35+ Tools I Actually Use That Changed My Life Forever!

0:00 hey y it's AAS in this video I'm going to share 35 Plus tools I actually use in my business and day-to-day the tools I'll explain in this video are separated in the following number one content creation tools number two productivity tools number three design tools number four sales and marketing platforms that I use number five team number six cloud and backup tools as you may or may not know on this channel I actually talk about the latest tools and apps that I find in interesting and ones that I think will help you in terms of your productivity but which of the tools do I actually use that's why I went ahead and created this video for you without further Ado let's get through the first set of tools which is under the content

0:45 creation category and by the way all these tools and resources that I'll be mentioning in this video will be in the description box below as well as a handy PDF that you can download all right so the first tool I use for Content creation is the video editing tool more specifically Bally the screen recorder so for many years I've been using a tool called screenflow the only thing is this is a Mac OS only app and I've been using it for like 10 plus years if you take a look at some of my videos four four years ago maybe 3 years ago you find that I've used screen flow and that's a tool that I've used for many years whether it's tutorials or online courses and it's really simple to use which is what I love about it in addition it's just a onetime payment unlike other

1:31 editing tools which do incur like a monthly fee now because I'm going to run through quite a number of tools in this video I'm not going to show exactly how it works and a full tutorial on each of these tools so let's move on to the second tool that I use all right so the second content creation tool is Adobe Premiere Pro and this is the actual video editing software that my team and I use to edit all these videos on my YouTube channel and any of the short form videos I for the most part do not do any of the editing now I simply pass the raw video to my editors and they do the rest but I simply have a subscription to do a bit of color grading here and I like the fact that I have a advanced and more professional uh

2:17 editing software that I can simply whip out and do any quick edits but most of the time I don't do any of the editing all right the third tool is frame and my team and I use this whenever I need to share feedback on the latest video draft and you can see in this example what you can do you can simply annotate Circle things and comment on specific timestamps so rather than chatting on let's say WhatsApp or on slack on the team communication software uh you know can you edit this part at this time stamp you can simply use frame which I'll open up here as an example and I can see all the videos that are currently in draft or approved and what we can do from here you can see is edit

3:02 let's say the background music is too loud I can leave a comment here uh music is too loud and right there it will provide a comment and it shows the exact time stamp which is at 000000 in addition you can do things like annotate as I explained so if you want to edit this part for instance you can do that and at the end of the day makes it easy for your editor and yourself to collaborate and just understand and gain everything with Clarity okay next up for YouTube research and planning what I like to do is use a tool called vid IQ with vid IQ I can type in a keyword such as AI tools and then what it will bring up or a list of matching keywords as well as related

3:49 keywords and in addition I can see how many people are searching for that specific key phrase on a monthly basis so AI tools for Content creation gets over 30 ,000 searches per month I can also get some ideas for my next video so if you search for more suggestions you can see other suggestions like AI tools for YouTube videos so AI tools better than chat GPT so plenty of other suggestions here and plenty of other searches that people are actually searching for that's the main tool of vdq that I personally use but there's a ton of other useful and valuable tools that vdq offers so you can get some ideas for your next video you can check out your competitors check out your analytics of course and do plenty of

4:35 other things all within vid IQ next up as part of optimizing my YouTube videos what I like to do is go to a website called thumbs up.tv drop in my thumbnail so that I can see how it looks like on different devices on a web browser for instance on the sidebar and you can see whether your thumbnail pops whether it pops different sizes and that's a great way to test it in addition you can see how your video title fits so you can enter your video Title Here drag and drop your thumbnail and then you can see how the title fits and what you'll notice here under mobile it's actually cut off some of the video title so I added the addition of Step by Step but it's cut it off so things like this can be really valuable when it comes to

5:22 optimizing your video title and thumbnail next up with all of my YouTube videos I always get it transcribed into cap options and I use a service called rev what I like to do is order human captions as opposed to the AI generated captions I found that's really inaccurate and some of the words I have to manually go in and fix up so you do have to pay for the captions it really depends how many minutes your video is but at the end of the day what I love about it is that it will transfer the transcript back to your YouTube video without you having to upload it manually the benefit of adding captions to your YouTube videos is firstly most people are on their mobile devices and they don't always have their

