A Clever Cat

These are resources that I have tried myself and believe are high quality, high value products or services. These are affiliate links, which means if you click on them and then buy something, I will get a few bucks, but please know – affiliate or not – I only put things on this page that I’d happily recommend to my own friends and family.

• Hosting

  Hostgator is the host I use myself, and I recommend them to everyone. A couple of years ago, my previous host literally just up and left town with no notice to us clients, leaving us completely stranded. Hostgator saved my bacon by getting my site back up again quickly and I’ve continued to be extremely happy with them ever since. They have great uptime, very responsive service (one of, if not THE most important part of hosting, in my opinion) and are quite affordable.

• Themes for WordPress

  There are a lot of awesome themes available for WordPress. Although there are some very nice free ones, I’ve always had the best luck with paid or “Premium” themes. They just tend to be more full-featured, have less bugs and since you paid for them, the authors offer some support. If you’re looking for a great theme, you can’t go wrong with these theme design companies. I’ve used their themes myself and can wholeheartedly recommend them.

  

  

• Internet Marketing Training

  
  I recommend, in the strongest possible terms, the Third Tribe Marketing program. It’s so awesome that I couldn’t shut up about it, so it gets its own page. Read my full recommendation article here.
  
   
  
   

• Shopping Cart

  E-Junkie is the cart that I am using here at A Clever Cat. When setting up the site, I tried a whole bunch of various methods – WordPress plugins, direct PayPal, Amazon Payment and Google Checkout integrations, third party shopping carts. This one was, by far, the easiest and most bug-free method I tried. It worked perfectly, right out of the box, with easy setup. There is a small monthly fee to use it, but it’s dirt cheap for what you get, especially when compared to other paid shopping carts.

• Marketing

  IttyBiz is run by Naomi Dunford, offering marketing consulting to very small businesses – “IttyBizes.”. Naomi is awesome because she is very real, very smart and very smart-mouthed! She tells it like it is, in words we can all understand (including the occasional F-bomb, just so you know). It’s obvious she knows her stuff and she makes you feel like you really can do this! Her goal is to help 1,000 people be successful enough at their own IttyBizes to ditch their day jobs. She has some terrific, very affordable products to help us do it. And get this – they all have a money back guarantee! I can’t say enough about Naomi – I want to be her.

  Marketing 101 – For when you need serious marketing help. It’s not about writing the right copy or advertising on the right blogs, it’s about understanding what makes your business awesome and knowing how to communicate that to the right people. This is marketing for people who don’t really get it. $197.00
  
  SEO School – The IttyBiz classic. Get Google to stop pretending you don’t exist… without paying bazillions for an SEO consultant. Do a few totally not hard or scary things now, get traffic while you sleep forever. Doesn’t that sound fun? $39.00
  
  Marketing School – Marketing School is kind of like SEO School except it’s longer and it’s about Marketing. $49.00