Have you ever looked for tools to help you with your internet marketing?

If you answered “no” to that question then you are amongst a very small minority. I certainly have, we use a bunch of them.

But which tools should you use!

If you Google “internet marketing tools” you get…

Thats 84 million results! If you Google “internet marketing software” it’s even worse…

131 million results. That’s just insane.

You are going to need some tools if you want to speed up and improve your marketing efforts. But there are thousands of businesses out there who are relying on you to try their tools, not really have the time to investigate it, but forget to cancel your subscription.

Very quickly you can find that you are paying for access to a bunch of software and tools that you’re not using and have never really used.

And the reason is that if we try a shiny new piece of software then it’s quite fun to investigate how it works and it feels like work.

But it’s not!

You are deflecting away from the work that actually needs to be done to play with something new and shiny.

To make matters worse, you’re paying for that as well.

You’d be far better off taking a walk and grabbing a coffee for an hour before resuming work.

Unfortunately that’s not how most of us are wired, but if you can do that instead then do.

What about the rest of us? Those of us who really struggle to stay away from new tools and products.

We need to have a plan of the tools we may need. And this plan is most easily created by basing it on your marketing plan.

The first rule is…

You won’t need 90% of products you’re interested in.

The second rule is…

Never try more than one product at a time.

If you start testing out a whole bunch of products all at the same time then there’s a 99% chance you won’t end up using any of them. That’s because however easy a product is supposed to make something, it usually isn’t that easy until you know how to use it. So you need to spend time getting to understand it and how it works. If you are trying to do that for five products at the same time you’ll quickly get overwhelmed, realise you’re spending way too much time on them rather than doing the things that make you money and put them on the shelf without ever discovering if they could have improved your business.

Start by testing out one product thoroughly, if it doesn’t work for you then cancel it. Only after you’ve cancelled it should you begin testing another product. This will prevent you ever having more than one product on test at a time.

The third rule is…

If you have more than three or four tools, you probably have some that you don’t need.

If you’re computer is choked with different tools and software then you are probably very aware you have a lot that you don’t need. However even if you have more than three or four the chances are that there are some you don’t need or they have overlapping functions.

There’s only one tool that, in my opinion, every digital marketer should have. And that’s… emailing software.

You MUST be able to send emails to your list.

In a few rare situations there may be marketers who don’t use them. And that’s usually because they’re using paid traffic direct to CPA offers and don’t want to get involved with building email lists.

However they also know that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by doing this.

Outside of emailing software there’s nothing that’s required by all internet marketers. It now depends on your marketing plan, how you intend to market and the size of your business.

Here are the tools that we currently use at Anonymous Ginger:

InfusionSoft

ClickFunnels

iMember360

Zendesk

ManageFlitter

ArticleVideoRobot

That’s it, we don’t use any other tools.

You may be thinking that I’ve listed six and mentioned earlier that if you have more than three or four you probably have some that you don’t need.

And you’d be right.

But the reason is that two of these are linked to a marketing channel we are now using heavily when we weren’t before and so have decided to automate a chunk of the work.

What do each of these do:

InfusionSoft

This is CRM software that quiter literally manages our business and automates our marketing. It allows us to send emails, process payments, manage products and affiliate partners and much more.

It’s the core processing plant of our company and pretty much everything goes through it.

ClickFunnels

As we create a lot of products it’s useful to have a quick and easy way to build sales funnels, and that’s where ClickFunnels comes in. We used to use LeadPages but with the added features ClickFunnels was a better choice for us we can now create our funnels in less than half a day once the copy is written.

This product also connects to InfusionSoft to make everything look seamless to our customers.

iMember360

This is a WordPress plugin that controls our members areas. Like ClickFunnels it integrates directly with InfusionSoft and then allows us to control how customers access their products and services based on what they’ve purchased in InfusionSoft.

If you’re an InfusionSoft user and what to create membership sites, you shouldn’t look any further than this plugin.

Zendesk

Support is very important to me. I want everyone who contacts us to have a good support experience and take away something that’s going to help them achieve their goals. Our support desk doesn’t just provide support for our products, it also provides our readers support with what they’re trying to achieve in our niche.

Zendesk allows us to create tickets, assign them to agents who are specialists in their field and make sure that all queries get answered in a short timeframe.

ManageFlitter

We have made a concerted effort recently to grow our Twitter followings and generally provide more content and interaction through social media channels.

This software has been absolutely essential in growing our Twitter followers and managing our feeds.

If you want to know how I use it, check out my guide to Grow Your Twitter Following.

ArticleVideoRobot

With the new plans to grow our social media following we have made the decision to automatically convert some of our posts into videos. These posts are ones that are published daily and contain a single piece of useful information.

This software quickly converts the post into a video and allows us to publish it on the major video sites.

We are still in the trial phase of this software but it’s allowing us to test whether our methodology for generating traffic from videos is going to work in the niche we’re using it in. And it’s only taking 5 minutes of our time each day.

So far results have been slow but we are starting to see some drips of traffic coming in and growth is definitely going in the right direction. This test will last at least 3 months and we’re only a few weeks in so far.

In Summary

It’s very easy to find that you own hundreds of tools to help you’re business and that you’re spending hours using just a tiny fraction of them.

The next time you’re considering a tool, forget all the sales copy and think instead about the core function of the product.

Then work out how much time you currently spend performing that core function. If it’s a lot of time and having the tool is going to save a significant amount of it, then it’s probably a good one to test.

But if you’re not spending a lot of time, or in fact aren’t even doing what the product will do, then you most likely don’t need it.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re not doing it because you don’t have time. If you get the product it will make it quick and so you will do it. You should always perform a task manually at least the first few times it’s done. If you don’t then you won’t be able to get a feeling for how you want it to be done or how effective it will be.

Follow these guidelines and 90% of the time you think you need to try out a new product, you will realise that you don’t. All you actually need is a break from work, so take one.