hi y'all,

excited to find this great group and share what has brought me here...i usually don't like to recommend tools because it's really about your mindset if you want content/online things to go well but...

i have to be honest there's a few tools that i use a lot and i'm probably not the only one.

1 - similarweb & alexa - they compliment each other with their variations on similar features and help you see how many folks are going to a site and where they are coming from. i once found a great site in brazil that went from 0 to 300k visitors in a month because i had been taking a look at the site to which those visitors were going using alexa and from there found the referring site which similarweb then provided some color for
2 - link redirect trace - that is the name of a chrome extension (there's many others though) that shows you the path you are taking when you click a link, which is appreciated because sometimes there's a few gals/guys in the middle ;)

3 - vpn - if you ever want to see ads or search results from a different country, even different states within the us - helps you tailor regional content, this will do that for you. there's a free trial one called hma and another simple one is tunnelbear... i fell for the cute animal branding i guess

4 - web archive - it's a great site that shows how sites evolved...what someone had on a domain name before you took interest in it helps validate ideas...what a site you like looked like a year ago shows you what they care about now... fun/strategic things like that

i think i'll leave it to that for now. comment any other tools you rely on or use cases of the above mentioned that I might not have thought of?