Here is a collection of marketing tools and resources to help with your business that I would personally recommend. I have used all of these except for a few that I either researched or were recommended to me, which are labeled with a *.
Categories
Website
WordPress Plugins
Shopify Apps
FTP Management
Creative/Design
Content
Learning
Admin/Productivity
Social Media
Advertising
Email
Analytics
Monetize
Chrome Extensions
Contests
Screencasting
Miscellaneous
Website
- Google Domains – My new favorite registrar as it’s always one low price and includes free privacy. Extremely simple and easy to use.
- GoDaddy – They often offer discounts and robust features. It can get more confusing, but they have good support and know their stuff.
- Namecheap* – Another big domain registrar that offers domains for cheap.
- Blue Host – Relatively simple hosting. Highly recommend going with the unlimited website plan rather than being limited to only 1. It’s a hassle to change it later and get a good price.
- WordPress.org – This is what I use to power my website along with over ¼ of all websites on the internet.
- Genesis theme – This is a very powerful framework for WordPress that is widely used. I use the framework with a child theme on top for customizations.
- Child theme – The one I’m using is called Dumplin which I found on Creative Market. I heavily customized it, but you can find all sorts of different child themes for the genesis framework.
- Instapage – I use Instapage for landing page and lead generation. It’s very customizable and pretty reasonably priced.
- Leadpages – I have also used Leadpages which is a little more expensive. I do like their leadboxes which are their popups that can be used outside of their landing pages which Instapage does not currently have.
- Shopify – Eccomerce platform with all the bells and whistles. I use it for thinkpup.com
- Namechk – Check availability of domain names and social media usernames all at once. Great tool when brainstorming new business ideas.
- Mobile Friendly Test – A Google tool to check if a website is mobile friendly.
- Peek – Free website user experience testing.
- SEM Rush – Keyword research tool for paid and organic strategies.
- Ahrefs – Track keywords, backlinks, brand mentions, and competitors.
- Buzzsumo – Contenet marketing research, influencer finding, monitoring, and more.
- Backlink Checker – Free backlink checker.
- Zapier – Connect apps and automate workflows.
- Google PageSpeed Insights – See how your website load times rank on mobile and desktop, and what you can do to improve site speed.
WordPress Plugins
Currently Installed on Brief Marketer:
- Yoast SEO – The best plugin for SEO. Also makes setting up Facebook OG codes very simple.
- AdRotate – Allows you to rotate through multiple banners in one placement. Can use in a sidebar or anywhere else on your site.
- Disqus comments – A better commenting system than the default WordPress one, used on my blog.
- Instapage – For easy integration when building pages on Instapage.
- Ninja forms – A better contact form submission than the default WordPress one, used on my contact page.
- Simple social icons – The social icons that live in my sidebar.
- SumoMe – Free tools for list building, social sharing, and analytics.
- Pretty Link Lite – A simple to use link shortener.
- Click to Tweet – Add Click to Tweet boxes in blogs to encourage sharing.
Other Good Plugins:
- Simple Share Button Adders
- Genesis Simple Hooks
- Scroll Triggered Boxes
- Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Shopify Apps
- Printful – Fully automated apparel and gift drop shipper. Large selection and good prices. Also works with other ecommerce providers.
- Notify – Popup notifications of recent purchases to increase credibility and conversions.
- MailChimp – Auto syncs your email lists.
FTP management
Creative/Design
- Design Pickle – unlimited graphic design for a flat monthly fee. Worth it if you have a lot of images to be made or if you don’t want to do them yourself.
- 99designs – Run a contest and have lots of different designs submitted by different designers
- The Noun Project – Free and cheap icons
- Adobe Creative Cloud – Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc.
- Pixlr – Online photo editor with a very similar set up to Photoshop with many robust features.
- PicMonkey* – A more basic online photo editor.
- Snappa – Online image creator that is more business focused than Canva. I use this all the time and is totally worth the small monthly fee. And all images included are free so you don’t have to pay any additional fees.
- Adobe Spark – Quickly make social media images, pages, or videos either on desktop or mobile.
- Canva – Online image creator good for creative, pretty images like quotes.
- Font Bundles – Premium free and paid fonts.
- Creative Market – A plethora of creative assets like themes, fonts, images, icons, and more.
- The Hungry JPEG – Another graphic design asset hub like Creative Market.
- Pixel Buddha – Yet another resource for free and premium design assets.
- Graphic Burger – One more that features mainly free assets.
- Smart Mockups – Free and easy to use mockup generator with a variety of templates.
- Compressor.io – Quickly compress images.
- Compress JPEG – Quickly compress images.
- Font Fit – Quickly test different fonts and styles directly on your website.
- Font Pairing
- Free stock photos
Content
- Title Generator – Type in your topic and they’ll make it interesting for you.
- Title Capitalization – Put in your title and it will automatically capitalize it correctly.
- Grammarly – Grammar and spell check, plagiarism check, vocabulary enhancement, and more.
- Word Hippo – Find new or different words.
