Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Risley’s ProBlogger Toolbox – Software & Services Listed

March 27, 2009 | Advice, Feature

As you know, I have turned blogging into a full-time business for me. And, yes, I do pretty well at it. Every day, I try to show people on this blog how to do things to turn their own blogs into a business. Another part of the story, though, is the tools and software I use to do what I do.

So, in this post, I thought I would just lay out what I use and why. I’m not saying that you have to use these things to work. It is just what I use.


Hosting

I use Pair Networks for my web hosting. I use two dedicated servers in tandem to run my business. Pair is a great hosting company with solid servers and solid support. It isn’t the cheapest game in town, however. You pay for quality. I also hate managing my own servers so they manage them for me.

When I’m not embedding videos from Vimeo or Youtube, I host my videos on Amazon S3. It works well, keeps load off my servers, and is cheaper than dirt for what you get.

Third-Party Services

I use Aweber to manage my mailing lists. Aweber is awesome and it was the best move I ever made in regards to my marketing logistics to switch to Aweber. I highly recommend them.

I use SurveyMonkey to run my surveys. I am signed up as a Pro subscriber which costs me $200/year but the amount of value you can get from even one well-written survey is well beyond that.

I use TubeMogul to upload my videos to third-party video sites. It is slick and it is free. And it saves so much time. For any livestreaming I do, I use Ustream.

I am also a Google whore. I use Gmail for my email client. I use Google Calendar to track and plan my own schedule. I use Google Reader to keep tabs on other blogs and the market in general. I use Google Analytics to track my website statistics. I use Google Alerts to keep track of who’s talking about me on the Internet. I use Google Docs for portable document management.

I use Authorize.Net as my payment gateway for credit card transactions. I also accept payments via Paypal. I just recently began offering a product (and accepting payments) via Clickbank.

I use Vonage for my office phone line. I use Verizon FIOS as my internet service.

Computer Software

I am a Mac user and therefore I use OS X Leopard. Love it. My workflow has improved quite a bit since I switched to the Mac. I still have Windows running, though, inside an instance of Vmware Fusion. My primary work machine is a Mac Pro with four processor cores (2 dual-core Xeons) and 9GB of RAM. My laptop is a Macbook Pro 15”.

Ironically, though, I still use Windows Live Writer as my blog client. It is better than all of the OS X blog clients I’ve ever tried.

My preferred web browser is Firefox. The add-on’s I use the most are S3Fox, Foxmarks, Firebug and SearchStatus.

I use Tweetdeck as my Twitter client of choice. It is an awesome app, however the memory usage is definitely huge. When I’m on the Iphone, I use Tweetie to interface with Twitter.

I use Adium for instant messaging and I have Skype open almost all the time.

I use Smultron as a text editor. Dreamweaver is my web-design program of choice. I use CSSEdit to do any stylesheet work I have to do. Transmit is my FTP client of choice for the Mac.

Believe it or not, I’m still using Paint Shop Pro version 9 for image editing. Under Windows. Really ironic, I know, considering I use a Mac. I actually own the full version of Photoshop CS3 and have it installed. I’ve just never taken the time to learn how to use it.

I am a big fan of Mindjet Mind Manager. I also use Evernote.

I use ScreenFlow to do screen recordings and iMovie 09 for editing. If I do any audio recording, I often use Wiretap Studio.

For local office software, I either use iWork 08 or OpenOffice.

Web-Based Software

Wordpress, obviously. All the other options out there, forget them. Wordpress is where it’s at.

I use vBulletin as my forum software of choice.

I use Amember Pro for anything involving a membership site or protected directory. My online store over on PCMech is powered by X-Cart.

I just recently signed up with EZS3 to manage my Amazon S3 account. So far so good, but I’ll have a full review of that some time later on, I’m sure.

So, What About You?

Found anything better? Do you have favorites you want to share?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

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  4. What Do I Do All Day? [Problogger]
  5. Using Multiple Opt-Ins To Track What Works [Aweber]

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  • Thank you for sharing the insider details on how your blog operates. I would also like to know what blog template are you using for this blog and do you recommend some good templates/blog designer because design is one of the biggest elements of success of any blog
  • Thanks for sharing these great resources! Also, glad you're MindManager fan! I work for Mindjet and would be happy to connect to chat about how you're using it. I recently started writing our blog which has grown over 400% in the last 4 months (even with a dinosaur blog platform). One of the key contributors has been my mind mapping approach to guide planning, writing and promoting. I look forward to checking out your suggestions and future posts.
  • Thanks for the tips -- always nice to have the Wordpress platform confirmed as being a great tool to have.
  • Thanks for posting that list of great resources!
  • If someone wants to jump start with Amazon S3 I would recommend

    our very own CloudBerry Explorer. It will help you to copy your video files to S3. It supports most of the Amazon S3 and

    CloudFront features and It is a FREEWARE
    (works only on Windows)
  • I love geekin' out on the details of what successful people actually use in order to be successful... thanks for sharing with us
  • I use the same web host (pair), blogging editing software (Windows Live Writer), and blog software (Wordpress).

    I'd add a few more tools:
    1) I use WinSCP to FTP files between my desktop and my web hosting account
    2) I use PowerArchiver to un-tar compressed files
    3) I use Putty to remotely connect to my web hosting account when I need to issue Unix commands
    4) I moved my comments to be hosted by Disqus

    Also, I'm working on a new site using Drupal. By the way, I've a couple of questions for you:

    1) what's your opinion on 3rd-party hosted comment system such as Disqus?

    2) what do you think about Drupal? It seems to be more powerful than Wordpress (although it's more complex that requires a little bit of learning curve.)

    cheers.
  • What a great list of resources.

    Thank you!!
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