Resources

I’ve spent a lifetime doing what I do. As I go about my daily work, I  stumble across tons of tools that small businesses can use since this list of digital marketing resources is always growing, please feel to use the links below to jump to the exact section that’s probably of interest to you.

Note: Please note that some of these links are affiliate or partner links. I make a small commission if you decide to opt for these but you won’t be paying extra. In fact, in some cases, you’ll save some money or get bonuses for using my affiliate link.

Now, not all tools are built for everyone. You got to pick, and then make decisions.

Of the entire lot, these are the best ever. Here’s the big list of digital marketing resources:

Domain Name Registrars (It’s where your digital journey begins start)

Managed WordPress Hosting

Website Hosting (Regular)

Search Optimization & Tools for SEM

Domain Name Registrars

Hover: They are really good at what they do. No Upselling. No nonsense (with “email” being the only other product they do sell. Excellent customer service (if you ever need it). They also do unbelievably easy transfers if you ever want to move one or several domains.

Namecheap: Namecheap has been around for several years and they have several other products including Easy WordPress, WordPress Hosting, shared hosting, and SSL certificates.

Nuage: A new way to buy and manage domains. Try them out.

Managed WordPress Hosting

There are only three best choices in the entire industry (don’t bother checking, I did).

Kinsta

Migrate your hosting to Kinsta and you’ll actually (no really) see a mind-boggling improvement in speed. Plus, there’s something to be said about Kinsta’s dashboard, built-in tools for managing your hosting, and so much more.

Watch this video to get a glimpse:

Flywheel

Flywheel provides the fastest hosting in the world currently. You can migrate for free and they have a “tiny” plan (which is one of the few differences between this one and WPEngine). They provide SSL certificates for free and have options for CDN. Malware cleanup and protection, fast hosting, a simple Interface to manage your websites, a staging area for experimenting with your websites, and more.

WPEngine

WPEngine is the next best managed WordPress hosting solution and they a notch slower than Flywheel (but speed also depends on the plan you pick and the kind of content on your site).

Both of these are fast, they have awesome customer support, and they migrate your website for free. Flywheel does a manual migration and WPEngine has an automated tool to help you.

Pressidium Enterprise-Grade Hosting is a relatively new entrant and is priced just like the others. Makes for a good alternative for your managed WordPress hosting.

Read my Pressidium review here.

Regular Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Servers

NameCheap Hosting

Great customer service and excellent interface to manage your hosting and/or domains from. It’s not a “Godaddy” if you know what I mean? Namecheap is reliable, dependable, and it has everything you need when you are just getting started.

Hostinger 

Hostinger gives you the fastest web hosting possible for the lowest possible budget. It’s so inexpensive that you could just buy hosting for the heck of it, run side gigs, experiment with new blogs, or just play.

But don’t let the low price make you think any less. They have amazing support, high quality servers, and the latest technology to back your website up.

Hostpapa

Hostpapa boasts of super fast customer support: Your phones are answered instantly, support requests come in at 10 minutes flat, and the folks at Hostpapa are super friendly, to say the least.

On top of that, as far as shared hosting goes, you get free transfers (domains and hosting), free website migrations, a free website builder, and so much more.

Search Optimization & Tools for SEM

SEMRush: One of the best tools there is for Search engine optimization (helps you with SEO site audits, backlinks research, Keyword Research (with the Keyword Magic tool), competitive intelligence, site health reports for SEO, on-page SEO health checkup and maintenance, and so much more.

The SEMRush team is constantly adding more tools to make it much more comprehensive than ever.

Lead Generation tools for WordPress

Chances are that you are on WordPress. There’s really no point in having a website built if it doesn’t get you leads, customers, appointments, or sales.

That website better get you something, eh? Some plugins, tools, and SaaS applications are worth considering to help juice up your site and to help you generate leads.

Unbounce Pop-ups

Leadpages Pop-ups

Leadpages is not just a landing page builder — it comes with the right set of tools to help you generate leads and that includes lead boxes, Landing pages, and more. Leadpages also integrates with Zapier along with several other integrations to ensure you have complete sales funnels for your business.

Want to know more? Read my Leadpages Review

OptinMonster

If you just had to use a single tool to help you generate leads with your WordPress website, you should seriously consider using OptinMonster (also works on Non-WordPress websites).

With a drag-and-drop builder, your little cousin can use, OptinMonster provides you with opt-in forms, pop-ups, exit intent pop-ups, slide boxes and also a full-screen welcome page for you generate leads.

There’s a lot that you can do with OptinMonster. Go ahead and read my review of OptinMonster.

