The Best Marketing Tools that will save you lots of time!
Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase using one of these links, I’ll make a small commission without impacting the price that you will pay. I recommend just services or products I find useful and that I have tested or currently use.
As blogger or entrepreneur, increasing the traffic for your blog or website and the engagement of your readers, growing the social media exposure and expanding your email list are some of the biggest challenges. Your online presence is not just about having a website or a blog filled with text, but also about finding interesting and trending topics, writing catchy headlines, finding great pictures and creating awesome images, mastering social media, and much more. Therefore, is extremely important to have the best marketing tools. They will help you grow your brand, your business, and most important, your income.
Some of these resources helped me to grow my blog and work from where I want – which is a dream come true.
Every business owner wants to save time and money and effectively grow his business. That’s why I’ve decided to share valuable information to help skyrocket your business so you can make money too. The following list of marketing resources includes a selection of the best blog writing tools, the most helpful scheduling tools, the easiest to use design tools and more.
Which are the best marketing tools for bloggers and entrepreneurs in 2019?
Best blogging and website platforms
Squarespace
Squarespace is a site builder and web hosting platform that includes a set of marketing features allowing you to easily create, personalize and manage your site or blog, engage with your audience and grow your traffic. It provides an easy manner to build your website and brand, by providing multiple templates to choose from and intuitive builders to help you achieve your goals.
You have at your disposal many useful features such as analytics, landing pages, e-commerce options, and highly responsive customer service to support you. This is a paid tool with a 14 days free trial period.
Boostingwriter.com is a Squarespace built site and I am 100% happy with my choice. Since I am totally stranger to coding, I preferred not to deal with plugins that don’t match, customer support lack or trying for hours to solve small details.
WordPress
Do you want a self-hosted website or blog and transform it into a profitable business? Then WordPress.org could be your best solution and it definitely deserves to be on the list of the best marketing tools. It’s easy to install and highly customizable and you practically can create the site the way you want. But you must deal with coding or hire a web developer to help you. You own your website and content and you can install any free, premium or custom theme you want to personalize it. Also, you can install or upload all the plugins you want to extend its functionality.
It will cost you the hostage of the website, but to avoid all the annoying problems caused by finding the right hosting provider, WordPress recommends Bluehost, DreamHost, and SiteGround.
Bluehost
Bluehost is the #1 recommended web hosting solution by WordPress.org and it gives you a simple WordPress installation, a free domain for 1 year, a free website builder, free SSL Certificate, auto-updates and much more. The pricing rates are very affordable, starting from €2.60+VAT/month.
Their custom-built servers and the 24/7 customer service deliver remarkable performance that help you grow your business. Bluehost is highly recommended also for beginners, as they practice 30-days money-back guarantee.
Best SEO & Analytics Tools
Ahrefs
Every blogger, marketer, solopreneur wants to see his work ranking as high as possible on search engine results. Ahrefs gives you a huge plus for high ranking success by providing tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, technical and SEO auditing, niche monitoring and rank tracking.
Using Ahrefs to analyze your SEO efforts provides you with a competitive advantage by monitoring your niche and competitors’ activity and using tools to grow your traffic.
Maybe Ahrefs is not affordable for beginners, but it’s a strong pillar for future success and one of the best marketing tools for small business.
Google Keyword Planner
Keyword research is crucial for any blogger. In an extremely competitive blogging era, using excellent keyword research and a strategic tool are essential.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner is one of the best tools to help you find the right keywords and stay relevant. It provides you with a comparative analysis of keyword trends for your niche, so narrow your keyword list to just the most important keywords.
Google Analytics
In terms of content and marketing strategy, bloggers must know what is working and what is not working for their business and their established goals.
If you want to be a successful blogger, measuring content values is extremely important. Google Analytics is one of the free tools that give you insights about your traffic volume, referral sources and conversion rates, audience characteristics, the most visited sections of your site, the most visited blog posts, and much more detailed information. This way, you find out which blog posts are increasing your traffic and conversion rates and you can use these data to adjust your content strategy and have a profitable business.
Yoast
By using Yoast features, you are sure of getting also previews of your social media pages, readability verified, categories control and other technical background stuff. You can edit your title tags, slugs and meta descriptions, as it provides solutions for everything related to your SEO ranking.
