18 websites I look everyday! - Tech Tuesday

Welcome to another Technology Tuesday. Today I've got a special treat with you. I'm gonna share with you the 18 websites that I look at every single day when I open my computer in the morning. These are the 18 sites that I always check out, and people keep asking me about my schedule and what I'm looking at, so these are the 18 sites that I look at every single day, and hopefully you can learn from them as well. Okay, so this is my homepage dashboard. It's a file that I, I save on my local computer that I load up every single morning that has all the important things that I need to run my business. I have my personal suppliers, business. These are like my daily tools that I use, but this side where it says daily, these are the things that I do every single day, and I'm going to load them up and walk you through what I do with them. So let's load each one up in a different tab. And we'll go through them one by one. So two of them are actually on the site and they're here. These two are the Google Hot Searches. This is from the United States and this is from Canada. This is a plugin that you could put in on any website to basically show you what people are searching. So these are the most popular searches in the United States that are happening right now and it shows you how popular they are by this red bar. It's Christmas Eve when I'm recording this. You can see things like Feliz Navidad, 'Tis the season, Joyeux Noël is French for Merry Christmas. So you can see that these are the things that are trending. And if I don't know what something is, then I can easily click through and learn about it. So Helena Bonham Carter is in the news for some reason. I don't know why. She split up after 13 years with Tim Burton. So, you know, easy way to know what people are searching for and why it's important. Okay, so we're gonna go through each of these one by one. So next is Facebook, and Facebook— hey, I see my year in review! There we go, me and Nina. So this Facebook is just to see if I have any messages. I don't spend a lot of time. I typically just check out the first post and, and, and that's it. I don't spend too much time kind of digging deep into what people are saying. I use it to kind of keep in touch with my wife, who's usually off working, so she already messaged me. And what does she want? Pretty good video about how a homeless man spent, given $100. Cool, will watch. Thanks, babe. So I usually actually keep it open during the day. It's my easiest way to connect with my wife and anybody who really needs to get a hold of me quickly. Next is music. I have a custom page that is my Believe playlist, and these are some of the songs that I listen to that keeps me inspired, motivated. Again, I need to have music in the morning to get me moving, and you want to create your own belief playlist as well. So I have how many songs on here? 85 songs and growing, and just songs that I like, get me dancing, get me moving in the morning. Again, one of the first pages that I load, and you want to have a playlist of your own that gets you excited every morning. Next, this is my, my business page, so my Facebook page. I usually just look at the messages here. I don't check out any of the content. I look at the messages and see who I have to get back to. So people who are asking me questions, and so I'll write back to them quickly. So just social media checkup. Here I have my lists. So I have a couple of lists that I use. I don't check the main Facebook stream too much because I find it too overwhelming and you just get lost in it. So I created a couple lists: family, business, healthy living, and my own personal page. So here are things that are related to my family that I can scroll down on. Business, I have some clients and various business things related here. So basically the pages that I'm a fan of. So Toronto Dance Salsa is one of the investments I have. Sage and AWeber, companies I'm working with. And so I can easily check out what they're posting and comment. Healthy living are just things that I find interesting, some pages. Healthy Holistic Living has some great content. I Love My Family has some great content, and just, I can easily scan it, see what new things. Here's a cute video, and I love using the Facebook lists as a way to keep track of the important content that I want to see every day instead of just getting it buried. And a lot of the Facebook pages now are getting buried in your main newsfeed, and you'll never see the content that shows up. So I specifically created it for that. And then I have my own page here, and I'll just see what people are sharing and, uh, like them, comment them, respond to people. So these are the people on my team as well as my own posts. Next I move over to Hootsuite, and Hootsuite is what I use for Twitter. I'll take a quick look at my sent tweets. These are my family, so my sister's been posting some stuff. She works at the United Nations, and so she has— she's doing a whole bunch of Ebola stuff right now, so she's posting pictures, and good way to know what she's up to. I have a list of baseball stuff, so people that I follow on baseball. And again, Twitter is such a crazy stream, you need to create your own list to be able to maintain the data that comes in. So I like keeping track of what's happening in the offseason. Here, these are from my movement students and what they're posting. So, you know, Jen posted this, Rich posted this. I can go check out the videos that they're posting, their comments, keep in touch. Business, again, a list of people who I want to follow for business reasons, so Sage, Cindy Bates is a vice president, I believe, at Microsoft. People who relate to one word, so these are all custom lists that I made on Twitter and you can bring them into Hootsuite easily. So Jessica Alba has her one word of honesty, 3M has innovation, and so a few companies who are using their one word and why. My direct message inbox so people can connect with me, and then my mentions. And I can see, you know, new mentions, people I want to write back to. And I try to write back to everybody, and I just find this as an easy way to connect with everybody. Next is unfollowers. These are people who are not following me anymore, so I will just quickly look at who is not following me back anymore, and I will unfollow them. Next is Google+, and I just take a quick look at what's happening on Google+. And I'll try to usually just comment on the first one that I see, either this or this. I'll leave a comment on just to say, "Great video," or "Good post," if I like it. Just an easy, quick way to stay in touch. I do a small business champion of the day, and I find this super helpful. I combine this with my Hootsuite. One of the