Plus, watch this video:

Fastest WordPress Themes

GeneratePress

Hello By Elementor

StudioPress Themes & The Genesis Themework

The cleanest WordPress themes with SEO out of the box, and completely bloat-free. Now, it’s StudioPress sites — everything you get from StudioPress neatly packaged into a single offering for a low monthly fee.

Astra

Social Media Management: Build, Amplify, and Connect

SEMrush Social Media Tool: Part of SEMRush’s 20-in-1 ultimate toolkit. I use this internally for our own social networks, other brands I manage, and for those that I help manage for clients.

Buffer for Business: Another awesome tool for complete social media management.

IFTTT: A smart way to automate parts of social media. We hear that IFTTT is not just about social media anymore though.

TailWindApp: Make your Pinterest Management easier and save time.

Graphic Design For The Rest Of Us

Canva: You need visuals for everything today. There are some obvious cases in point such as banner ads, Facebook Ads, and other advertisements. You also have logos that you’d need.

Then, there are blog post feature images, other blog images, and social media visuals.

Content marketing requires its own dose of graphics such as those constituting Infographics, assets for videos, presentations, slide decks, and more.

In some advanced cases, you’d also need charts, graphs, and embeddable graphic assets.

Nothing comes closer to the sheer versatility of Canva when it comes to creating all of those graphics, images, and other assets you’d need for digital marketing.

Start with their free forever plan, of course.

If you want to explore further, there are even more tools for graphic design that you can use.

DesignWizard:

Do you want to design gift certificates, social media graphics (across networks), Youtube Thumbnails, meal planners, Thank you cards, posters, etc? DesignWizard helps you design stunning designs in no time.

DesignWizard also integrates with Hootsuite, HubSpot, Marketo and several other tools to help you not only design but also scheduled to be shared on the web.

Visme

If you are a visual thinker, creating infographics, ads, social media content, presentations, pitch decks, and several other tools is probably the most efficient way for you to communicate ideas.

However, it can be time-consuming and expensive.

The best part? It only takes around 3-5 minutes (for most cases) to create visuals using Visme. You don’t even need any design or coding skills, just click on the elements you want from Visme’s library of over 600 icons and charts.

Then choose between different themes (like, a minimalist one that will fit your personal brand or a more corporate one to fit your brand) before exporting your graphic in PNG format at full resolution so that you can share it anywhere anytime. All this for $9 per month paid annually ($99/year). Go, get Visme.

Website Building Solutions

Webflow: Nothing comes close to the sheer power of Webflow and Webflow CMS to help you build contemporary websites, visually, and get the cleanest code possible.

Tilda: A fantastic new find to help develop classic and very good-looking websites.

Mozello: The cheapest responsive website builder out there. Signup and use it now.

Wix: It’s a popular choice and it’s often underestimated. It’s the world’s largest website builder (and as on 2021, it’s also proving to be one). Wix SEO isn’t as bad as you thought, and Wix has apps and features for everything. See how I built TrooperTribe — a complete freelancing training, freelance consulting, and a membership site on Wix

Squarespace: It’s a classy website builder. Be warned of the closed ecosystem though.

Duda One: Love the ease of use of this platform. Cannot integrate with other third-party tools and services. At least, none that I know of.

Strikingly: Build websites in a snap. Drag. Drop. done. Sell products and services with E-commerce options available.

Weebly: It just evolved and grew into a mature platform with “Carbon”. Build responsive websites by dragging and dropping. Today, it also has a complete suite of marketing tools built-in.

SmugMug: A complete photo sharing, photo hosting, and e-commerce solution built for photographers.

Video for Social Media

Magisto: Part of the Vimeo family and I think it’s interesting that while Magisto helps you make quick videos for social media, YouTube Intros (or outros), and others, you also get Vimeo’s legacy accounts as a part of your Magisto purchase.

Renderforest provides free tools for creating professional intros, animations, slideshows, and music visualizations in minutes.

Lumen5 : Lumen uses artificial intelligence to pick up what’s important from a blog post or any other web-based link that you’d feed into it.

It then whips out scenes based on that content. You have the choice of editing how those scenes play out. Also, take the time out to create your intro and outro for the video, pick music (they have tracks you can choose), and also choose the right colors for your brand.

Take a look at their example videos and you know what I am blabbering about.

Video for Lead Generation, Sales Prospecting, Marketing, & More

Dubb

Dubb helps you use the power of video for sales prospecting, marketing, or to make an impact.

Use videos for more bookings, a boost in sales, engagement on your site, marketing, and more.

Dubb also has several features such as dedicated landing pages for videos, video analytics, tracking, and customizable call-to-action buttons for your videos.

