SKIP INTRO and Jump to Toolkit
What do you know about Digital Marketing?
Unless you…
Do the job everyday, have for years, keep up with the trades, upgrade your skills to reflect developments in technology & the digital marketing landscape and have had a consistent positive ROI directly tied to your efforts…
Then you probably need to go over a few things.
A renewal of basic principals and recap of the best digital marketing tools is never a bad idea.
Visit our Articles section to see what we’re exploring.
No one person can know everything but you can (and arguably should) move the needle of knowledge forward from where it is now.
Many self taught digital marketers learned through experience and trial & error, which provides a wealth of knowledge but unfortunately it is easy to miss some things along the way – sort of like a finding a new keyboard shortcut on a program you used every day for years.
Others come from a theoretical or academic background. Unfortunately, the modern higher learning institutions are usually a little behind the times when it comes to technology. However, more and more schools are developing digital marketing related programs, which is great but they don’t necessarily tell you the latest piece of MarTech or Python script that came out last month that will automate a function and save you money and time.
For most people who are passionate about digital marketing, it’s Google searches, mailing lists, forums, Facebook Groups, YouTube videos, the occasional course offered through Udemy, Lynda, one of the educational tutorials companies use (i.e. Google Academy, SEM Rush Academy). The convenience of courses is that they are structured in a format that is helpful to learn, which is useful for those who don’t have the time to do a deep dive.
Then there are the pros. People who cut their teeth at high level agencies working with big clients and big budgets, or in-house at well run and well funded marketing departments… Or did it themselves. They live and breathe what they do every day. There is no substitute for experience and anyone coming from this background understands the vital importance of keeping current.
Wondering why your organic traffic dropped from 70,000 monthly uniques to 10,000?
Each year, Google makes hundreds of changes to search. In 2018, they reported an incredible 3,234 updates — an average of almost 9 per day, and more than 8 times the number of updates in 2009. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a major algorithmic update (such as Panda and Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways.
For search marketers, knowing when major Google updates happened can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic and ultimately improve search engine optimization.
– MOZ
First Principles of Digital Marketing
- Know your basics and best practices.
- Keep current with tools and technology.
- Assume you have gaps in your knowledge.
- Assume that someone else is doing it better.
- Test everything. Always!
Developing Your Model of Digital Marketing Best Practices & Tool Kit
Why is it important to develop your own model of process and best practices?
Because it makes your life easier and you have a system designed for you! No single tool kit or approach is going to be the best for everyone.
Case in point with video editing. I like Premiere Pro but my buddy likes Final Cut. Both are good tools that do essentially the same thing. Sure there are some differences, but the best tool is the one that works for you.
Your business may not require the same tool kit as someone else’s. The type of organization, goals, resources (budget, man power, expertise) will determine which tools work best for you.
A manual is a checklist of detailed steps that need to be taken at every point of the project over the schedule of events. Call this the project architecture. Again, something unique for different businesses.
If the project is just you or you are managing a large team, the process should be able to scale flawlessly because someone just needs to follow the best practices model you developed.
You need to prepare for change because continued planned growth is always going to involve change. While the core functions of your marketing strategy may not change when you reach a milestone, the increased availability of resources should necessitate re-investment to expand your digital presence and ROI. Every company can always be doing more. So you need to find out what your best next step is.
Change management can be difficult. For many companies it is:
We see potential but need to hire more people and do more things to get there but we lack the resources or plan to do so.
This issue is incredibly common and one of the reasons most companies end up outsourcing their marketing. However, most agencies charge an arm and a leg and rarely fully understand your brand. They do the the bare minimum possible and just want to keep you on their retainer.
Not to say they don’t produce results but when we have audited the marketing plans some large agencies send to their clients we can’t believe how much lack of detail and accountability there is. In short, no one is going to care as much about the success of your business as you will.
