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.

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 (Now called Layered Technology) 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. I also belong to MembershipSiteOwner, an excellent resource for those who want to run successful membership sites.

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.

I have also started using EasyVideoPlayer Pro and love it. This works with my Amazon S3 account. I upload audios through EVP and it puts them on the Amazon server, provides link security, gives me stats, allows player customization, lets me send the traffic to a URL once they finish the video, and much more.  Way easier to use than what I was doing before. Works for audio and video. Best of all - it was a one-time charge and not monthly. Visit EasyVideoPlayer Pro.

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.