HippoVideo

Loom

Why type or write when you can show and tell? Loom is all about making your workflow better with video. Create short videos to explain something, tutorial videos, videos for online courses, videos as a part of remote team meetings, and more.

Loom is fairly affordable for the power it packs in.

Sezion for personalized Video: What can you do with video, you ask?

Every time you book a time slot with your prospective client, how would it be if you can send in a personalized video (with the client’s name on it?). You can even go as far as integrating personalized video within your sales cycle

Say hello to Sezion. Create videos for any (or more) of the following use cases:

— Stay engaged with your customers
— Create videos that your social media followers will love.
— Engage with your email list.
— Send out personalized thank you emails for every lead registered on your website.
— Personalize videos for your eCommerce store.

Animoto For Simple Business Videos: Animoto has been around for quite a while. It was a simple way to create videos by mashing your family vacation photos or the entire series of chosen photos while your kid was growing up.

It wasn’t until Animoto for business was created that it piqued my interest.

Animoto comes equipped with a marketing video builder and this quickly helps you create social worthy videos from a few images.

The marketing builder is a complete drag-and-drop interface giving you control over voice-over, text, and how the video finally turns out.

Vizia For Video Lead Generation: Vizia has been built from the ground up by educators, for educators. Since video is also an incredibly powerful educational tool, it’s the number one choice for people who are involved with online educational courses, academia, and corporations that focus on training.

Using Vizia, you can incorporate multi-choice quizzes, collect feedback, and ask questions. More important, from a marketing standpoint, you can turn your passive viewers into active participants and also open up a dual channel for communications and improve your content by using the feedback you receive.

Vizia gives you simple –but powerful – tools to generate leads from your video content. You can use embeddable CTAs from within your videos and make your content share-worthy.

Vizia helps you turn your viewers into leads. It’s another thing that it was built for course creators. As a marketer, you are only limited by your imagination to generate leads for your business with video.

VideoScribe For Explainer Videos: Not all videos have to be the same. You can, in fact, bring back the love for explainer videos without doling out cash by the kilo.

Head off to VideoScribe and use the tool to make as many videos as you like. Go ahead and explain concepts, ideas, thoughts, and even convert the content of your blog post or white paper into another explainer video.

VideoScribe gives you everything you’d really need (including pre-built templates), royalty-free music tracks, royalty-free images, and full functionality to customize your masterpiece the way you want it for your business.

Proposal Templates For Freelancers & Agencies

BidSketch: Ruben literally Bootstrapped his company BidSketch to make it easier for freelancers, coaches, consultants, agencies and companies to create professional looking templates easily and quickly.

No more fussing around with Word docs and anything else that you manage to hack together. If you are wondering how Bidsketch makes a difference, the team at Bidsketch researched 27,000 proposals worth $270M to create a marketing proposal template and they are now giving it away.

The insights from their research even got covered on Inc.com

Proposify 

Great onboarding experience, better-looking templates, works on the cloud and aims to make sending proposals easier. Connects with your CRM of choice and does a lot.

E-commerce

WordPress eCommerce

It’s hard to put what WordPress can do (since this thing veers off in so many different directions, depending on what you want to do). For instance, you can use WordPress eCommerce to sell services, sell products, start a membership website, launch an online course site, and more.

Please do note that it’s indeed a popular and viable option. However, it’s not cheap (and certainly not free).

Shopify

Shopify is the big daddy of self-hosted e-commerce platforms. It’s easy to get started with it and you can launch your store regardless of where you are in the world. They also have an option to connect with your WordPress site, PoS, excellent templates to sell your products and services. Read my Shopify Review here

BigCommerce

Next, only to Shopify, BigCommerce connects you to your e-commerce dreams. Just like Shopify, you can get started easily and also connect your store to eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Shopmatic: Making it big already. Sell your products and services easily.  Read a review here that we wrote on them.

DIY Mobile Apps

You don’t need developers for building mobile apps (unless you need extreme customization). Pick from any of the following tools and you are good to go.

Swiftic (known earlier as Como): With over 1 million+ mobile apps already created on the platform, Swiftic is one of the most popular mobile app builders out there. Whether you want to dabble with mobile commerce, coupons, loyalty programs, online scheduling, and table reservations.

You also get myriad ways to promote your app with about pages, click-to-call, collections, catalogs, events, user reviews, and more.

See Swiftic’s app gallery to get inspired.

AppMachine

Want to know how easy it is to build an app? Put the URL of your website on AppMachine and get a mobile app, in minutes.

I should warn you that you’d still have to customize the output a bit but making your app can be as easy as that. AppMachine comes with 35+ pre-coded “building blocks” to make your app-building as easy as drag and drop.

