The following is a list of products and/or services I use myself in running my online business and recommend wholeheartedly:

Domain Registration
Usually best and cheapest to use a registrar in the country of the site you want to register.

For US sites I use GoDaddy (they’re currently offering a 25% discount if you use this link).

For UK sites I use 123-reg.

Though in all honesty any decent registrar will do.

A useful tool when looking for available domains is Domize which checks availability and can also do “wildcard” searches for domains.

Website Hosting
Best to host in the country most of your visitors will be from – both to get faster load times and to get a slight SEO “bump”.

For US sites I use Bluehost. I use the $6.95 per month plan for unlimited domains, diskspace and traffic. Really easy to do business with and everything just works. Hostgator is probably the biggest hosting company and one I used to use and was very happy with.

For UK sites I use UK Cheap Hosts and 5 Quid Host

Content Management
WordPress – free content management system I use to run all my websites.

Thesis Theme – the premium WordPress theme I use on www.ianbrodie.com. Thesis is a very flexible, controllable theme for blog-based sites.

Canvas Theme from Woothemes. Similar to Thesis – very flexible theme for blog-based sites, but a bit easier to use. My plan is to use this on upcoming sites.

Studiopress – home of very high quality WordPress premium themes -many designed specifically as showcase sites for consultants and freelancers. My particular favorites are the Executive Theme, Enterprise Theme, Agency Theme and Freelance Theme.

Themeforest – the biggest collection of WordPress premium themes on the web. You can get themes that do anything from ecommerce to showing portfolios to slideshows to blogs.

Optimizepress is the theme I use to run this membership site. It’s specially pre-configured to handle sales pages, “squeeze pages”, product launches and membership sites.

Email Marketing
Infusionsoft – I now use Infusionsoft for email marketing and CRM – and love it. They’ve developed an excellent report on email marketing 2.0 which you can download here.

Infusionsoft is quite pricey though (although well worth it in my view). For lower cost options if you don’t need the CRM and super tracking options, try out Mailchimp or iContact.

I no longer recommend Aweber. It’s an excellent system that I used for years – but has been hacked into twice in the last year and customer email addresses stolen by spammers. I can’t recommend it until they fix their security.

Keyword Research
Market Samurai – the market analysis tool I use to identify high potential keywords, analyze competition, and track my site rankings in google. The keyword and domain research tools are free – the others have a 7 day free trial.

Google’s Keyword Research Tool – a rather more labor intensive way of doing your keyword research.

Site Management
Google’s Webmaster Tools – a must for managing your site and in particular, picking up any errors and problems google is having indexing it.

Google Analytics – the ultimate free stats package for your website.

Further Reading
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Search Engine Optimisation Training – Where I learnt most of my SEO from. The course is expensive – but if you really want to get into SEO it’s about the best.

* Some of these links are affiliate links. In other words, if you eventually sign up and buy these products via my link I’ll get a small commission. This has in no way influenced my recommendation. I use all these product myself as my primary tools (as you can see from the site and my emails).