Ubersuggest
Developed by Neil Patel, Ubersuggest 2.0 is one of the best marketing tools that help you generate keywords idea for your content marketing and blog. This free keyword tool generates multiple suggestions and takes your content to the next level. With the Keyword Research tool, you can get more information about keyword volume, keyword ideas, SEO difficulty, cost per click (CPC) and paid difficulty, top ranking websites on Google and their traffic volume and more. Domain overview provides you with insights about the strategies that are working for your competitors, so you can adopt and improve them, and get a competitive advantage.
Thanks to Backlink Data feature, Ubersuggest helps you to get information about the number of backlinks of other websites.
Best Email Marketing Tools
MailerLite
MailerLite is an email marketing service provider with focus on simplicity, excellent customer support and beautiful email designs that offers a free email marketing platform for up to 1000 subscribers. They market themselves as email marketing software for small business owners and bloggers. Therefore, you should forget complex settings.
MailerLite is a user-friendly software that gives you the luxury to quickly create your email campaigns, track their results, manage subscribers and unsubscribes, design custom landing pages, popups, and many other features.
Even if this email marketing tool has lots of integrations,MailerLite manages to keep everything simple and easy-to-use for everybody, providing great user experience.
Other features:
neat and clean dashboard
automation tools
auto resend
drag and drop builder
A/B split testing
User permission for collaboration and team management.
You can sign up for a MailerLite account here.
ConvertKit
According to an old saying - “money is in the list”. Do you want to monetize your blog? The best performing way is via your email list and Convertkit is one of the best marketing tools to grow quickly and manage your mailing list and mail campaigns. Convertkit was expressly developed for creators and their needs, targeting bloggers, podcasters, course creators and YouTubers. It helps you design, test email content, understand your audience thought tags and segments, measure the performance of your campaigns and automate them. And finally, grow your audience and increase the conversions.
ConvertKit has an intuitive and user-friendly interface, being designed to make your tasks easier. Therefore, you don’t need to be a tech genius to use it. They have great integrations with the majority of the digital marketing platforms and tools and provide you the option to effortlessly switch from all the other email marketing apps.
In terms of the design of opt-in forms, Converkit is by far the best option. So, if you are seeking convenience, ease and you are a serious blogger with thousands of followers, ConvertKit is what you should choose.
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools, allowing you to create campaigns that suit best your communication goals. If you want to add images or videos in your email messages, MailChimp provides you many customization options.
The platform offers a free plan for the first 2.0000 subscribers and you can send up to 10,000 emails monthly. As most of the tools, templates and their in-built CRM are accessible on this free account. This is good news for bloggers and SMB accounts.
From my point of view, the design of the opt-in series is very rigid for this free account and for this reason I switched from MailChimp to MailerLite after the first two months.
Traffic & List Building Best Marketing Tools
Sumo
This is a comprehensive suite of marketing tools that help grow your site’s traffic and conversions. Sumo offers a free plan for an unlimited number of subscribers, but you can send only 10.000 emails monthly. The free plan includes different tools for growing your email list, connecting with your contacts, e-commerce and analytics features. For about $39/month, you get an open option of 6 additional tools to work with what best suits your needs.
Sumo allows you to track your success as you continue to build a following. Tools like list builder, scroll box, welcome mat, sharing buttons among others, increase your shares and subscriptions.
Milotree
It is one of the easiest and best ways to grow your social media following and email list subscribers, by converting the traffic that your blog or website is already getting. Due to its affordable pricing (just $9/month), Milotree is a cost-effective tool.
It works on most major website platforms, integrates with many email service providers and it cuts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. It is a mobile configured pop-up allowing you to show it only on the pages you want. Milotree also provides you with analytics, so you are able to track and monitor growth and results.
Writing marketing tools
Grammarly
This is a free blogging tool that is useful even for the best and most experienced bloggers. It helps you check your content for several types of errors, ensuring your blog posts have a zero-error rate. From grammar and spelling to style and tone, Grammarly helps you eliminate the mistakes and find the perfect words to express yourself.
Bloggers
Content marketers and copywriters
Authors
Any business professional who wants to draft an accurate report, presentation, email or social media post.
Students
Grammarly is one of the best marketing tools and maybe the greatest grammar and spelling checking tool, compatible with all web browsers, extremely easy to download and install.
