My Recommended Tools and Resources
As someone who has worked in the digital marketing field for about 8 years, I can confidently say that I've had extensive experience with numerous tools. This helps me to see beyond the glittering exteriors of shiny new products and launch campaigns, and instead focus on providing useful guidance to my clients, students, and readers to prevent them from wasting money while building their online businesses.
I am selective about the products I endorse, and nothing is featured on this page without me personally owning and using it. These are tools that I utilize, recommend, and wholeheartedly stand behind. Some of the links provided are affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase through them, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
I hope that with this guide, you would be able to find the exact tools and resources you can use to help you automate most of your day to day tasks for growing your business so you can focus on revenue generating actions that affect the bottom line.
Social Media
Content studio is an all-in-one social media tool that lets you create and manage all social media campaigns on one platform, track performance and derive inspiration from top performing posts in your niche. I mainly use it for scheduling Twitter threads, Youtube shorts and linked posts.
Notion is a perfect tool to manage the entirety of your social media platforms while also integrating your whole team to your workspace. You can organize posts and creatives, create brain-dump drafts and track your work seamlessly. It's also great for other things like course hosting, time management, etc
Link in Bio
Taplink is landing page for Instagram that provides you with a link for your Instagram BIO. You can optimize your mobile traffic by creating CTA elements, lead generation forms, and even redirect your clients to instantly chat with you. It has more pre-built themes and templates than other competing mini-landing pages.
Email marketing
MailerLite is one of the best email marketing and automation tools for businesses. It is pretty straightforward and offers user-friendly tools to get you growing your audience in real-time. It accommodates a relatively large amount of subscribers for the free plan compared to other platforms.
Sendy uses Amazon SES to send your emails and newsletters on a self-hosted email newsletter application. It lets you send your bulk emails at a ridiculously cheap price while maintaining its swift deliverability. If you can't get SES, you can use other SMTPs like Sendgrid, Sendpulse, Elasticmail, Mailjet, etc
Aweber lets you collect and manage email contacts, send seamless emails, build responsive landing pages, send instant push notifications, and analyze your email marketing results without necessarily requiring any tech knowledge. I tell my clients to use Aweber if they are not able to register for Mailerlite.
SEO
With Ahrefs, you get an all-in-one SEO set that helps you grow your search traffic and optimize your websites. You can crawl the web, and store tons of data, while using the accessible, user-friendly interface to make informed SEO decisions.
Ubersuggest is an SEO tool that gives you access to invaluable data like keywords monthly search volume, CPC & other competitor data. You can get insightful data from Google, YouTube, Amazon and other sites on a specific keyword of interest. It is available as a FREE chrome extension.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a valuable website crawler for your onsite SEO. It audits all common SEO issues that can super-charge your SEO strategy and results. It's also super amazing for technical SEO and should be your first point of contact when you want to audit any website
WebSite Auditor works like a search engine bot that completely crawls your entire website, while auditing every internal and external resource, including the URL, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, videos, images, and many more. This valuable SEO audit tool can perform a crawl analysis on your website on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Course Hosting
LearnDash is a WordPress learning management system (LMS) for creating and selling your online courses. If you’re a course creator who wants to monetize your online courses or a business with employee training objectives, LearnDash is an affordable solution for you.
Thrive Apprentice lets you create online courses and incorporate a full-fledged membership program for your loyal followers. With this learning platform, you will only need this one package and no additional tool. This makes it seamless to protect and sell your courses.
Graphics Design
Canva can make you beautiful and creative assets from social media images, to gifs, videos, posters, booklets, websites, multimedia presentations, and so on. Canva will help you create stunning designs, even if you're completely new to the design terrain.
Contentdrips is a simple micro content creation tool for building your personal brand. You can create bite-sized videos, design and schedule your social media posts & put together unlimited carousels. It is an automated tool for influencers, entrepreneurs and digital nomads.
Call Booking
Book Like A Boss lets you create your own booking page and start scheduling appointments - free or paid - in few minutes. It also helps you sell your digital products and services through your customized, all-in-one booking page.