It is one of the reasons why we believe that companies should develop GOOD in house practices. One expert Marketing Director and one project manager who work with a team of Agencies, Contractors, VAs and Freelancers could easily out perform 90% of agencies at a fraction of the price. We’ve seen case studies of companies with 500+ employees doing over $100 million a year in revenue with a marketing department of 2-3 people and a team of VAs and Freelancers – NOT agencies.
Why does this work? Good tools and good processes.
This allows you to work most efficiently with your time. The better the process manual, the easier it is to scale and outsource.
Finding the right tools and learning how to use them makes life a lot easier.
This compendium of resources is a small index of what we use and recommend to digital marketers of varying skill levels – again, the right tool for the right job/person.
This is by no means a complete list of digital marketing resources or tools – just the ones we like at the moment.
For beginners it can seem overwhelming selecting what to use, for veterans this list may seem incomplete – it will never be complete.
If you have a suggestion or we are missing something, let us know.
This list was developed because we got tired of seeing our friends, business owners and other digital marketers struggle to find the right path forward.
We hope you find at least one resource here that helps you move the needle. All the best from the GSC team.
This list is updated regularly.
Full disclaimer; some links are affiliate. All affiliate links are only to products/services we recommend, use ourselves and marked by a “+”
- SEO Tools
- Keyword Research
- Plug-Ins & Extensions
- Chrome Extensions for Digital Marketing
- WordPress Plug-Ins for Digital Marketing
- WordPress Themes
- Other
- Shopify
- Affiliate
- Content Marketing
- E-Mail Marketing
- Social Media Management
- Social Media Hacks
- Influencer Marketing
- Pay Per Click – Digital Advertising
- Business and Sales Tools
- Hosting + Domains
- Sales Funnels
- Learning Resources
- Project Management Tools
- Graphics and Video Editing
- Utilities
- Cloud Storage and File Transfer
- Content Creators, Writers
- Freelancers and Virtual Assistants
- Experts & Organizations
- Conferences
- Currently Reviewing
- Tutorial
SEO Tools
Google’s Page Speed Insights Test – Did you know that for every second it takes your site to load, conversions drop by 7%!
Pingdom Website Speed Test – Another speed test
GTmetrix – Yet another speed test
Ahrefs – Audit your website, explore competitors, research keywords & backlinks. Tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche Ahrefs helps you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them.
Majestic – Link intelligence tools for SEO and Internet PR and Marketing
SEM Rush – Offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research.
MOZ – Backed by the largest community of SEOs on the planet, Moz builds tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy
SerpCloud – SerpCloud. The best way to track your website’s rankings in Google,Yahoo and Bing Search Engines.We give you simple, powerful web based seo tool that make tracking search engine rankings fast and easy. Monitor daily changes, measure keyword performance, and improve rankings with data you get.Also you can track your website Social and SEO metrics Data and keep track of it.
Screaming Frog – The industry leading website crawler for Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu, trusted by thousands of SEOs and agencies worldwide for technical SEO audits.
BrightLocal – Local SEO Reporting, Citation Building and Reputation Management
Sitebulb – A powerful website crawler SEO tool that delivers instantly actionable insights and intuitive data visualizations
SEO Power Suite – Rank Tracker Automatic rank tracking & keyword research Rankings in 300+ search engines 17 keyword research tools Scheduled hands-free tasks Competitors’ rankings Vertical search tracking, geo-targeted results Ranking reports. SEO SpyGlass In-depth backlink research & anti-penalty link audit Link data for the Web’s largest index Key link stats at a glance 50+ quality metrics Competitors’ link strategy Side-by-side sites’ comparison Anti-penalty link audit WebSite Auditor Full website audit & content optimization Detailed crawl stats Broken links & 404 pages Robots.txt & XML Sitemap 40+ key SEO factors Social signals and traffic Page content optimization Site audit reports LinkAssistant Effective link outreach & link management Convenient link management On-the-fly link verification New link opportunities found Email correspondence with webmasters Progress tracking Link building reports.
