If you’re just starting out with your online business and want some guidance, you’ve come to the right page.
Here are our favorite, tried-and-tested tools and resources. To be honest, we could have filled this list with about a hundred recommendations, but I’ve narrowed it down to the ones we use the most and add the greatest value to my business.
As with all pages on this site, this comes with a disclaimer. We are affiliates for some of these recommendations listed below – you can read our full disclosure here.
Essential Tools For Your Website
If you haven’t yet set up your website, we’d recommend WordPress (unless you’re doing eCommerce—in which case we’d suggest Shopify). Not least because it’s free, but its sheer ubiquity means you’ll never be stuck for a WordPress expert to help you with any problems you have.
The best SEO plugin for WordPress. Even if you don’t know much about SEO or aren’t particularly interested in optimizing your site, you should at least install Yoast so you can get the basics covered. You just never know when Google might bring you thousands of visitors.
Namecheap are a great low cost option and a good starting point when buying your domain name as their packages are very competitive. They come highly recommended.
Social Media And Driving Traffic
If you’re on X/Twitter, Crowdfire will quickly become your best friend. They have this great virtual assistant feature that prompts you every day to post high-quality content that they’ve found for you using a “smart feed.” It’s made X so easy for us to use to get regular traffic to this blog.
If you want social media traffic, you need to invest in a good WordPress plugin. Social Warfare is fantastic and will help you increase the number of shares your blog posts receive.
If you’re planning on using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website, Tailwind is your go-to tool. It has a genius feature called “Communities,” where you can link up with other bloggers in groups and share each other’s posts. It’s the easiest way to get a viral pin (which can bring thousands of visitors to your site).
List Building And Selling
Optinmoster is a powerhouse for list building and landing pages. It will help you set up features on your site to sign up visitors and offers plenty of analytics to help you optimize your pages.
Getresponse offers great autoresponder capabilities. This means you can set up many pre-written emails to promote your products and services, allowing your business to run like clockwork with little daily input.
HelloBar is a clever little pop-up that is very (VERY) easy to add to your website. It’s perfect if you want to grow your list but aren’t confident in the technical side of things.
Other Very Helpful Recommendations
If you plan on promoting affiliate products as your primary income source, Clickmagick is a very useful tool. It’s also incredibly useful for list-building. Create custom links to all your optins, affiliate promotions, and products from Clickmagick, and you’ll get a dashboard of stats to see how well you’re converting, plus so many other powerful features.
We love Canva! It is easy to produce gorgeous-looking graphics and social media posts using Canva’s design features.
Evernote helps you stay organized. It’s the perfect virtual notebook for writing ideas, brainstorming posts, collecting research, and creating to-do lists.
Want a tip to help you grow your business faster? Outsource. It’s something we are all loathe to do when first starting out because of the expense, but Fiverr is a great option in that respect because you can outsource small tasks at $5 a time that end up saving you hundreds of hours.