Calendly is a booking and virtual availability app that can help you schedule your meetings, appointments, and events. Calendly allows you to share your calendar (with your available time and day) with your clients or students. All you have to do is to send them a link where they can pick the best time that works for both of you.
Video Editing
Filmora is a powerful video editing tool for all creators! With the tool, you can quickly create videos and films with the stunning combo of your video clips, photos, and music. It comes with an intuitive interface, and lots of drag-and-drop video effects that make it seamless to work with.
Happy Scribe works as an automatic transcription service that converts your audio to text, in an easy-to-use format. It is a reliable go-to tool for all your transcription, subtitles, and translation needs.
Camtasia lets you create interesting high-quality videos that your clients can respond to without formal training. It is my go-to tool when I want to create tutorials, product demonstrations, online lessons, and other important presentations. And it allows anyone you share it with to continue to use the resource long after your video has been shared with them.
Facebook Ads
Revealbot helps you easily scale and automate your Facebook and Instagram Ads, Google Ads, and Snapchat Ads with advanced, tailored-fit automation rules and strategies. I pretty much use it for automation and reporting
LeadsBridge is the perfect tool if you want to streamline your advertising activities by integrating your marketing stack with Facebook & Instagram Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and TikTok Ads. It supports several Facebook Ads products like Facebook Lead Ads, Facebook Custom Audiences and Facebook Offline Conversions.
Connectio Explore lets you access the most profitable Facebook interests when you want to run Ads using Facebook’s detailed targeting feature. With the quality targeting it provides, you can save tons of time spent on research and get quality returns on your advertising budget!
Screen Recorder
Droplr allows you to quickly capture screenshots, record, and add explanatory notes to your screen while sharing it with your people instantly. The interesting thing about the tool is that it saves your recordings to the cloud with a link that you can send to anyone, anywhere.
Filmora screen recorder gives you a powerful video recording software to capture your activities from your desktop screen. You can capture online meetings, product demos, webinars, and much more videos in super-high quality.
Storage
Google Drive provides a personal, secure cloud storage option to keep and share your content with other users. You can create and manage your works easily on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys, etc., online, and can access your documents from anywhere.
pCloud offers the most secure encrypted cloud storage to backup your personal files, PC or share your business documents with anyone. The most interesting thing about is pCloud uses 256-bit AES (as against Google’s 128-bit AES) at rest and TLS in transit. This means your data is more secure with pCloud.
Project Management
Nifty is that perfect remote collaboration hub for you if you want to manage all your projects, tasks, and communications in one place. Your remote work will become more easier and fun with your team with Nifty. It improves team productivity and ensures your team goals are met while on schedule.
Trello is that visual tool that helps your team manage any type of project, workflow, or track your tasks. You can add files, and checklists, or even set up automation rules. All you need is to customize it to fit your team’s structure, and you’re good to go.
Website/ Landing Page Builder
Thrive Architect is a fantastic visual page builder for WordPress websites, and is tailored for those who are conversion-focused. Thrive Architect is built with a streamlined and easy-to-use page builder for all your landing pages, sales pages, and so on.
Elementor is a popular replacement for the basic WordPress editor allowing you to create complex layouts visually, and design your website live. It has that premium flexibility and unlimited third-party integrations.
Website Hosting
Cloudways emphasizes performance and simplicity. From its simple server to seamless application launch and to server maintenance, Cloudways makes server management less stressful so you can build and grow your business.
Hostinger comes with a custom-built hPanel with advanced features, while offering a cheap web-hosting service. You can also build your website from scratch using Hostinger’s Zyro website builder.
It guarantees a 99.9% uptime guarantee with quick loading speed, dedicated IPs and servers operating on leading CloudLinux, from 10 data centers.
Namecheap offers a cheap web hosting service that comes with a free SSL certificate for the first year. However, the budget-friendly pricing is at the expense of low storage and limited customer support. If you are not a fan of complex setups, Namecheap is sufficient for you.