6:09 volumes on right you can use the YouTube autogenerated captions but I found that also inaccurate some of the words at least uh so I want to make sure it's 100% accurate and even with the captions what you uh can gain from it is the SEO benefits and it's actually good for the algorithm I've spoken to a few Creator Friends on YouTube and they've seen a bit of an increase in growth and viewership by simply adding captions all right next up as part of the kind of video production process what my team and I use and the one that I've been using for many years in terms of Sound Processing audio processing is a tool called or phonic all you need to do really is just drag and drop your audio

6:55 file whe whether it's an MP3 or wave file and what you do is you choose your preset or you can set your own perimeters and what I love about it is you get these filters right you can use the Adaptive leveler do some filtering loudness normalization and this all sounds technical but at the end of the day what it will help your audio do is level it so let's say you've got a you're standing way too far way too close uh which actually will clip the audio but let's say it's not it varies right your volume of your audio it will go ahead and normalize it and level it at a certain amount so you can see here under loudness normalization I've set it to- 16 LS and it's also great if you're

7:43 a podcaster too where you're having two or more people talking the mics and it's not even so this all does it for you all right coming in at number eight is the stock music website that my team and I use and that is epidemic sound so on the back end what I love about it is that it recommends songs or audios that it thinks that you like based on your YouTube channel and also more of what you like right here so recommend some of the other music based on some of my past downloads so my team simply goes and heads in here downloads the appropriate music track to then add to the videos as background music or they could go in here and check for sound effects that they'd like to add and this just enhan

8:29 this is the video production let's now move on to the next category of tools and those are productivity tools the first productivity tool that I use and one that's real game changer uh in my day-to-day and my business is none other than notion so you can see that I personally use notion as my content planner specifically for YouTube since that's my main platform and I use a kban board style and in fact this board right here not including my content ideas of course is for sale you're looking for a template that you can use to stay consistent with your YouTube channel so link will be in description box below but I can very easily let's say come up with an idea this is my idea and then I'll open up that and start scripting it

9:16 but what I've created is a video template that I have refined created over the years so that can follow this checklist follow my script so that I know exactly what my structure is going to be and I just go ahead fill those in as easy as that I can move on record that and get on with the next topic and that's just one use of notion for me I track everything from my uh other launchers I've got my company info I've got my reading and favorites and bookmarks things like that some of my other projects going on like the SAS that I'm building yeah there's really not much else to say but this is the main workspace system that I use SL project management system all right the

10:02 second productivity tool that I use is the to-do app that I use and that is things and I know for a fact that this is actually a apple you know Mac OS you've got watch OS and your you know iOS devices and stuff like that so it's not really made for Android devices uh from based on what I can see and this has just been a game changer for me I follow my to-dos every single day and I'll just open this up for you and this is just the list of things that I need to do today record two new videos I need to create a weit list for my startup uh that I'm currently currently building uh and I also need to register for a trademark for it so these are just

10:48 things that I have on my list it also syncs with my watch Apple watch Ultra and of course my iPhone so that everything's in sync I can see what I need to do rather than just logging into my computer to see what I actually have to do and what I also like to do is jot down ideas things that I need to do and simply put it in the inbox or in anytime and then once I kind of need to schedule in all of the to-dos I'll just drag and drop it or schedule it in for the on the appropriate days I've tried many to-do apps but I've always gone back to things and it's a paid app and it's well worth every single penny okay next up this may sound similar but in terms of scheduling things like meetings and to see the

11:35 agenda to see what I have on today and also syncing with my wife so that we're not clashing in terms of our time and schedule uh I simply use Google Calendar and that's it there's not much more to say about it but that's a simple app that I use for team scheduling and meetings and things of that nature all right the next tool that helps me with my productivity is none other than chat gbt kind of a staple right in everyone's browser Tab and I've got that open and what I specifically use it for things like grammar checking so I want to know whether I should use this word or that word when I'm doing things like running my Instagram caption or even when I'm speaking like this on camera sometimes when I'm saying something I'm like uh

12:22 should it be this or that so I go in there so that chat gbt can let me know and suggest what's correct what this means and what that means and when I should use this word instead of that word so that's just one example but another thing that I use Chad gbt for is you know suggestions on the next thing that I should write so when I'm actually writing a caption on Instagram or let's say a story or an article I'm stuck on Words then I go ahead paste it in all into Chap gbt and let chap gbt continue what it thinks I should say next the next thing that I use chat gbt for is content repurposing so if I've got an article and I want to repurpose it into tweets or something of that nature I can