TheAppBuilder

TheAppBuilder takes a dual approach to DIY mobile app development as in you can either use the online toolkit to produce your own mobile app or take the help of TheAppBuilder’s staff to get your mobile app designed. TheAppBuilder gives you a “Sandbox” style credentials to allow multiple users, client access, and customization.

GoodBarber

GoodBarber allows you to build iOS and Android apps giving you complete customization options for you to tweak every inane detail. Loaded with preset templates, more than 600 Google Fonts, and beautiful icons, your mobile app for business is as easy as typing out an email.

AppMakr

Recently acquired by Infinite Monkeys, AppMakr is a mobile app builder you can use with no coding experience. Create as many apps as you want and include features that work for your business including video streaming, push notifications, in-app shopping, events calendars, and a lot more.

Best WordPress Plugins

Mouseflow:

Get a deeper understanding of what exactly happens when your visitors browse your site. Get insights to work on your conversion optimization like a pro. Read more about it in my Mouseflow Review

WpGuard:

WordPress is vulnerable and everyone knows that. But you see? You have a business to run and that means you’d have to use a plugin like WPGuard to help protect your side and manage the nasty, technical side of it all.

Read about more awesome WordPress plugins you should use for your marketing.

DMCA

All that content you produce takes sweat, blood, and tears. You better have a way of protecting your content. DMCA WordPress Plugin helps you with that.

WPS Hide Login

This plugin allows you to hide the login page of your WordPress site. Read on how to use the plugin and boost the security of your WordPress site.

WordPress Page Builders

Elementor

Elementor is the popular choice for several WordPress users (be it marketers, freelancers, agencies, and business owners).

It comes with a landing page builder, a pop-up builder, theme developer, and the team is always working on something new.

Divi Builder

One of the best things that ever happened to WordPress has been the Divi Builder (which works with any WordPress theme). You can now build entire websites with it or maybe just customize the theme you are using.

Divi enjoys a large ecosystem of third-party products (Divi Marketplace), the Divi theme, the Divi plugin, a few other themes, the Monarch Plugin, and more.

It’s one of those few WordPress builders that still has a lifetime license plan.

Beaver Builder

Bev Builder is a WordPress plugin that will let you make a website without any code.

Beaver Builder offers amazing simplicity, usability, and design. With Beaver Builders drag and drop interface it has never been easier to build your page without writing one line of code.

Project Management Tools

HubStaff

Along with projects, tasks, adding team members, Hubstaff is the only tool among all the others in this list that actually allows you to track time, mouse clicks, keyboard movements, and more.

It helps you make payments to your contractors or your full-time staff (if you still insist). Hubstaff helps you to keep track of what your employees do as against what they “say” they do.

Track and monitor each employee does. Stay informed about app usage on computers, the websites they visit, the things they do, etc. Also track time, activity levels, and a lot more. Make payments effortlessly as the time comes.

Asana

Did you check out Asana yet? It’s all-new – complete with a new logo, a new color scheme inside the tool itself, and many more features. The popular project management tool just pops. It pops so well that you feel like working all over again.

Asana integrates with Harvest App, Google Drive, and more. It also has “recurring task” feature, reminders that go down to the “time” a task is due, and tasks can be neatly divided into sections. Asana also features task conversations that’ll help solve your email dependency for getting tasks done.

Trello

Trello is, will, and always has been an amazing tool for project management and collaboration. Working with boards and cards that you move about from doing to done, it’s a fresh approach to work compared to the other schoolbook like tools. Trello for business is even more loaded.

Email Outreach Tools

Once you set your mind to cold outreach, you are getting into the realm of a hustling marketer or business as against the passive kind. Outreach is what you do when you decide to step out of your boundaries and actually connect with others, as you were meant to be.

Instead of depending on the passivity and anonymity of the online medium, you decide to put your face up for the world to see you.

Tools for Finding Email Addresses

Once you send the right kind of emails out and find the right people, the sky is the limit. Get book contracts, speaking assignments, feature on blog posts, and more. You can also do guest blogging, appear on podcasts as a guest, or start a podcast, or co-author a book, or whatever it is that you want to do.

The key is to find emails of the exact person you want to reach out to, and you’d have to do it fast and efficient. Here are tools to help you do email outreach like a ninja:

Contactout

findthat.email

Clearbit

EmailHunter

SellHack

LeadIQ

Just Reach Out

VoilaNorbert

DataAnalyze Insider Chrome Extension

FindThat Lead

Full Contact

Tools for Automating Email Outreach

Woodpecker

Reply.io