Buzzstream – Manage outreach.
Pitchbox – Manage outreach.
SE Ranking – Cloud based SEO
SerpStat – Cloud based SEO
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Planner – The classic.
Long Tail Pro – Excellent Keyword research tool.
WordTracker – Need more than a keyword research tool? How about a market research tool. Take competitors’ keywords, in-depth PPC and SEO insights, data from Google and our own proprietary search technology… All you need to do is start searching.
MerchantWords – Uncover product opportunities, spy on your competition, create successful marketing campaigns, and grow your sales and business with our tools and services.
Sonar – Find the most profitable keywords in over 75 million real Amazon search terms. Discover competitor’s keywords with free reverse ASIN lookup
Plug-Ins & Extensions
Chrome Extensions for Digital Marketing
Amazon Publisher Studio Extension – The Amazon Publisher Studio Extension Beta for Chrome helps Amazon associates to add links to products on Amazon directly from your Blog or content management systems (CMS), without the need to visit Associates Central to get links. One can also share affiliate links on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
AdWords & Google Ads API Web Navi – This extension shows the related pages of AdWords API / Google Ads API developer website based on your currently browsed web page of the new Google Ads experience.
Facebook Pixel Helper – The Facebook Pixel Helper is a troubleshooting tool that helps you validate your pixel implementation.
Keywords Everywhere – Keyword Tool – Keyword search volume for 15+ websites like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, Majestic, YouTube, Amazon & more The Keywords Everywhere extension is an SEO keyword research tool that shows you useful google keyword search volume and cost per click data on multiple websites. This tool saves you the hassle of copying data from various websites and using the google adwords keyword planner to see relevant search volume and cpc data.
Lighthouse – Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps. When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs a barrage of tests against the page, and then generates a report on how well the page did. From here you can use the failing tests as indicators on what you can do to improve your app.
Majestic Backlink Analyzer – Majestic backlink analysis straight into your browser. Get instant link counts and see who is linking to the page you are browsing without having to go to a separate link analysis tool. FREE Backlink count data with much more detail for Majestic.com account holders.
MultiPages – Invite Post Likers to like page – Facebook scans selected posts in Real Time all day and invites everyone who like posts as soon as possible. MultiPage support added.
MozBar – The all-in-one SEO toolbar for research on the go. MozBar gives you instant metrics while viewing any page or SERP. -Create custom searches by engine, country, region, or city. -Quickly assess the Page Authority and Domain Authority of any site or page. -Access and compare link metrics across pages while viewing any SERP. -Find and highlight keywords on a page and differentiate links by type: Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal. -Expose page elements, general attributes, markup, and HTTP status. -Export your search engine results page (SERP) analysis details to a CSV file.
Oberlo – Aliexpress.com Product Importer – Import and sync products from AliExpress to your Shopify store
Pinterest Tag Helper – A tool to help you build, troubleshoot and test your Pinterest Tags.
Tailwind Publisher – Easily schedule and publish content to Pinterest and Instagram. Tailwind Publisher makes scheduling content to Pinterest and Instagram so easy it’s practically a superpower.
SEOquake – SEOquake is a free plugin that provides you with key SEO metrics, along with other useful tools such as SEO Audit and many others SEOquake allows you to: – Review all major metrics in a heartbeat – Get a thorough analysis of SERPs and export the results in CSV format – Estimate keyword difficulty instantly – Set parameters for a search query – Run a complete SEO audit of a webpage, including a check for mobile compatibility – Check your social statistics for Facebook and Google+ – Use a wide range of default parameters or create a custom set – Get a full report for internal/external links – Determine a keyword’s density and configure a stop-word list – Compare URLs/domains
SEO Analysis & Website Review by WooRank – Instant SEO analysis and website reviews for SEO, mobile, usability and social media. The freshest data when and where you want it. SEO Analysis and Website Review by WooRank is a free Chrome extension that instantly provides a deep review of a domain’s on and off-site site data to give a complete picture of a website’s optimization. The SEO Analysis and Website Review extension will analyze the website you’re currently visiting in your browser and generate a clear, actionable report to highlight any issues impacting the reviewed site’s accessibility, readability, usability and findability.
