Resources & Tools You Can Use To Power Your Success
Welcome to the Resources & Tools section of the site. I’ve collected a list of books, tools, and websites that I strongly recommend for empowering and enhancing your journey toward your purpose, goals, and success.
I have tested, read, reviewed, and/or used all the resources, tools, and books on this page. The tools you will find here I have found either very useful for gleaning insight or help me with running my business.
As noted on the Affiliate Disclaimer page, some of the links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to buy the item through the link I’ve provided, I will earn a small commission from the website.
Website Hosting
BlueHost
All of my niche websites are hosted on BlueHost because they’re simply the best bang for the buck when it comes to an easy-to-use system for getting a website up and running.
Their platform provides you to host multiple domains on a single website starting at an affordable monthly rate.
Customer service is spot on and with an eBates account you can get $10 off your order.
CloudFlare.com
CloudFlare is a fantastic platform for protecting your website from security attacks, caching pages, site-down notifications, CDN, as well as providing a free SSL certificate tunnel for traffic to your website. The entry-level service offers tremendous value for free! I’ve used this service on all of my websites since they first came out and they continue to improve and add valuable features.
NOTE: CloudFlare works a little differently with BlueHost. If you’re looking for a page to enable CloudFlare, you can go to the My BlueHost CloudFlare Configuration Page to enable and configure the service. From there, CloudFlare utilizes BlueHost’s DNS registry instead of their own. BlueHost doesn’t make the CloudFlare page available from the control panel anymore so my link to the page will get you to where you need to go without having to contact the BlueHost support team.
Books That Inspire & Motivate
I didn’t go to a formal business school. Everything I’ve learned about business I’ve learned through self-education and reading.
by Steven Pressfield
This is a great book chock full of inspiring words to drive you to fight and overcome your inner resistance to find your true purpose and execute with consistency your art. It’s in tune with my message of finding your purpose and using it to drive your goals and actions.
by Brendon Burchard
A great book on becoming an inspiration for others by offering your advise and knowledge to others. This is a must-read for anyone who aspires to become an influencer or become a prolific and followed content creator online.
by Josh Kaufman
This book was a big help in understanding the facets of running a business successfully.
by Napoleon Hill
This original 1937 classic is still relevant even today! The original self-actualization book, Napoleon Hill guides you to understand the secret of successful people.
by Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko
This will help you get your mind right about money and discover how the rich use money to their advantage. A lot of statistics are thrown at you so read this in small spurts but the knowledge is invaluable to understanding wealth.
by Eric Ries
A fascinating and inspiring book on how start-ups can avoid failure by knowing when and how to react to change, pivot, and adapt. It’s a bit slanted toward the tech-business reader, but the business advice is solid and applicable for any entrepreneur.
by Brian Tracy
Managing your time is imperative to running a successful business. This audio-book introduces techniques to aid in helping you ignore the trivial and focus on the tasks to meet your goals. Practice makes perfect and these lessons can be applied to anything we do in life.
by Tony Robbins
Tony Robbins has for decades been a guru of self-improvement wisdom through his prolific writing and speaking. He expands on his earlier book Unshakable with an overview of mastering money and provides seven steps to mastering your personal finances.
by Tony Horton
Fitness guru Tony Horton walks us through the 11 laws of The Big Picture. An inspiration to me on my journey, Tony hits home the importance of finding your purpose, making a plan, being consistent, and achieving your goals. Do your best and forget the rest is echoed throughout the book and the relatively affordable small tome of his journey is packed full of witty wisdom.
by Marty Cagan
Martin Cagan has a great deal of knowledge and experience on what it takes to not only make great products, but building a project team that is necessary to create great products. In its second edition, the book continues to establish itself as a go-to reference for Project Managers. I found myself being described when Marty speaks about the expectations of a Project Manager.