things I found on Twitter was I couldn't remember who I last responded to or not. So if I look at my mentions here, you know, who did I last respond to? Where do I leave off? Because I only check Twitter once a day. I don't have time to stay on Twitter all day long. And so who did I last respond to? I don't want to go back to my SaaS and try to find it. So what I do every day is I post an Evan Carmichael Small Business Champion of the Day and whoever it is. And this is randomly generated from people who I like their stuff, I respect what they're doing in the entrepreneurship community. And then I post it and then I know that everything after that post is is new stuff. So for example, this is what I posted this morning at 8:10 in the morning. So now I know I have to go through all of these tweets that mention me until I get to the next one by me. So I go all the way through. This is what I responded to this morning, lots of these tweets. From here, the Evan Carmichael Small Business Champion of the Day. So these are my mentions, and I make sure to mention myself so it'll show up in the stream. So then tomorrow, I'll do a new one, and I know I have to go through all of these new ones until I get to here. And this is the easiest way I found to track what I'm doing on Twitter and not have it monopolize my life. Next is LinkedIn. Just quickly check my messages. I don't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but I like to really get back to people who do inbox me. So that's empty because I cleared it this morning. Klout. Klout sometimes has some interesting content around entrepreneurship, so I usually take a quick look at it to see if they have any What's happening here? Oh, Klout, what kind of experience is this? This is terrible. Charming date. Okay, well, I might have to remove Klout. Let's try that one more time. Klout fail. Sign in with Twitter. It's gonna work this time. There we go. That was messed up. So Klout gives me ideas for content, and I usually don't do anything with it. I just like looking at it to see if there's something interesting in the entrepreneurial world. So they have tags. I use entrepreneurship and small business, and it shows me related content that I can pull up their articles. And so sometimes there's some interesting things. I don't know if anything would be pulling out for this, but I haven't looked at it and actually posted anything for a while, but it's cool to just see what kind of content is coming out that entrepreneurs are talking about. You got to stay on top of your market. Amazon, these are deals of the day, and just quickly look. I'm curious to see what's happening on Amazon. I got Amazon Prime, so I get free 2-day shipping and just see what's interesting. Every now and then I'll make a purchase, but quick browsing to see what's there. Kickstarter. I love Kickstarter and I love Toronto, en city, so I look at Kickstarter Toronto every day to see what projects. I've backed a couple, I have connected with the entrepreneurs for a few and partnered with them and given them exposure. So I like seeing what Toronto entrepreneurs are up to and if there's any way that I can help or I find it interesting. So quick look at that. There aren't that many that come out every day, so it's pretty quick to go through. Google Play, I look at the top free apps on Android, and this is just to get a sense of what people are looking at and what apps are popular and what I'm missing out on. I'm not a huge mobile user. I don't have a data plan, I don't have a phone number, although I have a cell phone. I use it more more like an iPad, I guess. But I like seeing what apps are out there, what's popular, what's trending, just to stay current. It's just a quick glance. Then I go to my YouTube comments, and this is the heart. This is what I love. This is the fuel for me, and see what people are talking about and writing about. And I respond. I respond to— like you can see here are comments, and I'm responding to basically everybody who writes a comment. It's what I love doing every single day and kind of gives me that energy to keep going. So thank you guys so much. You can see this is still just from a day ago. I get so many comments, and it's Christmas Eve, so this is actually slow. It's usually crazy, crazy, crazy busy, but it's still just one day ago as we scroll down, down, down, down, down, down. So yeah, I mean, the heart of what I do, and you want to have those little whys to help keep you motivated every day. Then this is Product Hunt, and Product Hunt is what people put up to share any kind of new ideas that are on the web that can help businesses grow. I usually miss today and go the day before to see what the most popular one was. So command line radio for geeks, easy way to keep up with industry news and inspiration, expand your knowledge universe in 5 minutes a day, free ebook. You know, I see what's popular, so these are all upvoted. So this is the most popular one. It is— It is skewed towards geeks, trending, technology, that kind of stuff, but I like it and every now and then I find some cool sites that I can either use myself or share with friends. And the last one is the newest one, FameBit, and this is a way for people who are on YouTube to collaborate with each other. And so I've collaborated with a whole bunch of people. Right now it's mostly— the people on here are mostly in kind of makeup, beauty, space, but there's a few that aren't, and I've reached out to them, some reached out to me, and basically trying to find ways to collaborate. If you think about musicians, you know, it's common to be on each other's albums and record songs together. So YouTubers are starting to do that too, where I'll be on your channel, you're on my channel, we'll be on the same video together. This one is an example. It's a channel with 196,000 subscribers. And she wanted to do a mashup of a bunch of YouTube people sharing 1 minute of why YouTube has changed their life. And so I recorded a quick 1 minute for her, and that's gonna go up on, on her channel. And so just a great way to check in to see what new YouTubers are out there looking for collaborations to work together. So those are the 18 sites that I look at every single day to fuel me and help my business grow. I'd love to hear what are the must-have sites that you need to check out every single day, leave them in the comments below. Maybe I'll discover something new I haven't heard of below. Let that comment fly, let, let that inspire other entrepreneurs to go check it out too. If you guys like this video, you want to see more, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you soon. If you want to see more great content to keep you inspired, motivated, and believing, check out my newsletter in the link below.