Resources

My clients and students often ask me for advice on the tools they should use in order to develop their own in-house best practices for marketing. Here are some of the tools I recommend to them (most of them I use myself). Some of the links are affiliate links (meaning they will give me credit if you sign up through those links) although most are just because I love the companies and I think they’re great.

For Hosting

I was with BlueHost for about 4 years, but recently (2016) I noticed that my site was REALLY slow, their service was down more often, and I was getting 100% bounce rates. I switched to SiteGround and my experience has been nothing short of AMAZING!

For Websites

WordPress – I’m partial to WordPress (and WooCommerce) – especially when it comes to helping small to mid-sized business get a great, up-to-date website template that they can also administer themselves.

ThemeForest – I go here often to find inexpensive templates for my clients.

For Email Marketing

While I’ve used MailChimp in the past, I’ve been using aWeber lately because I noticed that my deliverability rates were higher. I don’t love their reporting, but aWeber is still a great tool for timed auto-responders and it’s not too expensive.

For Email Data / Lead Generation

I use several tools, but my favorites are:

PopupAlly (WordPress plugin)

LeadPages

Sumo.com

For Online Course Delivery

LearnDash (a great WordPress plugin for online learning)

Must-Have WordPress Plug-ins

If you’re using WordPress, use these plug-ins to get the most out of your website. Just make sure that they’re compatible with YOUR version of WordPress before you download and activate anything.

Sumo.com – Tons of great tools for list building, customer care and more!

YoastSEO – helps you make sure you’re following the “foundational aspects” of SEO on your pages (it also helps make sure you’re actually DOING your SEO)

Shortcodes Ultimate – this plug-in has the most shortcodes for newbies

JetPack – while there are a lot of different “mini plug-ins” as part of JetPack, my favorite is the CSS Editor that creates a separate page for customizing CSS

Just a quick note – some of the links above ARE affiliate links (meaning I make money if you sign up), but a lot of them aren’t, they’re just great tools that will help you make your business more successful. Thanks!