you need well organized text files. I just dislike having to open and waiting for word processors to load.

For Windows? Here is an alternative but still nowhere near as good as Quicksilver.

8. Evernote

So, I have many text files, how do I ever “Remember Everything?”

I could always use the “Back To My Mac” function but I prefer a cross platform, access anywhere, anytime platform. This is what makes Evernote so great. Aside from my personal account, I created an account just for sharing my data to other partners. They can freely read and edit it and that’s great!

9. Tweet Deck and Hoot Suite

I like Tweeting but I’m not addicted to it. I make sure I track the replies to me so I can show my appreciation. I also like grouping together people I need to follow closely. That is why I chose Tweet Deck over many others. If the new Tweetie client is good, I might switch, but for now, Tweet Deck is the one to beat.

Hoot Suite on the other hand, helps me instantly send out links I want to share. What’s so special with that? It tracks those links for you. You don’t have to go to a separate website like Budurl and the likes just to track.

10. Google
There’s a whole suite of Google Apps, but here are the one’s I prefer to use.

- Google is obviously for researching.

- Gmail is excellent especially with the new functions added recently.

- Google Reader, for me is the best RSS reader and it makes it very organized. Make sure you put it in List mode when you eventually have so many RSS feeds.

- Google Alerts is important for your online business. This keeps you up to date with the latest news about your topic and they email it to you.

- I use Google Analytics on most of my sites for tracking. It’s very comprehensive and very easy to navigate.

Some other good Google tools are Google News, Google Docs, Google Notebook and Google Groups but I seldomly use them.

Special Mention:

Firefox

This is a given, so I did not include it in the list. There is simply no browser out there better that this for producing the fastest results. Although it is not as fast as Safari when loading, it will always outperform it. I’ve tried Camino, Opera, Flock, Safari and some more. I was mainly using Flock for a certain period of time but the screen real estate of the browser was so small because of the annoying tool bar. Safari 4 has the best screen size but I missed the functionality of extensions. Ended up somewhere in between, which was Firefox.

This is by no means the end all, be all list of productivity tools. I still use other software and “hardware” too like iLife, Mikogo, iWork, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Bento, Filemaker, MS Office, my table, my file cabinet, my assistant and a host of others but these are my “Go To” tools. These are what I use to think, do and arrange my stuff currently. These are essentially, just simple tools that you can use anytim. I really do hope you got something out of this.

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