13:08 use that the one time-saving thing that I use chat GPT for is YouTube timestamps so I simply transfer and upload that transcript or that video the captions that is from rev over to chat gbt and let chat gbt come up with list of timestamps so then I will copy and paste those timestamps in the description of every single video of mine all right next up this one's a kind of content creation tool as well depending how you see it but it's also productivity so which is why I put on the productivity this next tool is called audio pen it's an AI tool that helps you speak and it will summarize everything that you said into a few words depending how long you're speaking for and I talk about things like let's say embracing life's

13:54 balance so that's the the other time I was talking about this and the great thing about using tools like audio pen and the like is that all you need to do is hit that record button and then you can say whatever you want to say you don't have to be perfect in terms of your speech you can say your arms and eyes and be repetitive as you want because what it will do the AI that is is summarize it so that it's something like this right and furthermore What audio pen can do is rewrite it in a certain turn so it can be professional casual friendly or specify your own custom kind of voice and tone that is on their Prime kind of paid option so I've got the paid option with audio pen and it's well worth it if you want to get some thoughts down keep a journal

14:39 perhaps or use it for Content creation okay the next tool is called magnet this is a Mac OS app and I know for PC users on Windows they've got their own built-in uh window organizing system or app but what I use this for is to Simply do things like have my have one browser on the left side while I've got another browser on top and on the bottom right so things like this you can really use for productivity so you can kind of multitask even though I don't really like multitasking but it just makes it easy if I'm looking over one screen and I need to then let's say write some notes based on that as just one use of it all right next up I also use a tool called cursor Pro which is exactly what

15:24 you're seeing now with my cursor it puts this kind of Halo ring around it so drawing attention to whatever you're pointing at and it helps with these tutorials that I'm sharing on YouTube so if I'm pointing at something rather than looking at this tiny little arrow you can you can see and visibly see the actual Arrow right the cursor and you can change the shapes you can change the sizing and the thickness of it so it's great it's for Mac only there are PC alternates but this is what I use the next tool that I use that also has to do with kind of your cursor your mouse is a tool called screen brush this one allows you to doodle on your screen so it's great if you're presenting sharing tutorials like what I'm doing sharing training so if you want to draw

16:10 attention to a specific thing I can do so by simply enabling a screen brush and now I can draw attention to this specific icon I can also do little arrows as well you can also choose the option to enter text so if you want a list of things as you're kind of presenting you can do that okay for screen capturing and taking long screenshots of your browser because most screenshotting tools only take what they can see right here but with snag it you can actually use the scrolling capture tool the scrolling capture will essentially capture the entire website if you're wanting to do that I've been using snagger for many many years I think it when it first came out which was over 10 years ago so I've just kind

16:57 of stuck with it and whenever I need to take a screenshot for instance I can simply take a screenshot let's say of this thing and then what you can do is annotate and point at different things so I can use the arrow tool I can use the text tool different shapes and you can specify the parameters right there and then also share it with a link and down the bottom you can see history of all your screen captures which is what I love about it but that's the screen capturing tool that I use all right let's move on to the next category of tools and these are tools under design the first tool under design is of course canva and I use canva pretty much all types of designs anything that I need to design whether it's an ebook cover like

17:42 this or a worksheet or an invoice to I simply use canva don't have to worry about using Photoshop these days and it even has AI built into it in fact I'm also using canva to sell canva templates as digital products the next design tool that I use is figma I use figma to create prototypes and whenever I need to show what I'd like as this interface for you know the software that I'm building like this one example which is an ebook tool that we're currently building and you can see the Prototype that I made and that's a great thing about figma you can actually create prototypes that work okay not the actual software but prototypes so whenever someone clicks on something you can actually make it go to a specific screen or different section

18:29 of your design and this is just one example that I'm using figma for plenty of uses but I know there are professional designers that use figma but for my case I simply use it for prototyping and just mock creating mockups all right next up I get all my stock photos from a site called unsplash you may have heard of this I know some others use pixels but I simply like to stick to one just to keep it simple and I found unsplash the quality is you know next to none and these days you've got a ton of photos to choose from people with actual professional cameras putting it and uploading it up there on unsplash and other stock photography websites and you can download this freely and use it for commercial purposes but my team and

