Mindjet Catalyst

This is the easiest brainstorming tool you can find. It will allow you to put together amazingly beautiful mindmaps to organize everything that you can do both personally and professionally.

Google Trends

This is a fantastic tool that will allow you to analyze trending graphs off any keyword or keyword phrase you enter. This will give you insight on if the topic or industry you’re considering entering is positive.

Google Keyword Tool

This is a free tool that you can use to discover vertical niches off you tier 1 topics. These new niches can be used for product creation, advertising expansion and even brainstorming within you industry.

Google Insights

This free tool will allow you to narrow your market research data to specific categories. You can also view seasonality, geographic distribution and even emerging patterns across other Google Properties.

United States Patent & Trademark Search

If you have ever come up with an amazing idea that you would like to secure a paten or trademark for, this is the place to look to see if it already exists. You can also use it for market research on your competitors.

Quantcast

With this tool, you can analyze an entire audience of any website. This will allow you to determine what demographics to target as well as plan your market campaigns and understand your sales funnel.

Ad Beat

Instantly uncover any advertiser’s online strategy outside of the PPC seach engines. Find the biggest advertisers on the content networks and reverse engineer their entire campaign with Adbeat.

Keyword Spy

Use this tool and you can do real-time tracking of the paid keyword from any of your competitors as well as analyze their gap across multiple search engines and even spy on their campaigns across over 30 countries.

Another powerful keyword intelligence tool, with not as many features as Keyword Spy. However, you can do more free searches without buying a package, and even download all of your competitiors keywords.

Ispionage

This will give you the ability to spy on your competitor search marketing beyond just Pay-Per-Click. You can even monitor organic ranking performance as well as build and launch an effective PPC campaign in minutes.

Basecamp HQ

Having the proper organization and management tools is crucial to your success online. Basecamp HQ is the only software we use to manage over a dozen online businesses. This is by far the best of the best.

BackPack

This is the by the same company that makes Basecamp. It’s an essential tool that will allow you to easily share information with your team, keep documents, and schedules in one place, all the time.

HighRise

When building an online business, you will collect hundreds, if not thousands fo important contacts during your journey. HighRise is by far the best way to keep all of your contacts organized, in one simple place.

Apple Everything

If you have yet to own a Mac, it’s time to get one. You never have to waste time updating, dealing with viruses, having programs crash, losing files forever, etc. Every Apple product is an amazing investment, and is all we use.

Blue Yeti Microphone

Everyone always asks what microphone we use to record our videos. After testing dozens of microphones, this is the one we use that is also easiest to setup and doesn’t require a mixing board.

Western Digital My Book Hard Drives

When you start recording videos, podcasts or even just download all the material from Commission Takers as a VIP, you need to secure a place to store all of your data. These MyBook hard drives by Western Digital are our favorite.

Screen Flow

If you want to do any type of screencasting for video tutorials, demos or walkthroughs on a Mac computer, screen flow is the software that is the best of the best.

Camtasia Studio

This is the best screen casting software you can get for a Windows based computer. They also have version for the Mac, but it is no where near as powerful as Screen Flow. If you’re on PC, get Camtasia Studio.

Adobe Photoshop

This is a “must have” product for anyone that is going to be building their own online business. There are literally over a hundred reasons you will be using photoshop in your journey to building a business

Hostgator

For anyone starting their own business online, we personally use and highly recommend Hostgator. They are extremely affordable, scalable and have award winning customer service. You will be very satisfied.

Amazon S3

If you are going to host images or vides, and plan on getting a lot of Traffic, Amazon S3 is your solution. We use them for all our web properties with hosting videos. They have the best cloud hosting available.

Screencast.com

If you are looking for a small place to easily upload videos and host them yourself, without getting into a big Amazon S3 hosting plan, then Screencast.com is your answer. They also integrate seamlessly with Camtasia.

GoDaddy

If you are going to buy domain names on the Internet, you might as well buy them from the biggest and best domain name registrar. We buy our domains from them and never have problems. Their support is first class.

Buy Domains

If you are looking to buy a domain name that someone else already owns, this is the place to come. They have the biggest marketplace of premium domain names for sale on the Internet. Also great for brainstorming.

Domize

This is the fastest and easiest way to search and see if a domain name you have in mind is available. The data is delivered in real-time, which will give you the ability to brainstorm names at a rapid pace.

Clickbank

Without a doubt, this company knows what they’re doing when it comes to offering the biggest and most active marketplace for both digital vendors and affiliates. We use them for all our web properties.

ROI Rocket

There are hundreds of marketplaces for CPA offers. Unfortunately, most of them are either fly by night operations, or too corporate to care about you. ROI Rocket on the other hand, is our personal favorite.

Amazon Associates

If you want to get paid to promote physical products, then the only place you should be focusing on is Amazon. It’s a household name, amazing reputation, and has hundreds of thousands of products to promote.

Dollar Cards

If you want the unfair edge in promoting products offline, then Dollar Cards is exactly what you need. They are easy, highly effective, unique and fun to use. This will be some of the best money you’ll ever spend.

Woo Themes

This is the best source online for the highest quality professional Wordpress themes that are very easy to customize. Most importantly, new themes are available to members every month!

Rocket Theme

When you get into building websites with Joomla! As your content management system, it can be very hard to find a developer that can build stable themes on a regular basis for your needs. Rocket Theme has it all.

