Jeff Mulligan's Personal Resources
I get a lot of emails from people asking me about specific resources I
use in my businesses. Below are resources I personally use. In many cases, I
made mistakes and bought the wrong thing before I settled on the companies or
products below. Hopefully this list will help you avoid those errors. If
you have any other specific questions, ask me in the forum.
Click here for Resources Forum Discussion.
Free Flash Audio and Video Tools - here are some
free resources for
creating Flash audio and video files.
Hosting - I have a dedicated web server at
Fastservers to run
all my UNIX web sites on. Over the years I've had numerous hosting accounts in
numerous places. Fastservers provides outstanding phone support, high
availability and full features.
You can get shared hosting for $9/month. And that can be fine when you are
starting out. But as soon as your business supports it, moving to a
dedicated server makes sense for a variety of reasons, chief among these is
reliability of service. Fastservers has dedicated servers starting under
$200/month.
Autoresponder - This one is easy. I use
Aweber. In fact, I pay for 5
different accounts there now. I originally bought AutoresponsePlus which is
software that runs on my server. And I still have a 6-figure list there.
But everything new goes on Aweber due to email deliverability issues.
This Membership site - is run on
Membergate software. I actually have
two MemberGate licenses - the other one is for PilotWorkshops.com.
Merchant Account - I use
PowerPay because they cater to internet marketers. They understand our
business and how we can suddenly go from 0 to 5 figures of billing overnight
because of a launch. Other merchant account providers don't understand
this business and I've heard way too many stories of people getting their
accounts shut down because of a sudden surge in business. Doesn't seem to
make sense, but be safe and use PowerPay. Plus, their rates are very
competitive.
Physical Products - I mention these resources in one of the Quickies.
There are all companies I have used to print, duplicate and fulfill orders for
my physical products.
http://www.speakerfulfillmentservices.com/ - Bret Ridgway
http://www.directtomarketsolutions.com/ - Rich Selby
Both Bret and Rich work with many internet marketers and
understand how this business operates. They will also work with small quantities
so you don't need to lay out a lot of cash upfront. Ideal for lower volume
products.
http://www.Disk.com -- Cindy Tonne - This is a huge company that is great for
higher volumes of production. A typical minimum is 1000 units. If you got the
physical version of QuickieProfits, you have their work in your hands.
Shopping Cart - I use
1shoppingcart for
several of my physical products. Again, they have lots of experience with
internet marketers. This shows in their feature set which includes recurring
billing, affiliate tracking, autoresponders and much more.
Audio - For streaming audio I use
AudioGenerator. I know that I
can host it on my server, but audiogenerator has redundant servers spread out,
which gives better, faster delivery of my audio no matter where the listener is.
Plus, it's cheap. They have delivered over 1.6 million audio files for me.
For recording and editing I use Sony SoundForge. It's
easy enough for me to use. I have a high quality, AKG Perception 200 Mic that
cost me around $200, and it goes through an Edirol USB audio capture box into my
PC. The Edirol is overkill, but I would recommend at least getting a high
quality USB microphone so your audio quality sounds as good as possible.
Again, not necessary when you are getting started, but it makes a big difference
in the quality of your sound if you can get better equipment.
Video - I used
Camtasia (free 30-day trial
at that link) in the production of all the video Quickies. The videos are
hosted at Amazon, using their
S3 service.
With S3 you are using Amazon's world class server infrastructure to ensure the
quality of your video delivery. Plus - it's very cheap. If you are going to be
using a lot of video, or getting a lot (thousands) of views to a single video
you should really look at using this service. This is especially true if
you are using video for a launch. You don't want your sales page bogging down
because the video is slow.
Backup - Check out Mozy Unlimited Backup - $4.95/Month
This is the perfect backup service because you don't need extra hardware, you
don't need to remember to do anything and your data is safely backed up on their
servers (encrypted of course). Imagine if your laptop got lost or stolen, or yo
had a fire of flood in your residence. With a service like Mozy, your data
will be safe. Even though my desktop system has RAID backup - I still have
two offsite backup accounts - one for my desktop and one for my laptop. Every
hard disk fails. It's just a matter of time.
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