- Hemmingway – Write stronger articles and copy.
Learning
- Digital Marketer – Tons of marketing content in their monthly membership and access to their large Facebook community.
- Myspeed – Speed up or slow down videos, great for training and instructional videos or audio, podcasts, webinar recordings, etc.
- Pocket – Save articles for later and store all in one place.
- TheSkimm – Daily 5 minute read to your inbox to keep you up to date on all things current events.
Admin/Productivity
- Evernote.com – Easy way to take and organize notes, images, files, etc.
- Google Drive and Docs – Cloud storage and eliminates the need for Office products like word, excel, and powerpoint.
- Google Apps for Work – Use Gmail for your business accounts.
- DropBox – Cloud storage that syncs across computers and devices effortlessly.
- Divvy – Desktop window management.
- PayPal – Make and receive payments.
- Square – Great for online or point of purchase sales.
- Braintree Payments – Payment processor. No fees on first 50k.
- 1password – Password manager.
- WeTransfer – Send large files to people.
- Grasshopper* – Business phone service.
- Boomerang for Gmail – Schedule emails to come back into your inbox when you need them.
- SurveyMonkey – Surveys.
- Google Forms – Best and easiest forms to use with instant integration with google sheets.
- Slack – Internal team communication. Cuts down on unnecessary emails and saves time.
- Asana – Project and task management. Great for work and personal.
- Zendesk – Customer Service.
- Unroll.me – Mass unsubscribe from emails and add others to a daily digest email.
- Amazon Fresh – Save time, have your groceries delivered.
- Timer-Tab – Easy, free tool for timers, countdowns, and alarms in a browser tab while you work.
Social Media
- Hootsuite – Schedule your social media posts and engage in conversations.
- SproutSocial – A more robust scheduler. This is used at my agency.
- Buffer – Social scheduler that posts at the best time for your audience.
- Quuu – Hand-picked content suggestions automatically pushed to Buffer.
- Edgar – Schedule and reuse evergreen content on social.
- Jarvis – A cheaper option to reuse and schedule content on social. Also includes a content discovery search.
- Instagress – Automate Instagram actions.
- Grum – Schedule Instagram posts.
- Crowd Fire – Twitter automation and stats.
- Facebook Sharing Debugger – Preview how our links will show up on Facebook.
- Twitter Card Validator – Preview how your links will show up on Twitter.
- Hubspot Marketing Grader – Get a free and quick grade for your site and see where you can improve.
Advertising
- AdWords – Search ads, display network ads, product ads, and YouTube ads all go through AdWords.
- Google Adwords Editor – A more advanced tool that you must learn if you’re doing large amounts of ads.
- Facebook – Also where you would run Instagram ads.
- AdEspresso – A very powerful split tester for Facebook ads. This is hands down MY FAVORITE tool.
Email System
- MailChimp – This is what I currently use and is great for beginners. Integrates with a ton of other platforms.
- Infusionsoft – When you’re ready to upgrade to the next level this is a very popular and robust platform.
- OptinMonster* – Grow your list with pop-ups.
- OptiMonk – Another pop-up list building provider.
Analytics
- Google Analytics – Free tool to track all your site analytics.
- Google Tag Manager – Manage all your pixels and tracking codes from one place.
- Google UTM Builder – Use UTMs to track campaigns in Google Analytics.
- Cyfe – Create your own simple dashboard that pulls in widgets from other sources important to you.
Monetize
- ShareASale – Affiliate network.
- CJ (Commission Junction) – Affiliate network.
- Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate program.
- AdSense – Place Google’s display network banners on your site.
- Swagbucks – Earn redeemable points for shopping or completing actions.
- Kit – Allows you to put products into “kits” and attach your amazon affiliate link.
Chrome Extensions
- FB Pixel Helper – Make sure your Facebook pixels are installed correctly on pages.
- Tag Assistant – Check on your Google Tag Manager codes.
- Effin Amazing UTM Builder – Easily build UTM tracking links from your browser, and save presets.
- ColorZilla – Pick up colors from webpages.
- Video Speed Controller – Speed up or slow down any HTML5 videos.
- Multi-Forward for Gmail – Forward multiple emails at once in Gmail.
- Full Page Screen Capture – For capturing long pages all in one image.
- Googlecast – For use with your Chromecast
- Grammarly – Check your grammar on any webpage.
- WhatFont – Easily find out what a font on a page is.
- Save to Pocket – Quickly save articles and pages to your Pocket account.
- Pin It – Share on Pinterest straight from a webpage.
- 1 password – Manage your passwords.
- Swagbucks – Alerts for when you can be earning from shopping online.
Contests
- Gleam.io – Grow your email list and social followings.
- Fish Bowl Prizes – Easy to set up basic contests.
Screencasting
- Screencast-O-Matic* – Free screen recording.
- Screen Flow* – Record your screen and webcam at the same time and an editor – for Mac.
Misc
- Chromecast – Share your computer screen on a TV.
- Franklin Covey Planner – For those who still like planning on paper. I’m a big fan of this.