These are some of the things that I love. I do make a small commission if you click through and buy something, but the only reason I endorse these products is because I’ve purchased them, I use them, I love them, and I would gladly stake my reputation on any of them. That’s how strongly I feel.
Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides
To say Chris Guillebeau has changed my life is an understatement. Honest, hardworking, and ethical, Chris has created a series of products to help people create small businesses and travel the world. I’ve used Chris’s business model as a guide for Nerd Fitness and I can’t think of a better mentor/Yoda.
I purchased his Frequent Flyer Master ebook last fall, and racked up over 300,000 airline miles without any flying or spending any extra money. It sounded too good to be true, but it was absolutely worth it. It was the info in this book that taught me how to travel hack my way into my world trip.
Aweber
It took me WAY too long to find these guys. I had a normal RSS and Email subscription set up through Feedburner, figuring I didn’t need a separate email service. Wrong. Building an email list of your readers is one of the most important things you can do – you don’t have a way of directly sending emails to your list on Feedburner, nor do you know who’s actually reading and clicking on your content.
I’ve been using Aweber since June and my only regret is that it took me a year and a half to find them. I can now track daily subscriber additions, split test different email subject lines to see which gets more opens, and set up different email lists, and more.
Bluehost
Back when I purchased web space for Nerd Fitness, I really had no clue what I was doing. Luckily, I picked Bluehost as my service provider, because they have been absolutely amazing to me over the years. I think my site has been down once in the past 24 months, and it was on a Friday night for approximately 15 minutes. That’s it.
They have very reasonable pricing, domain name sales, and make it very easy to install things like WordPress for blogs or phpBB for Message Boards. You can also run multiple sites from one account, which is what I do. Bluehost rules!