Web Tools Radio

Alternativeto.net (http://Alternativeto.net)

This is a cool site. If you find a tool you like, but maybe you don't like the price. You type in the name of the website or app, and it spits out an alternative to. For example, I just cancelled my lead pages account. I just wasn't using it enough to warrant the $40 a month . It brought up a bunch of landing page alternatives such as Landini, Front Meter (which looks really cool), http://unbounce.com/

Unroll.me

Not sure where I found this, but I’ve been using it for my gmail based accounts for a few months. 

it’s called unroll.me (http://unroll.me/) . If you’ve heard of this or already featured it, then disregard. But I’ve been using my email address since 2005. It’s been the ONE constant email address through domain changes, job changes and everything else.

Rather than try to keep up with dummy accounts for subscriptions, I just had everything into that account. I would get hundreds of e-mails a day. I love “inbox zero” and my OCD about it can be a bit unnerving. 

What it does is you can sync your account from a desktop or iPhone (not sure about Android) app and it finds e-mails in your inbox that you might want to “roll up”

Do you need that mailing list thing delivered immediately or can you wait a few hours? It gives you a daily “roll up” of all those subscriber lists, etc. You can of course opt to keep some in normal delivery. 

I have 75 “subscriptions” (sometimes just people who email me a lot) untouched, so they get delivered as normal. I have 183 e-mail lists i’ve UNSUBSCRIBED to using this tool and another 151 subscriptions that get rolled up into one e-mail a day. Sometimes you get 10, sometimes 12, sometimes just 1 or 2.

From a productivity standpoint, it is awesome to know that only the e-mails I want to come into my inbox are filling it and I get ONE email a day (usually in the morning) with the rolled-up e-mails. 

It’s free and i’ve loved using it for the past few months. Inbox is CLEAN!

Email Spike

This too allows you to put a video into your email that can play (this would be an mp4, and have a backup animated gif so if the browser doesn't display in the browser). You can also create a slideshow that you create write there in the software. You can also make a YouTube gif. This is a 10 second gif inside the email.

You can also create a countdown timer that shows in your email. You pick the style of the timer, the end date, the font size, font style, and copy and paste some code into your email.

You still need to create great content to get people to open the email, but this looks pretty cool. As I write this it is $47 and the creators say this price could go up to $200 at any time. So here again, a  company that has a scarcity tool is using scarcity. Shocking. If that works for you, then maybe you should use it in your emails by purchasing email spike (http://www.weeklywebtools.com/emailspike) . before the price goes up.

A new episode

I was at WordCamp Dayton last weekend and these two tools kept coming up. The interesting thing is with SEMRush, it might be easier to say what it DOESN'T do than what it does. 

In a nutshell, you can spy on our competitors, and figure out what keywords they are using, how much they are spending, and what keywords would be a good fit for you The only thing missing from the feature list is a free pair of knives. The price starts at $69 a month and they offer a 7-day guarantee so if you're not sure about the product, block out some time and really jump into the deep end if you sign up.

Editorial Calendar Plugin This free plugin makes it super easy to plot out when posts will appear on your website The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

So with SEMRush you decide what to write about it, and then combine it with the Editorial calendar to figure out when it will be published

Easy WP Local Host (http://jvz3.com/c/59893/202416)

AD respark Ad Respark (http://www.weeklywebtools.com/adrespark)  is a Flexible tool for making Facebook Ads. Their video shows you just click a few buttons and it switches it to a banner, or pinterest, etc. I did not have the same experience. I had to do some tweaking as an image for Facebook won't fit on a pinterest icon (in some cases). I don't beleive they purposely mislead you, but it's not quite as simple as their videos show. It is a nice program with the ability to pull in pictures, and use their tool to check to see if your add should pass the Facebook 80/20 rule. I did sign up for one of the webinars and their webinars were some pretty heavy duty selling from their partners. For me, when you have to keep asking, "Are you ready? I want to make sure you're engaged!" How about show me what I signed up to see and I'll be engaged instead of 37,000 screen shots of how much money people are making on JVzoo. So I don't blame the makers of the software, but I would stick to the videos tha twalk you through the software and skip the live webinars. here is an overview video, or go to

We all know you can click on the fears in the bottom right hand corner of a youtube video and choose to play it faster. This is not an option with videos served on the Wisita platform. So here is the hack around it

Use Chrome and go to the page that has the video

Right click on the video and choose HD only.

Use the keystroke CTRL+SHIFT+J to bring up chrome's java tools

Go CTRL+F to bring up the find tool and type "embed" there will be quite a few you typically want the one in the iframe.

Click on the code for the video and then right click and choose copy link location

Navigate to clipconverter.cc and paste the link into the box and click on Continue. If a bunch of mp4's show up, that was the right link. If not go back and try again

When you see the mp4's pick the one you want and choose download.

Coming in the next few episdoes

A hand's on review of (http://jvz2.com/c/59893/114792) Webinar software for Wordpress.

A hands on review of AdRespark.

Thank to all who have supported me. Become a supporter and get access to video and bonus content at www.weeklywebtools.com/support (http://www.weeklywebtools.com/support)

This podcast originated at WeeklyWebTools.com (http://www.WeeklyWebTools.com)

I've been seeing a new tool pop up on more and more sites. This lead me to thinking, "What are they using to do this?" When I was using YNAB.com the owner let me know the software had been updated. When I was using Audiometric.io I was told that the system would be down by maintenance. So when I found this tool, and found out that you can start using it for $4 if you have less than 500 contacts in the database - it seems like a complete no brainer. You can take it for a spin for free for 30 days.

Here is a video that shows off what it can do (http://intelliplayer.com/watch/f609f1tut)

Today we have two tools that allow you to crate great images.

Crazy Kala

CrazyKala is a cool web based editor that is similar to Canva.com This is a different business model as there is an up front fee and that's it. With Canva it is free, but you pay for images you use ($1.00 each). It is $27 and expect to be upsold when you sign up. For more information check out crazykala.com (http://weeklywebtools.com/crazykala)

Check out CrazyKala in Video (http://intelliplayer.com/watch/837221tu5)

Foto Press - Photoshop Type Editing in Wordpress

This is another $27 product. This is a plugin for Wordpress. I've purchased it, but haven't had a chance to really kick the tires on it. It looks super functional with tons of features. Here is a video that shows it off. For more information go to wpfotopress.com (http://weeklywebtools.com/fotopress)

Check out the FotoPress Video (http://intelliplayer.com/watch/96b7c1tuf)

See weeklywebtools.com/312 (http://www.weeklywebtools.com/312)  for full notes

See weeklywebtools.com/311 (http://www.weeklywebtools.com/311)