Top 5 Tools for Creators
If you are a creator here on Youtube, or elsewhere, some of these tools might be useful for you. Let’s run through my top 5, starting with one I created. Now, of course I’m biased here, but I created this service because it’s useful to me, and now I can offer it to others I’m confident you’ll like it.
It’s called Locally Links, and it’s a geolocation linking service – primarily for use with Amazon Associates. If you have Amazon affiliate links, especially multiple countries, you’ll know how much of a pain it is to have to put a link per country, so a USA link, UK link, German link, so on and so forth, so with Locally you can make one link that serves them all. It even has a search fallback, so if you can’t find the product you are looking for, you can just type the name and we will take people to a search with that name instead. I get anywhere from 10-20% more revenue because I serve not only the UK, USA and Germany, but also Canada, Italy, Spain, France and Australia, all with one link.
We’ve also got general links, where you can put any full link in the box and we will take people to the right link for them, which is really useful for other affiliate programs, maybe you have an affiliate link for a product in the USA, but a different company sells it in the UK, you can solve that problem with Locally. As for pricing, it’s only £2 per month, plus usage over 5,000 clicks and that’s only 50p per 1,000, with discounts for the more clicks you get. We are also adding loads of new features that we release at no extra cost.
Right, so that’s my sales pitch out the way, lets look at some other tools. First is TubeBuddy. This is a browser extension that can be incredibly helpful in so many ways when it comes to managing your youtube channel. It lets you do bulk updates to videos, either adding or removing text from descriptions or titles, gives you tag suggestions when you upload and even lets you pick a giveaway winner from your comments. It does have a free version, as well as a few paid options that you might want instead.
Next is for audio, while youtube’s own royalty free library is good, Epidemic sound’s library is bigger and just as royalty free. It does cost money, but not much, £10 a month or £96 a year, and has something like 30,000 songs available, plus sound effects which can be really useful to make your videos that much more involving, funny or enjoyable to watch. It’s pretty easy to search through, by mood, genre or just search an artist you like, ooyy is one of my favourites.
Next on the list is something you might know already, a website called Socialblade. It lets you see any channels views and subs, but now does Twitch, Twitter and Insta. Being able to see trends in your category or compare your stats to similar channels can be really helpful in working out what’s going on with your content. It’s also helpful when brands ask for information on your views or subs, you can just send them a socialblade link and gives them reasonably accurate info easily.
As for the last one, I actually want to give a set of “honourable mentions”. Teespring is a great and easy to use merch store, all you do is upload a design, give it a title and description, set a price and boom, store made. What’s a nice bonus is teespring now integrate with Youtube, so you can have your merch appear below your videos right on youtube.
Then there is FameBit, which is a site dedicated to letting creators and sponsors connect. Most of what’s on there is cheap tat, but sometimes you can find some good stuff there. Just send a message to the folk you are interested in working with and go from there.
