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Tools and Resources That I Use
Every web publisher has his or her set of favorite tools and services that they use for running their online business. I’ll be sharing mine on this page.
I’m going to share all of my tools – or at least everything that I can think of. Some of the links will be affiliate links, so thanks in advance for signing up using my code.
Courses and tutorials
The following are courses and info products by people I know and trust in the industry. These are all affiliate links, and I share them either because I’ve tried them or because I know the creators and consider them friends.
Now that Google traffic is dead, there are many courses out there that can help you find alternative ways to reach our audiences. Before you buy any course based on the mention here, I suggest you read this post for my views on courses.
One very thorough and methodic course that I have reviewed is Tony Hill’s Pinpoint Clicks. The course is generally closed, but if you click this link, registration will open for you for five days.
For Facebook, I reviewed and can recommend the Masterclass by Jesse Cunningham and Brian Nagele. It covers the same methods that I use to get a consistent stream of traffic from Facebook.
Another course I have reviewed and am following these days is Scott Delong’s Million Dollar Newsletter Playbook.
A very interesting traffic strategy is to piggyback on Reddit’s recent success and promote your content there. Ewen Finser does that very well and shares his methods in this Reddit traffic course.
Last but not least, for those who are further down their web publishing journey or are looking to flip sites, I have tried out these –
The Website Flipping Course by Mushfiq Sarker—Mushfiq has purchased, improved, and sold (i.e. flipped) hundreds of websites. He’s a great guy and knows what he’s doing. I took this course recently to assess the potential of selling some of our sites. I’ll publish a detailed review soon.
The Easy Wins database – Also by Mushfiq Sarker, this is a handy cheat sheet that lists hundreds of ways in which you can improve traffic, revenue, or both.
Summits and Conferences
Here are links to summits and conferences that I participated (or will participate) in –
Alt G – Traffic beyond Google – Free attendance for the live event taking place on April 24, 2004 (or purchase recordings later).
The Niche Site Summit was free to attend while it was live-streamed, but if you missed that, you can purchase the recordings here.
AI Writing and Content Production
An exciting new section to this page!
Koala – my team and I have used Koala AI extensively. It’s the best tool I found for generating high-level AI-generated articles. It does the heavy lifting of prompting and styling, but we don’t publish any of that content “as is”. We edit and fact-check first.
Amazon Affiliation Tool
I use AM Image Master to embed Amazon links in our posts easily and effectively.
Social Media tools
Social media is a cornerstone of my current strategy. I use the following tools –
Postplanner – to schedule posts across our Facebook pages. With features such as topical buckets and smart recycling this has been a lifesaver. We have an agency-level plan where multiple team members can work on their respective social media accounts (both Facebook and Pinterest)
PinGenerator – for quickly producing pins with overlaying text and scheduling them to our accounts. It’s a nifty tool where our VAs can easily add dozens of effective pins within minutes.
Strevio – for tracking the success of each posts and finding page-level patterns. It’s also great for checking out the competition and getting more ideas for Facebook creatives.
Project and task management
This is my current setup in 2021 –
- 15+ niche/content websites
- 7 VA’s
- 3 editors
- 80+ freelance writers
- 500+ posts published each month
It’s quite a challenge to manage everything! Especially since I have ADD and I can’t take Ritalin for medical reasons. This is where I rely on Clikcup.
I’ve tried Trello, Toodledo, and Asana as well, but Clickup gave me the best value for money. I do use the paid version for the premium features, but I only started paying about a year into using the platform. The free version of Clickup works very well. It’s robust and feature-rich.
Read more: How I use Clickup to manage my web publishing business (inc. screenshots).
Publishing Platform
WordPress is pretty much the industry standard. It’s free, open-source and has every plugin you can imagine. And if you’re still missing something, it’s fairly easy to get a coder to fix you the right plugin. Some of the plugins are mentioned down the page in the context of how I use them.
Keyword Research
As for keyword research tools, I’ve tried several over the years. They all have their pros and cons and I wouldn’t rely on any of them 100%.
Low Fruits is my favorite keyword tool and I still have credits there, even though we don’t do any keyword research for search engines these days. Focusing mostly on social media, we still use LowFruits to come up with topic ideas.
Hosting
My current hosting setup isn’t suitable for beginners. It’s ideal if you know how to manage a server without Cpanel, or are technical enough to learn how to do that. It’s very cheap for the quality of super-cheap hosting that you get. I also love that it’s very scalable. When I started out, it was costing me $5 a month. Now I’m at just over $80 a month. That’s for as many sites as you need to host – calculated by overall bandwidth and storage needs.
That $40 currently covers about 4 million monthly pageviews. Not bad at all, considering how robust this solution is. I’ve been using Digital Ocean for several years now.
At this point, I’m also using AdminGeekz to manage the server, paying them an hourly rate of $100 an hour. They’re very expensive but they are the best. I’ve known the owner since he was 12 and he’s pretty amazing. Anyway, other than setting up a new site once a quarter, I don’t usually need their help, but it’s good to have them in case something ever happens.
Domain registrar
Nothing exciting here. I use Godaddy. I have been with them for more than 20 years now and it works. They’re not the cheapest but I’ve used their support more than once and they’ve always been helpful.
Backup services
Our server admin takes care of creating full backups. I’m still using a few options on top of that (just because I already set them up).
I’ve been using Blog Vault for several of the largest sites for several years. Currently, I’m using the basic plan for small businesses. That means full backups for up to five sites which I use for my largest and most active sites. Daily backups that are easy to restore (I tested it once).
I also use the UpdraftPlus plugin to create free daily backups of some of the sites on my Google Drive. It’s easy to set up and free, so why not.
Read here about my full backup setup.
Image Generation and Editing
We use AI tools extensively, including for image generation. Our team’s current favorites are Midjourney (paid account), Dalle (via a paid ChatGPT account), and Stable Diffusion via KoalaChat.
For quick editing and templates, we have a team Canva account.
Stock photos
AI images aren’t always the right solution. Pixabay and other free sites just won’t do because I prefer to avoid copyright issues. We currently have two mega subscriptions with Shutterstock.
Mailing Lists
I use Convertkit for the Yeys newsletter and Flodesk for our other newsletters.
I’ll be adding to this page as I discover more tools and services that I use. If you have any questions about any of the above or would like to ask me about another function that I may have missed, just leave me a comment!