19:15 I use unsplash to grab some stock photos to use in our videos and our ebooks and things of that nature next up is icons uh we grabb all our icons from flat icon.com and it's got a range of free icons that you can use and we grab some of these icons to put on our thumbnails like the YouTube thumbnails and also using some of these on our ebooks and digital products so it's a fun little you know great way to enhance and make your adsets and media a bit more appealing okay the next category is sales and marketing platforms that I use number one is the online course platform that I use and that is think GIC I've got my YouTube master course on this hosted and this is what the back end

20:01 looks like where you can add your course curriculum your modules your lessons all here including your videos and any other assets so you can integrate and incorporate different types of media as well depending on your online course in addition you can also sell your course using think ific so there's an e-commerce kind of platform that you can use and you can manage all of your students and enrollments all within the same platform the second platform that I use is Thrive cut now I've got a lifetime account with them and they're still advertising this which is great so if you're looking for a platform where there's no monthly fees at all you get the latest updates and they've been running for I'd say 5 to 10 years now so they're not like running away or

20:47 anything and getting everyone's money stealing it and not updating their software they've made constant updates which is great and because I've got that account I sell most of my digital products uh through this platform what's also great about it is there's no fees so they're not getting any transaction fees you know apart from you getting charged by stripe or PayPal whichever payment processor that you're using there's no other fees just to list some of the benefits of using Thrive card you can do things like Auto bumps you can deploy upsells and funnels and embed your cart anywhere on your website there's a sales tax functionality as well well as many of these other uh builtin tools like an affiliate Center

21:33 so if you're looking to build some of these it's all built in okay the next platform that I use to sell my products is lemon squeezy and by now you're probably thinking why do I have so many different platforms why don't I just consolidate into one well firstly lemon squeezy makes it really easy for you to start an online store which is one of the reasons why I simply got this up and running uh one called aesthetic ebook covers I wanted to just put this up and just test out lemon squeezy and I found that it's really great really user friendly and it handles all the taxes and all the backend for you so you don't need to worry about that they pay you on a periodic schedule on a periodic schedule that is and all you need to worry about is putting your product up

22:19 as simple as you know entering the name description where you can sell onetime products you can sell subscriptions and set different pricing models but I've got a full tutorial on limit squeezy in description box below okay the next platform that I use is called beacons and this one is different because what you can do is set up a sort of Linkin bio page where you can do things like of course list all of your links external links and within your beacons page you can also build an email list so you put in your newsletter and also sell through it so you could very well enable your store and you can sell your products right there I don't use this but but I use as you saw Thrive cart lemon squeezy to sell my products so but there's that

23:04 option which is great if you're looking for kind of an all-in-one system rather than having a full web page and speaking of email marketing and building an email list I use a tool called drip so it's purely an email marketing uh tool but you can use an alternative called convert kit I don't really recommend drip because it's quite Advanced and it's not as user friendly I would say go with con kit but I just wanted to share that this is the email marketing platform that I personally use okay for website building at least for my main a realist.com website I use webflow it's been on webflow for many years now and I love the ease of it not only is it userfriendly but you can be flexible with it and go as advanced as you want

23:49 because you're given all of these options so you can see on the right here with the styling you can specify different styling for each of these elements on your page and this this was all designed using webflow however on that note if you're not looking to create a website from scratch like this which is what I did I recommend a web host called hostinger because they've got a built-in AI website builder with hosting as AI website builder you simply describe what your business is about what you're selling and then it will generate a website for you within minutes so if you're looking for an easier way to create a website with no code or technical skills a look down below there's a link to hosting over there as well as my coupon code a realus so that you can save further okay the next tool is called rebrandly and this allows you to not only shorten long

24:37 links but it also hide it and also make it look more branded you can go to the paid option which will allow you to create branded link so it will be yourdomain.com whatever link you want so rather than having this long affiliate link for instance or this really long website URL you can shorten it to just a really memorable UR that you can then share on social media what's more is that you can track the amount of clicks on those links that you've just shortened and cloaked so if you are let's say an affiliate marketer it makes sense because you want to see the amount of clicks or if you're looking for the conversions and also if you want to hide your affiliate link so it doesn't look as obvious then you can shorten it so for instance there's a tool called

