When I was starting out I had no money but quite a lot of time so I had a really good study of what tools and guides were available to help me get on in Internet Marketing.

I had two rules – they had to be:

a) really useful or powerful and
b) ultra cheap or even better – free

These were so many tools I tried that were pretty average or downright poor, so I’m going to concentrate on what I’d consider as Must Haves and save you wasting your time on the rubbish. First up:

INTERNET MARKETING GUIDES / COURSES

1. Obviously Maverick Money Makers
It’s not free, it’s not even that cheap – but it’s where I got started. It’s the main reason I went from $0 to $1000 a day in IM.

If I was starting out again would I use it?

Most probably. The best thing about the Mack Michaels Maverick money Makers Club is you can stay signed up for as little or as long a time as you want – I felt six months was perfect. The worst thing is that a few of the techniques don’t apply so much now as they did maybe two years ago – but the basics are bang on the money. Try to resist his up-sells and some of his other courses – in my opinion MMM is still the one to go for.

2. Ewen Chia
If you haven’t heard of Ewen Chia, look him up. The man is an Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing genius.

Don’t sign up for his course unless you have a spare $800 kicking around (although I‘m sure it‘s first rate) – what I recommend is picking up his free book The 7 Hidden Principles Of Super Affiliate Marketing. That was enough for me – and you can gleam everything you need from it to see you in the right direction.

3. Kelly Felix / Mike Long
Two of the coolest friendliest guys in the whole world.

They have a course called Bring The Fresh – well when I say it’s a course it’s a way of life. There’s a forum, more videos than you could ever watch and they even give you their cell numbers and email if you’re having any problems. Like nothing I’ve ever seen, it’s back to basics, gurus be damned stuff. I got this free site you’re looking at right now built in 10 minutes, indexed and onto Google page one in 3 days using their “fresh“ methods.

Handy hint: go to their site, read what’s there and then hit your browser’s back button and you’ll be offered the course for $7. Grab it, seriously.

4. SitePoint’s SEO Business Guide
Pick up four chapters of this incredible SEO course for free.

Written by Mike and Kristen Holden – two of the greatest SEO experts out there with an incredible track record, it’s like a university course in SEO. There’s no fluff and no crazy marketing talk – it’s very much a text book type thing but saying that I found it very easy to understand. This was the second purchase I made after signing up to MMM and it made the difference between me making $50 a day and $500 a day within a month of implementing their techniques. Not for everyone, but if you read the four free chapters you’ll see if you click with their methods.

INTERNET MARKETING TOOLS:

1. Google’s External Keywords Tool.
Free. What more can I say except unbeatable for initial keyword research. Just remember to set it to “exact match” (I promise if you don’t, and proceed with what seems an amazing keyword to building a site that then gets no traffic – you’ll NEVER make that mistake again!!)

2. Traffic Travis
Free (there is a paid version, but the free one is all you’ll ever need)
I always move to Traffic Travis after I’ve been on the Google tool – to check out promising keywords. It’s fantastic for finding more long tail keywords, adding Yahoo and Bing results – and then checking the competition that’s out there. You can rapidly find high traffic keywords with low competition to base websites / articles on – and then when you’re done you can check out the on-page SEO score of your work and make improvements as required.

Do NOT be without Traffic Travis.

3. Social Monkee
Free. A brilliant package that produces quality links to your websites entirely automatically.

25 links every day. It’s really easy to use and you can install a widget into your firefox browser that does a lot of the work for you, taking information off any site that you happen to be on. You just spin the content and press go – 25 links will be created in 24 hours.

Sign up for free for 25 links a day, or if you’re keen pay a small fee and create 100 links 3 times a day – 300 quality links every 24 hours!

4. Content Professor
Free. They say it’s the “The World’s Best Web Based Article Spinner” – some would disagree preferring Spinner Chief – but I’m a big fan.

Again there is a paid version, but to be honest the free version is great. Before I knew about spinners I’d spend hours everyday manually re-writing articles. I gave Spinner Chief (also free) a go but didn’t like the interface, couldn’t afford The Best Spinner – and then landed with Content Professor.

That’s it. You DON’T NEED any other tools. REALLY you DON’T