Template Monster

This place has the largest selection of flash templates. They also have great e-commerce, CMS, blog and even video templates to choose from. And there is no membership to pay. Just pay per template.

Adobe Dreamweaver

If you want the best HTML editing software, Adobe Dreamweaver is as good as it gets. You can start out with a trial version to see if it’s for you. We highly recommend it, and it’s worth taking the time to learn.

Theme Forest

If you’re looking for design inspiration, or even a full turnkey template, Theme Forest is our “Go To” website that is the best of both worlds. Spend some time looking around. You’ll be amazed at what you will find.

Webby Awards

If you want to get website design inspiration from people who win awards, then this is the place you want to check out. Take a look at the winners to really open up your mind on the possibilities of design.

Google Analytics

If you want to the most optimization and tracking features you can get… for FREE… then Google Analytics is your best solution. We use it for all of our web properties and it is more than enough power than we’ll need.

Google Website Optimizer

To perform split tests, real time optimization, and even multi-variant test can be very expensive and time consuming. Unless you use Google Optimizer! Just like tier analytics, it’s free, easy to use and setup.

Crazy Egg

With the rapid advancement of today’s technology, you now have the ability to leverage the power of heatmaps, confetti maps and much more to view the visitor behavioral actions on our website. All with Crazy Egg.

Aweber

If you’re just getting started with building your email list, then Aweber is your solution. It’s what we used to get started many years ago, and still use them today on many web properties. They are easy to setup and manage.

iContact

If you plan on building an email list that will have over 25,000 subscribers, then you will want to take at iContact. They are more reliable and stable than many other solutions when it comes to doing big mail drops.

Hand Crafted Templates

When it’s ready to start building your email sequence, it’s important to use high quality hand crafted templates that will make your emails stand out above your competitors. This is the best collection we’ve seen.

Ezine Articles

There are thousands of articles directories online. This one is by far the top of the industry. If you focus the majority of your attention on submitting your articles to this directory, you will get recognized.

ISnare Articles

With this resource, you can submit your article to thousand of directories on complete automation. It’s easy and cheap. However, be sure you submit your articles to ezine articles by hand first. Very important.

Hub Pages

This is a fantastic website which you can easily create an online hub where you can publish your articles, attract readers and even earn rewards in the process. Create you hub by hand. Do not use automation.

YouTube

Anyone that is interested in getting into building a business with videos will want to make sure to submit them on YouTube first. It has the most exposure and can turn anyone into a celebrity overnight.

Tube Mogul

This is an amazing service that provides a single point of deploying videos to top video and social networking sites. You can even create RSS Feeds to syndicate your video and save time overall with your video marketing.

Vimeo

Without a doubt, Vimeo is a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing videos they make. Everyone should have their own profile and channel on Vimeo. It’s easy and FREE.

Facebook

Leveraging the power of Facebook groups, fan pages and even their ad system is one of the smartest decisions you can make as an online business owner. Social media is getting bigger and more exciting by the day.

Twitter

If you haven’t started using Twitter, you need to. If you have a Twitter account, buy haven’t really used it, you need to start. More and more people are getting on Twitter daily and it’s going to be one profitable trend.

YouTube

We featured YouTube already in this rolodex for video marketing. However, YouTube is also a major social media resource. The best way to leverage it for social media is to start your own channel and update it often.

Google Adwords

The current kind of search engine pay per click is Google Adwords. It’s Free to sign up and somewhat easy to setup. However, they can be difficult to work with when approving campaigns, etc. It’s Google.

Facebook Ads

If you want to reach out to over 500 million potential customers without dealing with Google and search PPC, then Facbook Ads is they holy grail. They make it very easy to use and anyone can get started right now.

Ad Mob

Being able to do pay per click marketing on mobile devices has never been easier than it is now. The best solution we have found to be is Ad Mob. They have served up over 300 billion impressions and going strong.

GoTo Webinar

If you’re going to get into hosting your own webinar, then we recommend using the best software you can get your hands on. That’s GoTo Webinar. It’s easy, professional, reliable and most importantly, scalable.

Join Me

If you don’t have the money to spend on GoTo Webinar, then the best free screen sharing software you can use is called Join Me. Since it is FREE, it is going to lack many features that you would get from a paid solution.

Dim Dim

This is another free screen sharing software that is like Join Me, but with a different feature set and user experience. We recommend giving them both a try and then decide which one best fits your needs.

Elance

This is the biggest outsourcing marketplace on the Internet. We recommend starting here when looking for anyone for any project. If you can’t find the right person for the job, then consider more focused sites.

Guru Employer

If you couldn’t find the right outsourcer on Elance, then the next best place to look is Guru Employer. It’s not as big as Elance, but will have completely different demographic of potential workers.

v Worker

This marketplace is full of computer programmers and people who are qualified for more technical development than management and administration. If you need a coder, this is a great place to look.

Poll Daddy

Being able to survey your website visitors and even newsletter subscribers is a very powerful tool that many do not talk about. Poll Daddy is the easiest of them all to serup, configure and manage. Give it a Try!

Survey Monkey

Unlike Poll Daddy, Survey Monkey Strictly focused on surveys. They also have a completely different set of features and user interface. We recommend trying them both out to decide which is best for your needs.

Polls Boutique

If you want to use surveys for more of a younger demographic, then polls boutique has that look you’re trying to find. They also integrate very well with social media such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.