Whether you are just getting started or a successful blogger, you need tools and services to help you become successful online.
That is why I decided to share with you tools that I use and endorse.
One of the reasons is because almost daily I get questions about what are the best tools out there that I recommend and the second one is because over time I tested plenty of tools, invested time and money in them and I want to spare you from doing the same.
This page will continue to be updated as I find more useful tools which provide value to me and which will also provide value to you.
Disclosure: Some of the links from this page are affiliate links and if you purchase the products using them, I will get a cut from that vendor’s profit. However, this does not affect you in any way nor does add extra costs for you. I only include here tools that I use and trust.
Blogging Tools
WordPress – This is the most used platform for blogging and powers millions of websites. With WordPress you can easily start a blog and share your knowledge with other people.
HostGator – Choosing a hosting company is a tedious work and finding a good one is really hard. After hours spent reviewing hosting companies and their packages I signed up for HostGator and I am really happy with this choice. The load speed of my website is fast and the customer support is extraordinaire.
I highly recommend HostGator and I would advise you to go check them out.
NameCheap – This is the company to choose when registering your domain name. They have fast support and provide really good value and a good price. I also like that you get with every domain free WhoisGuard for the first year and PositieSSL for just $1.99.
Genesis from StudioPress – The Genesis framework is my favorite and I use it for all my projects along with it’s child themes. It’s a solid platform, which adds additional functionality to WordPress, it has powerful build in SEo features, it’s secure and you can get beautiful child themes fro your blog.
Premise Landing Page Software – If you are looking to easily create landing pages Premise is the way to go. I endorse all Copyblogger Media products because I like them and their philosophy. Again, if you need help building landing pages choose Premise and you won’t regret it.
GravityForms – In case you want to build a nice contact form or any other form where your visitors can submit information, GravityFroms will do a great job for you. It also has advanced functionality like allowing user to register or pay you via PayPal.
MailChimp – This is my preferred email marketing provider and I use it for most of my lists. It has great support, powerful segmentation features, allows you do split test emails and much more.
Aweber – The majority of online marketers swear by the high deliverability rates of Aweber, so I had to include it here. Even if the interface is more clunky that the one MailChimp has, Aweber does a really good job and has powerful split testing features.
SEO Tools
SEOmoz Tools – You can get a lot with a PRO account of SEOmoz, but most important, you can create a campaign that you can track, research the keywords that you should target, see keyword rankings, link your Google Analytics account and see what is the ranking of a keyword and how many visits that keyword sends to your site and much more.
On top of this you can get access to a Q&A Forum, Webinars, 2011 MozCon Videos and additional tools.
One really neat tool that I use frequently is the Keyword Difficulty tool, which shows me how difficult is to rank for a specific keyword and whether or not I should target it.
You can get a lot more with a SEOmoz PRO account, but I will address that in a different article.
Open Site Explorer – This tool will help you see who links to your website and how authoritative those sites are.
But, you can actually use this to research your competitors and see where they get links from, where they do guest posts or what anchor text they target.
Then you can use these to improve your link building strategy and get more links from website with a high authority.
Advanced Web Ranking – With Advanced Web Ranking you can actually achieve great things, and monitor your SEO rankings, links and traffic.
While SEOmoz is an online based tool, Advanced Web Ranking can be installed on your computer and it will help you to easily track your keyword rankings, monitor the backlinks of your website and connect it to Google Analytics to see data about your traffic.
What’s also interested about Advanced Web Ranking is the fact that you can do all these for your competitors and discover their SEO strategy.
Read my Advanced Web Ranking review to learn more about how it can help you.
Scribe SEO – I use Scribe SEO for all my articles and it helps me to get most of them on the first page of Google within days from publishing or even hours sometimes.
What I like most about it is the fact that once I write the article, I can analyze it and Scribe will immediately score it to tell me how effective I optimized the article.
This gives me the chance to do some small edits and increase the chances for the article to rank higher before I even publish it.
I highly recommend it! Get your copy now!
Analytics and Conversion Optimization
Google Analytics – I’ve been talking a lot about Google Analytics in the past 6 months because analyzing and understanding your visitors is really important.
With Google Analytics you will be able to see how many visitors come to your site from search engines and what keywords they use.
If you are eager to learn more, signup for my free Google Analytics course or take it at the next level and get my Web Analytics Blueprint paid course.
Website Optimizer – If you are looking to test different pages or elements on the same page, you can do it with the Website Optimizer from Google. It’s free and it can help you get started with conversion rate optimization.
Visual Website Optimizer – This is similar with Website Optimizer, but it’s a paid tool that provide a more easy and powerful way of doing A/B and multivariate testing. Once you get started testing, you will want something more powerful and Visual Website Optimizer will do the job for you.
WordPress Plugins
I have already published a couple of articles about WordPress plugins, so I would recommend you check them:
However, please note that you should keep your WordPress blog plugin-light to keep a fast page load speed.