25:23 evence and I've simply shortened it to a. link evence and this is an affiliate link it's gotten 255 clicks and you can get even more data by simply going to the link and then it'll give you the stats on the geographical location of where those clicks came from and the demographics and a bit more info like that all right let's move on to the next category and these are the tools that I use with my team okay the first and one that you probably have already is WhatsApp so I use WhatsApp for desktop and also mobile so that I can you know quickly communicate with my team members whether that's my developer designer or my video editor it's all using Whatsapp okay the next team app that I use is one

26:09 that doesn't need any introduction and that is slack we simply use it for team communication as opposed to those quick messages and if we want to get in touch with the whole team and share more files so more file based things like docs videos audio files things of that nature then we simply use slack as part of Team communication the next tool that I use that helps train and also a way to for me to share feedback with my team is a tool called teller I use teller to screen capture quickly rather than using a tool like screen flow because with screen flow you're recording a screen and then you're having to upload it to somewhere like YouTube or other sources whereas with teller it's all hosted on

26:54 their servers so all you do is you install the teller app app and then you start recording it also records yourself like a little talking head on the corner kind of like what I've got set up right here and it records your screen you can record different tabs different windows and all hosted so if I want quick recordings I simply use teller as opposed to screen flow all right these next couple of Team Tools it's more so websites is going to be for finding people to help you in your business and the first is none other than Fiverr I use Fiverr for quick uh kind of jobs and gigs that I need in fact I've found some good YouTube thumbnail designs from here some writers in fact and also I tried using it for logo designs which has been

27:41 good as long as you find those that are I guess premium and charging a little more than the usual $5 logo designers but that's that the next website that I use to Outsource is upwork and I predominantly use upwork to find my developers and find my let's say writers and my ux UI designers all come from upwork it's reliable you know it's all feedback kind of scored and you can see what they're doing so if you've got a contract with them you can see the screenshot you can see what they're currently working on upwork is rather the more expensive rout because they do charge a fee and especially for someone like me who's hired a developer it's costing me quite a large chunk okay so those are the team apps that I use then

28:26 next category is backup and storage okay the first tool that I use is Google Drive as my main cloud storage so we upload all our videos all our final videos and docs everything all in Google Drive I just Consolidated there I used to have uh Dropbox and plenty of other storage services but now we predominantly just use Google Drive for backing up my computer it all happens automatically using a website and service called back blazs I've been using this for many many years it does it all for you so it gives me peace of mind knowing that yes my system is all backed up even though I've got iCloud going on but with back plays it is more economical because the pricing is significantly cheaper than the service

29:12 like iCloud so I predominately use back plays to back up all my files and folders videos and what I love about it is that it all happens on the backend I can set it all up uh at a certain schedule so I'll just open this up showing you at the last backup was today in the morning and you can set your schedule and that's a great thing about using back blades all right so those are the cloud services I use to back up my files what about physical storage well yes I do I back up all of my files and folders also in physical drives like this the first is a typical SSD drive I like to stick with ssds because it's a heap of a lot faster you're going to save so much time I don't even bother with normal hard drives uh that have

29:58 physical you know Parts this is just the best and the second thing that you can do and what I actually prefer which is uh because it's more economical uh is building these mv2 kind of drives nvme or pcie some people like to call it and what you do is you buy this enclosure everything can be bought on Amazon and then you buy the little stick the SSD stick drive that fits into it all right and then of course all plugs in via USB which is great and I found this actually faster than using one of these and ends up being cheaper you know per gigabyte uh based on the mats that I did right so that's the first thing that I do in

30:45 addition just grab this is this NAS drive it's got 20 terab all up so once I once these are kind of full I transfer them over to this so that I can access my files videos or what have you remotely if I ever need to because it all does connect uh via your network and that's your internet and I just like to have more storage because I deal with a lot of video files I want to keep it and instead of buying and forking out plenty of cash on these things that ends up being more economical okay but for fast things fast transfers I simply use these

31:31 and those right there are the 35 tools apps and websites that I use in my business and day-to-day hope that's giving you some insight in terms of what I actually use as opposed to the thousands of software tools that are out there so it's all condensed into one don't forget I will condense it and provide a resource PDF in the description box below so that it's easy reference for you in the meantime thanks so much for watching watching and I'll see you in the next video