SimilarWeb – Traffic Rank & Website Analysis – See website traffic and key metrics for any website, including engagement rate, traffic ranking, keyword ranking and traffic source. The SimilarWeb Browser Extension allows you to gain insights into any website’s statistics and strategy as you’re browsing, with the click of a button. The extension allows you to surf sites and find out all the information you need, all in one place. With a single click, you can get in-depth traffic and engagement statistics for any website. Want to see how popular a site is? What are the main traffic sources? The SimilarWeb browser extension provides users with all this information and much, much more.
Sprout Social – Sprout Social powers social communication with world-class engagement, publishing, analytics and team collaboration tools. Sprout Social is a social media management platform for businesses. Sprout powers smart social communication for leading brands around the world including Anthropologie, GrubHub, Hyatt, Mailchimp, Spotify, and Zipcar. A powerful platform for social business available via web browser, iOS and Android apps, Sprout enables brands to more effectively communicate on social channels, collaborate across teams and provide an exceptional customer experience. Sprout’s intuitive platform was designed with the user in mind, making it easy for anyone to publish content, monitor their social presence, engage with their audience and analyze social media efforts across all connected profiles. Teams can be up and running in minutes—Sprout does not require up-front investment, has flexible contract terms and there is little-to-no implementation needed. Sprout is a Twitter Certified Product, Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and Google+ Pages API Partner, and also integrates with Instagram, LinkedIn, Zendesk, UserVoice and Salesforce.
vidIQ Vision for YouTube – Uncover the secrets to success behind your favorite YouTube videos. Discover what makes a video go viral and optimize your videos to get more views With metrics that go beyond YouTube Analytics, vidIQ Vision delivers a comprehensive optimization report card for any YouTube video – right on your browser
Google Tag Assistant – Tag Assistant helps to troubleshoot installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more. Tag Assistant helps you verify that you have installed various Google tags correctly on your page. Just navigate to any page and Tag Assistant will tell you which tags are present, report any errors we find and suggest improvements that can be made to your implementation. Most Google tags are checked including Google Analytics, Adwords Conversion Tracking, Google Tag Manager and more. Use Google Tag Assistant Recording to record a typical user flow to and through your website and instantly validate, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues with your Google Analytics implementation.
WhatRuns – Discover what runs a website. Frameworks, Analytics Tools, WordPress Plugins, Fonts – you name it. WhatRuns extension is one click away for you to find technologies used on any website you visit. From Developer Tools and Ad Networks to WordPress Plugins and Themes, we detect even the new and upcoming tools and services.
TweetDeck – TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. Originally an independent app, TweetDeck was subsequently acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into Twitter’s interface.
Scraper – Scraper gets data out of web pages and into spreadsheets. Scraper is a very simple (but limited) data mining extension for facilitating online research when you need to get data into spreadsheet form quickly. It is intended as an easy-to-use tool for intermediate to advanced users who are comfortable with XPath.
WordPress Plug-Ins for Digital Marketing
Ohhh so many WordPress Plug-Ins to chose from. Too many actually. Here’s some of what we use on different sites.
Elementor – The most advanced frontend drag & drop page builder. Create high-end, pixel perfect websites at record speeds. Any theme, any page, any design.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. See how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back.
Hummingbird – Everything you need to get your site running super fast. Hummingbird zips through your site finding new ways to make it load faster, from file compression and minification to browser caching – because when it comes to pagespeed, every millisecond counts.
Jetpack – Security, performance, and site management tools for basics or those who use woocommerce mobile app.
