Here is a collection of awesome tools and resources we and other bloggers use and can highly recommend!
You have probably seen some of them being recommended somewhere else, too – that’s because they’re ‘true and trusted’.
We recommend you see and try for yourself, though. After all, it’s about your blog and what best fits your needs!
It’s a lot of trial and error in blogging or eCommerce until you find a solution that really works for you – we’ve been through a lot and think that maybe you can benefit from that 🙂
Social Media
Ok, we LOVE posting our blog posts on Pinterest. It’s such an awesome way to get traffic to even brand-new websites! Think of it like a search engine. But you don’t have to wait your average 8-10 months before ranking or seeing results.
One tool that’s exceptional for generating that sweet Pinterest traffic is Tailwind. They let you automatically loop your pins through all the boards you want them to be pinned on (own as well as group boards).
So you no longer have to sink hours of work into managing your Pinterest account. You just upload your pins once and let Tailwind get to work.
It’s pretty darn awesome and you should definitely check them out.
Hosting / Domains
A reliable hosting provider is the first thing you need if you want to start a blog or website. If you’re on WordPress (as we are), Bluehost is a name you most definitely have heard once or twice before. It’s pretty much self explanatory: good site performance, a bunch of tools for SEO, social media or e-mail marketing included. All-in-all a pretty neat package!
You get unlimited domains for unlimited websites, no website storage or traffic limits with all plans and a bunch of beautiful themes for your website to choose from. Check them out here.
Another option is HostGator. They have an average uptime of 99.99% of their servers – which is valuable especially when doing eCommerce! More website uptime equals more money. Simple 😉
Their prices also start pretty low which also is important! If you’re starting out, every buck is adding up more quickly than you will expect. Save wherever you can! Check them out over here.
Blogging Platform
WordPress is the way to go, honestly. There is a lot of competition, though and building your own website or blog has honestly never been easier than it is today. But the amount of creative freedom WordPress offers you, is outstanding.
Sure, it takes some getting used to but it is well worth the time investment to learn WordPress. It’s the most widely used platform to build websites with and for good reason.
You could choose some easy out-of-the-box solution and end up with a beautiful website, too. But in the long run, such projects tend to outgrow the possibilities these easier platforms can offer. Remember, your blog isn’t going to stay small forever and moving from platform to platform is not only a hassle but may hurt SEO in a worst case scenario.
Apart from that, you are also able to easily integrate a web store into your blog with WordPress.
E-Commerce
We actually started our online journey with eCommerce. Back then we did a lot of research into finding the best platform to run an online store. It’s just as confusing as trying to find a decent blogging platform!
Now if you’re serious about starting an online store, there is two options for beginners: Shopify and WooCommerce. There also are more premium solutions like Magento, but considering the prices they charge it’s not worth thinking about using them until your store does high six figures.
If you already have a WordPress based website and are just looking for ways to monetize it by integrating a webstore into it – you should definitely go with WooCommerce. It’s more or less plug-and-play for WordPress sites and the most widely used eCommerce platform in the world. And just as with WordPress, that’s a good thing. It means that there is a ton of themes and support readily available compared to more ‘niche’ solutions. You can expect things to just run smoother
E-Mail Lists
One of the most important assets you as a website owner have, is an e-mail list. It doesn’t matter what kind of website you run because having a good e-mail list is one of many ways to actually monetize your site! You can market anything with it.
It’s the same kind of numbers’ game as with PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns – if you have a list of 10,000 e-mails collected and send out a newsletter, maybe 10% of your audience will open it. That’s 1,000!
Now if you send them good and convincing content, let’s say that another 10% of them actually go and check out the offer. That’s 100 people.
And assuming a conversion rate of about 2%, you just got 2 sales!
Depending on what you sell or market and depending on the size of your e-mail list as well as your marketing skills, you could make several 1,000s of dollars with each campaign! See how amazing e-mail marketing is, yet?
We took months to perfect e-mail campaigns for our webstore. Cart abandonment campaigns, ‘simple’ welcome mails or sporadic check-ins… it’s a science! But well worth it.
When we were done, we were generating about 1,500 to 2,000 with each newsletter and thousands of dollars with the abandoned cart e-mail campaigns!
And that’s just a webstore. With a good e-mail list, you can market anything. Affiliate products, ebooks, your own online classes… get creative 🙂
We can really recommend ConvertKit for that! You can try it for free, too, so no real risks here. They let you customize and embed forms on your website and make growing as well as monetizing an e-mail list super easy.
You can set up automated campaigns (abandoned cart, etc. – this is where the magic happens) and increase conversions dramatically that way. It might take some tinkering, to make an automated campaign really work, but it’s the same with PPC campaigns and anything else online and it’s solely dependent on your skills as a marketer.
BUT: you already have acquired the e-mail addresses. So there aren’t costs involved like with pay-per-click campaigns (GoogleAds, etc.) – you don’t lose money if it doesn’t work 🙂
Anyways, you should definitely check them out here.
SEO
We do all SEO with TheHOTH. They are seriously awesome and we are using their services for four of our websites now.
What do they do? Basically everything you could ever need if you run a website and need a helping hand. They provide everything from classic on- and off-page SEO to press releases, etc. You need something for your website? They do it.
And best of all: their quality of work is impeccable. And that saves a lot of time that you can use to concentrate on your business.
After ordering the Hoth X SEO package for example, you get kind of an onboarding call where you can tell your account manager exactly, what your website is about and what you want to accomplish. Then you will receive a detailed plan of what they’ll do to accomplish your goals and off you go – it’s basically fire and forget.
Organic traffic to our web store grew by about 200% within three months since we started working with them (we ordered the Hoth X full SEO package).
They also offer a bunch of super useful tools for free that you can access from your dashboard. Online logo maker, website rank tracker – anything you could wish for!
Of course, this sounds like used-car salesman talk – but seriously, these guys rock hard 🙂
You can check them out here.
Design / Freelance Work
Fiverr. Who doesn’t know them 😀
Anything you need to be done, you can find on there! Literally anything.
We love Fiverr because it’s easy to find good freelance workers on there. By reading comments and filtering by stars, it’s easy to weed out the not-so-good services and find the ones that get stuff done in a way you want them to.
Need a website built? Fiverr. Need a logo designed? Fiverr. Looking for GoogleAds specialists? Yes, Fiverr. From ghostwriting to spokespersons, you will find anything you might ever need online, there. And for good prices, also! It’s a lot like Amazon, only for online services.
We can highly recommend Fiverr as a whole. Just keep your eyes open and try to find quality suppliers. Overall the service they provide is awesome and we saved A LOT of work and have a whole bunch of freelancers that we regularly work with!
Definitely check them out!
One more thing: some of the links below can be affiliate links. See the affiliate disclaimer here.
While we are always careful to only recommend products or services we use and can fully recommend, we want to be open and transparent about our relationship with any companies we do recommend.