These are some of the tools that I personally use to develop my online business. I will try and select the very-best, and ideally free tools that I have discovered and later list my own in-house tools that I have developed. Also, I will try and keep the list short so you are not overloaded with choices.

SEO Tools

Keyword Tool – to get keyword suggestions

Open Site Explorer – to check links to sites

Yahoo’s Site Explorer – to check links to sites

Online Commercial Intention – check if there is intent for people to buy based on your keyword

Product Creation Tools

eCover Designer

Open Office – use to create PDF reports

Irfanview – Image manipulation tool

Audacity – Audio editor

Productivity Tools

NotePad++ – advanced text editor

FileZilla – FTP program to upload files to the web

Foxit PDF Reader

Free Content

I won’t list article directories here since there are so many.

www.sxc.hu/ – free stock images. This is a useful resource to use if you are creating your own header graphics on a budget. Also, there is often no need to include an attribution link.

Project Gutenburg – this is a collection of old documents that are in the public domain, but you can recycle them to produce recipes and stories for example.

Web Development Tools

Xampp – Local web server environment

Net Beans – IDE for PHP development (and other languages)