Smush – User’s choice, award-winning, and benchmark tested – The best image optimizer plugin for WordPress. Reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO using the free free WPMU DEV WordPress Smush API.
Stripe – Payment processor
TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE, the visual editor in WordPress.
WooCommerce + An eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
Wordfence Security – Anti-virus, Firewall and Malware Scan
Yoast SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.
WordPress Themes
OptimizePress – Create Landing Pages & Sales Pages that Increase Leads & Sales On Your Website Create Conversion-Optimized Landing Pages, Sales Pages, Blogs & Membership Sites
ThriveThemes – Conversion Focused WordPress Themes & Plugins Themes & plugins, built from the ground up to make your entire website convert more of your visitors into subscribers, customers & clients!
Doko – Material Design WordPress Corporate Theme – Doko Pro Doko Pro is a modern WordPress Corporate Theme brought to you with the incorporation of a new concept known as Material Design. It is a clean and simple theme that is easy to use, has powerful features and includes some greatly appealing layouts. The interface, design, and layouts of this…
Salient – Good theme for agencies.
Other
Zapier – Useful software integration tool that connects different platforms together.
Shopify (update soon)
Oberlo – Classic Dropshipping CRM to find, manage and integrate products via AliExpress
Shopsheriff – Shop Sheriff’s tailor-made for e-commerce applications help you reach your customers where it matters most – on a mobile device.
Affiliate
Amazon Associates – The standard 101 of Affiliate marketing. Make money when people click on your amazon links. Easy to use and a good way to get your feet wet into the affiliate world.
OfferVault – Leading affiliate offer marketplace. At the time of writing, 52,173 offers. Search by country, network, category, offer type (PPS, RevShare, etc).
CrakRevenue + One of the originals, the largest, longest running, most reputable & the most trusted CPA network in the industry. 1000+ products/offers and great interface.
Warrior+Plus – Best-in-class sales automation, affiliate network, and education for digital business owners and online marketers
ClickBank – An internet retailer of top quality lifestyle products allowing manufacturers to sell their products & digital marketers to promote them
Commission Junction – The world’s largest and most established affiliate marketing network
JVZoo – Instant Affiliate Program With 800,000+ Active Affiliates
Share A Sale – Affiliate Marketing Network
Content Marketing
CopyScape – Articles that you purchase may have been copied or stolen from other sites. Publishing them on your site can damage your reputation and ruin your search engine rankings. Protect yourself by verifying all new content with Copyscape Premium, the web’s leading solution for originality checking. With the click of a button, anyone in the world can copy your content and republish it on their site, stealing your visitors and your revenue. Copysentry scans the web daily for copies of your content, emailing you whenever new copies are found.
CopyPro – CopyPro Express is proprietary software that takes the world’s top converting sales copy and converts it into simple templates that you can access near instantly
Article Forge + Automatically Generate High Quality SEO Content. Article Forge uses incredibly sophisticated deep understanding algorithms to automatically write articles in the same way that a human does. These deep understanding algorithms allow Article Forge to research ANY topic, exactly like a human does. Article Forge reads millions of articles, learning everything it needs to know so that it can write about any topic in its own words.
AI Writer – Create an article with one click
WordAi – Automatically create human quality content with WordAi WordAi uses artificial intelligence to understand text and is able to automatically rewrite your article with the same readability as a human writer! Sign up now and get unlimited human quality content at your fingertips!
BuzzSumo – Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor Find the key influencers to promote your content
Grammarly – Locates & corrects mistakes of your writing.
Grammarly Plagiarism Checker – Why use copyscape when you can use this free tool?
Google Trends – See what’s trending to content inspiration
E-Mail Marketing
MailChimp – Email marketing, ads, landing pages, and CRM tools to grow your business on your terms.
Constant Contact – With Constant Contact, you can create effective email marketing and other online marketing campaigns to meet your business goals.
Aweber – Looking for affordable and easy to use email marketing and autoresponder tools
SendBlaster – SendBlaster is the best bulk email software for managing your mailing list.
