As a blogger and someone who has helped apany sell over 3 units on Amazon I spend a lot of time researching and learning. Some of that learning is about marketing some is about trends and a lot is about reading how other people did it so I can take the parts of what worked for them and incorporate them into my plan. With that being said my number one resource by far are books. Sure they aren free but for a $1 investment that allows you to peak into the mind of an extremely successful person it should be a no brainer. However there are a couple other resources I use regularly that help in either learning about business or in building your own. horizontal-rule 1. Newsletters Nowadays our emails are full of spam but I purposely subscribe to two newsletters that offer a lot of value for me. Prsuit - Prsuit is a daily newsletter for entrepreneurs and others looking for tips about building side hustles changing your mindset and seeing how other people built their success . They have a lighthearted vibe that still gets down to business by ing to a lot of awesome content. I don open many emails but Im always waiting for my email from Prsuit . Ramit Sethi s - While his website title of I Will Teach You To Be Rich is cheesy Ramit and his team are one of the best. Ramit offers several very expensive online courses but I subscribe to his email list for two reasons. First the real reason I subscribe to his list is to study italic his emails. When ites to email marketing and writing copy he is the best. Second many of his emails offer great advice about person finances productivity and life. His site offers free tools and many articles that are extremely helpful. He will try to sell you one of his courses at some point but I just love studying how he goes about the process. horizontal-rule 2. Market Research and Trends Anyone trying to start a website or business needs to be keeping up with what their market is doing. Google trends s - Google trends is a free resource that allows you to see how frequently certain phrases are searched online. This gives you a feel for how certain markets or trends are either growing or dying. You can filter your search by category as well as by country and time frame. I use this almost daily topare trends against each other. Similar Web s - Similar web is a site that allows you to get an estimate of the traffic that other websites get. It shows you an estimate of a couple months of website traffic as well as a breakdown of the main sources for that traffic (search social media email direct etc). This is a great free tool to get an idea of how other websites are doing and where they are getting their traffic from. horizontal-rule 3. Email Opt-In If you have a website you need tools to get subscribers and leads. Sumome s - Sumome is a free tool (with paid options that I don use) that allows you to put opt-in boxes on your website. They offer very customizable forms that you can design to fit in with your brand . You can pick between pop up forms scroll boxes smart bars and a number of other s. You can also choose when to show the opt-in box and on what pages on your site you want it. Designing a cool lead generation for with SumoMe is very simple. MailChimp s - In my opinion SumoMe and MailChimp are the perfect one-two punch for email marketing. SumoMe is the best for getting subscribers and MailChimp is the best at letting you send emails to them. With MailChimp you can send fully customizable automated and manual emails to your list. The free version allows you to have up to 2 subscribers and send several thousand emails per month which is more than enough for someone just getting started. horizontal-rule These are a snapshot into some of the behind the scenes resources I use on a daily basis to learn and research what is working. I hope it helped! Comment which ones you like as well. #OneBrickADay