Applications & Services
Jungle Scout & Chrome Extension
For those of you who are considering selling private-label items on Amazon, Jungle Scout is a leader in the niche hunting market They offer both a web browser-based application for searching and tracking products on Amazon as well as a Chrome extension (sold separately) for fast search analysis on Amazon’s website directly. The combination of these two products provides a powerful assistant in searching for and selecting a niche product to sell on Amazon. I’ve used these both and found them extremely useful for quickly analyzing the Amazon market landscape.
TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is a must-have tool for anyone who is a content creator on YouTube. It’s a Chrome extension that when installed augments the YouTube page with a fantastic set of tools for mining the platform for useful insights to help your videos rank higher. It’s important to keep in mind that YouTube is a search engine platform and keyword SEO is an important part to getting your videos viewed and
Commun.it
Commun.it is a free social media community manager which you can use for managing your Twitter and other social accounts easily. By using commun.it you can follow relevant members, unfollow irrelevant members, check who unfollowed you, mention your most engaged members, send a thank you tweet, retweet popular tweets, reply unreplied tweets, find high value members based on engagement level and influence level, monitor engagement in your community, find new relevant Twitter followers based on keyword, location and language, create groups, block certain members, create Twitter activity and Twitter engagement custom reports, and set up automatic daily and weekly campaigns to thank your top new followers and top engaged members.
Passive Income Sources
Passive income streams are those in which you do a significant amount of work up front, typically for free, with expectation of sales and residual income from that work on the back-end with minimal maintenance or extra work. There are so many ways to earn passive income. Below are a few that I’ve looked into myself or have used.
Selling Swag & T-Shirts
A lot of vloggers will tell you they don’t make a lot of money from ad revenue. The real revenue that comes from their vlogging efforts is from external sales to the affiliate links they include in their video descriptions as well as through swag and merchandise related to their channel.
You can either have T-Shirts printed in bulk or have them printed on demand. Typically in bulk is the cheapest and offers the most profit, but also the most up-front investment. Print on demand companies offer a variety of swag options but often will take most of the profits made on the t-shirt.
Below are a list of print on demand websites that I’ve used in the past. All have pros and cons and different price points. I typically will use these sites for t-shirts, and the quality of the shirts are important to me.
TeePublic
TeePublic offers a pretty good commission on their shirts. They do hold sales and when they do your commissions will go down, but otherwise, it’s an easy to use platform to upload images and get them printed on-demand. Your products will be on sale your first few days.
TeePublic also as a referral program that allows you to earn up to $1000 for anyone you direct to sign-up and sell on their site. For each t-shirt that person earns, you get a $1 without affecting their commission. Pretty cool way to make serious passive income as well! In fact, if you choose TeePublic, be sure to use the link above as I am using this program!
RedBubble
RedBubble offers a good commission on their shirts via markup. By default the markup is %20 of the sale price, but I would suggest bumping this to %30 as anything below %20 in my opinion isn’t worth the juice on low-priced items. RedBubble.
CafePress
CafePress has been around for a while and is one of the most popular swag creation websites around. Their product lineup is pretty diverse but the margins will be pretty tight on a lot of the products they sell.
Cafe press also has an affiliate program that is powered by CJ (see below) and allows you to make commission on links to the products they sell.
Printful
Printful is a little different in that they act as a wholesaler rather than a shopping portal. This is useful if you are looking to host your own e-commerce site and want Printful to handle the creation and drop-shipping of your swag. Printful integrates with several commerce platforms which makes managing your designs, product posting, and order fulfillment a snap!
Affiliate Programs
ShareASale
ShareASale/Awin has been in business for 18+ years and handles 5,171+ different affiliate marketing programs. They handle the affiliate program for companies like RedBubble, WayFair, Reebok, and more.
CJ.com
CJ offers over 2768+ affiliate programs for companies like CafePress, 1&1, 1-800-Got Junk, and more. The have an easy-to-use interface for applying and managing your affiliate advertisers. I definitely recommend giving them a try.