Social Media Management
SproutSocial + Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and a whole lot more. $99.00/user/month with up to 50 connected social profiles (larger plans available).
Hootsuite – Hootsuite is a social media management platform
Tailwind – Smarter Visual Marketing Your end-to-end solution for winning on Pinterest and Instagram Discover Content, Schedule Posts, Monitor Conversations, Amplify Reach, and Analyze Results. All with One Tool.
Social Media Hacks
Tweet Attacks Pro – Designed to run thousands of twitter accounts at the same time 24/7 to auto-follow, unfollow, follow back, tweet, retweet, reply, favorite, delete tweet, unretweet, unfavorite, add to list and send messages to your new followers.
Video Marketing Blaster – Keyword Research for Video Marketing
Influtool – Scan your Instagram profile and remove existing Banned Hashtags
hashtagify – Monitor your performance, exploit the best hashtag suggestions and identify Twitter influencers. All in one place.
Hashtag Expert for IG iOS – Hashtag Generator for Likes #s
All#ashtag – Hashtags for Twitter, IG
SeekMetrics – Instagram & Twitter Hashtag Generator Get thousands of Hashtag suggestions for any topic or keyword
IQHashtag – PAID spot your fake and mass followers and remove them to increase your profile’s engagement – recognize those who interact with your profile most often – search for the best hashtags that fit your profile and posts to attract more followers and likes – avoid shadowban – find banned hashtags that you use, remove them to make your profile and posts visible again.
Influencer Marketing
Hypr – Discover and engage the right influencers from our evolving database of 12 million. Easily activate and manage influencers, then measure performance and ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns in real time.
Pay Per Click – Digital Advertising
Google Ads – Needs no introduction..
AdPlexity – Spy on your competitors, see what campaigns are working.
Taboola – In Feed and Native Ad Platform
Outbrain – Native ad platform
SpyFu – Download Your Competitors’ Most Profitable Keywords and Ads For Paid and Organic Search
Rakuten Marketing – For Publishers
Reddit Advertising – Reddit offers highly targeted advertising opportunities from engaged audiences.
Adspresso – One platform for Facebook, Google, IG ads.
Business and Sales Tools
JV Brokers – Product Launch Management, Marketing Consulting, Sales Funnel Optimization, Direct Response Copywriting, Media Buying and Campaign Management services, and Mentoring Programs in these areas.
HubSpot – HubSpot offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software — plus the methodology, resources, and support
EmpireFlippers – Buy & Sell Quality Online Businesses
LegalZoom – Templates and legal help
Merch Informer – Discover Profitable Merch Niches Get the data you need to build your Merch business, sell successful products, and work on your own terms.
JumpSend – JumpSend has two features. One is a launch platform for distributing coupons and driving sales to your Amazon listing. The other is an email autoresponder, a tool that integrates with Amazon Seller Central, to automate your Amazon emails.
Viral Launch – Amazon PPC tool – Kinetic – gives you research, strategy, automation, and analytics
Fame Bit – Find Influencers to work with.
Albert AI – Albert plugs into your existing marketing tech stack, so you still have access to your accounts, ads, search, social, etc. You see everything. Albert leverages existing business logic you already have in platforms, and maps tracking and attribution to your source of truth.
Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand
Lucky Orange – Deeper analytics, hot spots and conversion optimization.
Live Recover – Text recover shopping cart abandonment.
Capterra – Software Reviews. Read before you buy.
Hosting + Domains
HostDime + Excellent support and services. HostDime offers an array of cloud products from managed servers to colocation for both entry and enterprise level operations.
