Mailchimp You need an email list. If you don t have one, you need to start today. It s completely free to start an email list with Mailchimp. Create an account, get the Mailchimp for WP plugin and add your first optin form in seconds. You will find that most readers don t want to buy something (or even click on an affiliate link) until they trust you. Email is how you build that trust. I make literally 99% of my income off my email list. Type: Email list Price: Free
OptinMonster I use OptinMonster to create and design all of my optin forms and lead magnets. Creating beautiful forms is easy with their pre-built templates. Their most popular features include a two-step optin form which pops up on-click and their exit intent technology. There s a lot of different types of forms you can create, such as welcome mats, slide ins, floating bar and lightbox popups. But by far my most effective optin form is the inline form. With these, you can insert forms right into the meat of your content! This is how I get the bulk of my subscribers. Type: Optin Forms Price: $14.00 per month
Canva I own a copy of Photoshop that I paid $700 for. But guess what? I hardly ever use it anymore. I now use Canva (which is 100% free) to create my graphics. Keep in mind that I m no graphic designer, but i can create a pin for Pinterest in 2 minutes using their Pinterest templates. I even created a full-blown 100+ page ebook/course on Canva! You can create your logo here and all of your freebies for your lead magnets here. Type: Design Images Price: Free
Tailwind Pinterest has tons of traffic and is a huge traffic source for me. You can t just expect to get traffic from creating pins and posting them to your own boards. You need to join group boards first. I schedule my pins through Tailwind to all my Pinterest Group Boards and have it run on auto-pilot. I now spend 15-30 minutes per week scheduling my pins and Tailwind does the rest. It s a game-changer for me. Another feature is Tailwind Tribes. With tribes, each members shares each others content. This is a sure-fire way of getting more re-pins. Type: Blog Post Scheduler Price: $9.99 per month
Trello Trello is a time management app that gives you a visual overview of what s being worked on. It s a big time saver for me. How do I use Trello? I use it for the following: Content calendar To do list Visualizing my email sequences Track my backlinks Courses I ve taken and plan to take List of lead magnets and content upgrades Type: Organization Price: Free
Google Docs Google Docs is a word processing app you can use to create your Wordpress blog posts. It s also the preferred way to send and receive guest posts. In addition to Google Docs, there s also Google Sheets and Slides. Google Sheets is for spreadsheets. I created spreadsheets to keep track of my income, expenses and ad sales. Google Slides is for presentations. However, I use it to create PDF files. In fact, this pdf file you re viewing was created using Slides. Type: Documents Price: Free
Social Pilot As bloggers we just can t do it all. We need to concentrate on putting out great content. But marketing it? Who has the time for that? Here s what I do. I create my tweets and Facebook posts ahead of time and then let Social Pilot do the work of publishing them on schedule. I send out 4 Facebook posts and 4 tweets every day with links to my content. It s a numbers game to get your voice heard on social media and Buffer allows me to be everywhere at once. Type: Social Media Scheduler Price: $8.33 per month
Manage Flitter I use Twitter to carry a steady stream of traffic to my site. I get about 10 new Twitter followers daily. That might result in just 10 visits to my blog today. But if I tweet multiple times per day, those clicks I get keep piling up. But you see, I don t have time to devote to Twitter. So I use Buffer to automatically send my tweets out. But what s the point of tweeting if you don t have followers? That s where Manage Flitter comes in. I use this app to help me follow targeted users and then unfollow those who didn t follow back. Type: Grow Twitter Price: $12 per month
WPForms If you think WPForns is just another contact form plugin for Wordpress, think again. This premium plugin does so much more. In addition to creating a basic contact form, you have more options too. You can integrate your email provider like MailChimp or ConvertKit to subscribe people who contact you. The best part of this plugin is the integration of Paypal and Stripe to accept credit card payments right on your blog. Type: Contact Forms Price: $49 per year
Monster Insights In its simplest form, Monster Insights is a Wordpress plugin that lets you see your Google Analytics stats within your Wordpress admin. But geez, it does so much more. What Monster Insights does is get all the data Google Analytics has (which is too confusing for me to understand) and pack it into a beautiful display that shows you only what you really need to know. It s a tool created for bloggers like me. I only want to know pageviews, time on site, pages per viewer. Then, I want to see it broken down by article, so I can see which content performs best. Type: Stats Price: $99 per year
Long Tail Pro How do you decide what to write about? Want to know how I decide? I type in a few keywords into Long Tail Pro and it will guide me in the right direction. This keyword research tool program is ideal for bloggers who want to get search engine traffic. The program gives you data such as keyword popularity and it gives each keyword a difficulty score. Picking keywords that are both popular and easy to rank for is the best way to get search engine traffic flowing to your blog. Type: Keyword Research Price: $25 per month