The free version includes extensions for Chrome and MS Office, while the premium Grammarly plan includes critical grammar and spelling checks, conciseness, readability, vocabulary enhancement suggestions, gen-re specific writing style checks, plagiarism detector and much more.
Hemingway App
The Hemingway app is an editing tool that evaluates the quality of the writing, aiming to make your writing bold. When you paste the content into the online Hemingway Editor or write directly within, it highlights your work using different colors and shows the readability grade of your text. Each color corresponds to a different type of improvement Hemingway suggests.
Hemingway Editor can be used in two ways:
Free Online Hemingway Editor
Paid Downloadable Hemingway App
Anyway, even if the app is a good starting point, it doesn’t take the place of a human editor.
Google Drive
Drive is a free Google blogger tool accessible to anyone with a Gmail account. Drafting and writing content on Google Drive is the safest way to back-up your work, making it accessible to anyone you want to share it with and collaborate during content creation. It is perfect to back up your files, photos and videos, as it’s a secured cloud storage system.
Interactive Content
Interact Quiz
It’s a fantastic web-based quiz building tool and (and it deserves its place on my list about the best marketing tools) that helps bloggers, content marketers, entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants engage with their website visitors and potential customers in a way that’s fun and Interactive! I just love the Interact quiz maker and I use it for creating my interactive content.
Interact has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that lets you create your quiz in a few minutes – if you want to use a pre-made template or you can create your quiz from scratch. The Interact Dashboard offers you plenty of customization tools. You can change font types, font colors, button colors, button text, add your branded logo and your own images.
There are plenty of options to embed your Interact quiz wherever you want. Simply copy and paste the code snippet into your “text” part or “HTML” part of your website.
Is good to know that Interact has specific guidelines for embedding quizzes on every platform, you just need to click yours and follow the instructions.
In terms of cost per acquisition (acquiring each lead), it is a very low amount of spend. Why not start your free 7-day trial?
Online Design Tools
Canva
The visual appeal of your content is what attracts your followers to you, and I don’t make any mistake saying that poorly designed content is a sure way to disaster. Canva allows you to create layouts from millions of templates available and has a huge photo library and design elements database. You can customize layouts for all social media channels, for presentations, for blog, for ebooks, you name it. It simply gives you the freedom to go wild with your creativity hence standing out; it is easy to use and less complicated than the dedicated design software. Its editing and resizing features are efficient. Canva has a free option that you can use with confidence and a superior paid option.
Stencil
Stencil is one of the best marketing tools and an online design app I have recently discovered, and I have to admit that it’s perfect for creating social media posts, content marketing visuals, email images and more. With Stencil, you can make outstanding visuals without being the best designer in the world, the app helping you to create detailed and colorful pictures with just a few clicks. In terms of visuals, Stencil streamlines the process and provides you a vast image library of over 2.200.000 pictures to choose from, templates, Google fonts, icons and graphics, quotes and more. It allows you not just to create a design online, but also to share it directly to your social channels. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts and post on any profile or page you have, Buffer and even send it on Instagram via SMS.
Stock Photos
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of my top three favorite places where I look for free photos. It has over 550.000 high-quality images, offered by the communities of photographers. You may find here a lot of pictures that you can use for personal or commercial projects totally for free. Unsplash uploads ten new photos every day, that you can have into your email inbox if you subscribe.
Pixabay
Pixabay is my second favorite resource, where I can find stunning quality stock photos free for personal and commercial use! It’s also probably the easiest-to-use stock photo website. You can search for photos by applying different filters such as category, type, orientation, and colors! The best part? On Pixabay you may find not just photos, but also illustrations, vector graphics, and videos! Moreover, it is also integrated with Canva, one of the best marketing tools and probably the easiest online design app!
Social Media Scheduling
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a family of agile marketing products that helps you to stay focused and deliver projects on time. In short, with CoSchedule you can organize your team and their workflow, schedule social media posts on various platforms, manage communication campaigns, and so on. This is a one-stop-shop for many marketing actions.
From content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and automation, analytics, workflow management to headline analyzer and email title analyzer, CoSchedule is a reliable solution. A special mention for the headline analyzer - helps you to write search optimized headlines with an emotional punch.
CoSchedule is your multipurpose tool if you want to increase your blog traffic, efficient email campaigns, social media calendar management and optimizing all your headlines, email subjects, and social media posts. They have a free 14-day trial period, so why not investigate what can happen in those 14 days.