WPX Hosting – Lighting fast host for WordPress. 5 Websites 10GB Storage 100GB Bandwidth WPX Cloud CDN – $20/month
M3 – 30 GB Disk – 2 GB RAM – 2 CPU – 5 TB Transfer – $20 Per Month
CloudBoss – Up to 100 HTML sites on Rackspace: $49.99 Monthly
SmartSEO Hosting – 8 Different A Class IPs. 130+ Different B Class IPs. 600+ Different C Class IPs. 120+ Different Datacenters from All Around the World. Single WHM/cPanel Panel.
BlueHost – Free Domain Name for 1st Year FREE SSL Certificate Included 1-Click WordPress Install 24/7 Support Starting at $7.99 / month
SEOHost – Dedicated IP & C Class Hosting – 5 C Class IPs – 10 GB – 100 GB $15.79/month
DomCop – Buy Expired Domains With Great Backlinks We’ve got bucket loads of metrics to help you find the really good ones in minutes!
ExpiredDomains – Great filters and customization to find the domains you’re looking for.
Uniregistry – Cheap domains
DynaDot – Cheap Domains
GoDaddy – 101 for domains
SSLs – For all your SSL needs
Sales Funnels
Geru – Funnel-Planning, Profit-Prediction & Simulation Tool. Basic funnel planning tool. Good for mocking up presentations to clients or figuring out your funnels from scratch. Downside is basic version is $37/month. Personally, we would rather use Sketch for architecture mapping of funnels but its more labor intense and we have our own funnel formula we use, so it’s not something that needs updating a lot.
Funnelytics – Funnel Mapping.
LeadPages – $25 / month
Fast Pages – The Fast Page Builder that Converts at Lightning Speed. $147 / one time payment
Unbounce – Comprehensive landing page builder
OptinMonster – Comprehensive conversion optimization toolkit
ClickFunnels + I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard of them because they market like crazy. $97/month is steep but it’s a turn key funnel system that just works. Yes this is an affiliate link and no we won’t try to sell you on it, but we have tested it on multiple sites and the easy of implementation on a One Product Shop (OPS) had us up and running in less than an hour. It’s dummy proof and they are always updating the features. Yes, there is sort of a drink the Kool-Aid over the top branding associated with this company which you need to get past (in addition to the price) but the product itself is solid.
Learning Resources
Facebook Blueprint – Official Facebook Ads Training
Code Academy – Learn to code
Udemy – Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 100000 courses and 24 million students.
Lynda – Learn software, creative, and business skills to achieve your personal and professional goals.
Skillshop – For Google related products
Google Academy – Analytics, Tag Manager
SEM Rush Academy – SEO Skills
Project Management Tools
See our article on more detailed comparison of project management tools. There are WAY more tools than these (Asana, BaseCamp, etc) but we recommend the following.
Freedcamp – Free to small monthly fee. Great for organizing larger projects and teams with VAs and Freelancers. Good permission settings and APIs. Very helpful if you run multiple websites, personal projects, to-do lists, etc.
AirTable – Free to small monthly fee. How we organize content for blogs and social media. It’s like if Excel and a Project Management software had a baby.
Apple Notes and Stickies – Yup. We can’t seem to get away from this basic thing. Sure some people like OneNote, Evernote Dynalist or Workflowy one of the other hundred note apps. Our problem is they are all too complicated for what they need to be. Most note apps are starting to go more into project management territory and that’s where they fall off IMO, too many features, too clunky. Apple notes allows you to create different folders, sub folders, share notes between users and integrates across all devices. Stuck at the airport with a good idea? Put on your headphones, go for a walk and make a dictation into a new note, then when you turn on your computer it’s there. We just like it.
Tomato One – While not strictly project management. The Pomodoro tool is an excellent and simple way to keep focused on task and get things done and as you know we care a LOT about Time Management.
Graphics and Video Editing
Adobe Premiere Pro – Used for professional video editing.
Adobe After Effects – video special effects, titles, intros, etc. Learning curve: moderate.
EasyVSL – Create VSL (Video Sales Landers) quickly without any technical knowledge. Works well and only $67.
Celtx Shots – Visualize your story and create multi-sequence storyboards, camera blocking, and lighting setups on the fly with Celtx Shots. Features: -Create and edit multi-sequence, multi-shot storyboards. … -View animatics with the built-in Storyboard Player. -Backed up to and synchronized with your online Celtx Studio.
Lumen 5 – Easy video editor with stock footage for social posts. Basic plan is $19month and includes: “Unlimited access to 15 million photos and videos from the standard library”.
Inforgraphia – Infographic Stock Library. $69 (one time) for almost 1000 infographics and 3,000 vector icons.
SlideQuest – $79 for lifetime access to 3210+ slides.
Storyblocks – Offering stock images, audio and video
Freeimages – Explore over 300,000 free stock photos and royalty free images
Promo – Promo.com has everything you need in an online video maker. High-quality professional video clips, royalty-free music, customizable video templates, and more.
Canva – Canva is a simplified graphic-design tool website
Clipman – Easy video ads creator. Select a template to match your product, Upload your images and choose your backing audio, Add your titles, prices, calls to action, Render your new video, Publish your new ad to Facebook or share to social media.
Zubtitle – Easy subtitle creator
Doodly – The World’s Most Powerful, Yet Simple-To-Use Doodle Video Creator Create Whiteboard, Blackboard, or the all-new Glassboard videos in minutes!
Toonly – The Simplest Drag and Drop Explainer Video Creator
Utilities
AppSumo – AppSumo promotes great products to help you in your career and life. You’re never paying full price for software again.
Meltwater – Meltwater is a media intelligence company who provides media monitoring and social media monitoring to help companies grow and build brand
Anonymizer – On-demand IP Rotation for Faster Web Scraping. Ion disperses enterprise web scraping activity over our vast network of anonymous rotating IP addresses, allowing you to increase your data collection speed, avoid detection by targeted sites, and perform unrestricted deep-drill scraping. Ion is not only faster and safer, but is more reliable than other comparable solutions. Our high-speed, low latency IPs accelerate your data collection, with far more accurate and reliable results.
Reverse IP Look Up – Find the IP for websites
TradeMarkia – Search Millions of Filed Trademarks for Free
Handbrake – HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
TeamViewer – TeamViewer is a proprietary software application for remote control, desktop sharing, online meetings, web conferencing and file transfer between computers.
Sketch – Sketch is a design toolkit built to help you create your best work — from your earliest ideas, through to final artwork.
Amphetamine – Keep your Mac from falling asleep
Private Internet Access – Log free VPN
Zoom Meeting – Enterprise level video conferencing
Skype – free video chat
Best Macros – windows based web automation software
Password Generator – Useful tool for generating strong passes
Cloud Storage and File Transfer
- Dropbox – Trusted by millions. It just works.
- pCloud
- Microsoft’s OneDrive
- WeTransfer
Content Creators, Writers
- Freelance Writing Gigs
- Contena
- Listiller
- WriteJobs
- ContentGather
- TextBroker
- Constant Content
- Medium
- CopyPro
Freelancers and Virtual Assistants
Experts & Organizations
Please visit our Twitter’s following list to see who we like to learn from.
Matthew Woodward – Expert SEO Blogger
RankXL – Great SEO resources
Warrior Forum – The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace
Blackhat World – Shortcuts for beginners and pros
STM Forum – STM Forum is your gateway to affiliate marketing. Whether you are experienced and need a networking hub, or want to launch your first campaign online, we have something for you.
No Hat Digital – Testing new monetization methods is the #1 way to improve ROI on my website investments and it applies to every niche.
Webmaster World – Tools, resources, forum
Search Engine Land – News On Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Podcast – Podcasting help and tools.
Conferences
Currently Reviewing
These are platforms we cannot endorse but are checking out. Let us know if you have any experience with them.
Improvado – Marketing analytics data integration.
Madgicx – Facebook Ads automation.
Conversio – Chatbot