Tailwind
As visual search engine, Pinterest is a pure gold mine for most niches and for bloggers, businesses and entrepreneurs in search for alternative ways to grow their blogs and sites. Due to its focus on visuals, it has the capacity to be your highest traffic driver, better than any organic search engine or social media channel. But if you want to be successful on Pinterest, you must pin more than 50 times a day and that’s time-consuming.
And here Tailwind comes in and saves your day, being from this point of view, one of the best marketing tools. It helps to schedule your pins for an entire week in an organized manner, according to an optimized calendar and also includes Instagram scheduling and publishing tools. It has a very friendly-user dashboard, providing you with detailed analytics.
Even if it’s a paid tool, Tailwind offers you a free trial and you can schedule up to 100 pins on Pinterest, and 30 posts on Instagram for free before deciding if a paid plan is right for you. However, the benefits outweigh the costs and it’s a must have if you want to make Pinterest the main source of traffic for your site or blog.
Hootsuite
This is a versatile social media management tool with excellent collaboration and reporting features that helps you keep track of all your social media accounts through a properly structured dashboard. By using Hootsuite, you can schedule, manage and report all the social media activities organized by you and your team, saving a lot of time. Hootsuite also measures and reports the impact of your social media campaigns and it gives you an accurate overview of ROI. It is a paid tool with a 30-day trial period.
Later
Blogging requires you to constantly connect with your audience through various social media platforms and this can be an annoying and time-consuming task. Later is one of the best marketing tools for Instagram that helps you plan, schedule and auto publish your Instagram posts. But you can also use Later to unify your Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter visual content strategy in one place. Being a visual planner, you can see the aesthetics of your feed before you post and make the necessary changes. There is a free and paid option, which is also affordable.
Sales Generating Tools
Leadpages
Your audience needs to be driven from just being readers or visitors of your blog or website to be part of your sales funnel and become paying customers and advocates of your brand. Landing pages help you to accomplish this goal. Statistics sustain and even guarantee a more than 55% increase in sales with the effective use of landing pages.
Leadpages is a web-based platform that gives you a multiple and vast selection of drag and drop templates for your lead-generation campaigns.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a popular sales funnel tool that simplifies the whole sales and marketing funnels for all types of businesses. It allows you to build pages easily inside sales funnels and make more money. You don’t need to be a tech wizard as it has a user-friendly interface that lets you easily integrate animation, clocks, videos, and other elements to your templates and then perform your A/B testing on them to see what works and what doesn’t. ClickFunnels is a paid tool (14-day free trial) that every internet marketer needs. As putting your information out in the best way possible is how your customers get to connect with you and purchase your product or service. As one of the best marketing tools, Clickfunnels helps you to increase conversions and grow your business through result driven sales funnels.
Team management tools
Slack
As a business communication platform, Slack is ideal for businesses that need an efficient way to communicate and collaborate across teams. There are over 1000 applications that can be integrated with the platform, thus saving time to get feedback and manually reviewing work.
Trello
Trello is a project management tool that enables users to organize their tasks via boards, lists, cards, and other productivity tools. It provides teams with a simple platform to collaborate and work on various projects simultaneously. It reduces email strings, keeps timelines and monitors productivity. Trello pricing has a free option and three paid plans, the main differences between them including the minimum number of user accounts and access to premium features like advanced administrative permissions and public board management.
Income Generating Platforms
SendOwl
This an online platform where you can easily and inexpensively create a storefront and start selling digital your products and services. Sendowl is one of the best marketing tools and an important blogging tool for beginners as it is difficult to make sales and monetize your site when you are just starting up.
Sendowl is mobile optimized, secure and provides a huge network of people for you to reach out and benefit. Their payment plan is affordable as they start monthly charges at $9.
Teachable
It is an amazing online course platform or Learning Management System (LMS) that helps you to create and sell online courses. They offer both free and paid plans to cater to all necessities and budgets. If you are good at creating excellent course content, Teachable provides the network of students you need to profit from your work.
Every blogger driven by success aims to be the best in its niche or area of expertise and having the right resources makes it easy to produce high quality, interesting and thought-provoking articles. Planning, creating, organizing and managing the content and all the communication campaigns, as well as analyzing and improving the results are not easy, but they are the most important ingredients for a successful blog or website. Therefore, you need the best marketing tools to support all your creation and marketing activities.
