Tools
Tools of the Trade
We are often asked what tools and resources we use or that we can recommend. Below are some of the best resources for maximizing your productivity and effectiveness and we’re happy to support them. Some we use or have used in our business, others we know work well. Our support for these resources is based on the benefits they could offer you and your endeavours.
DISCLOSURE
Some of these listed resources have affiliate links, and when you purchase any products or service using these affiliate links we will receive a small affiliate commission. Please note that none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and wherever possible we have negotiated special discounts that we extend to you.
Keyword Research
Keyword research can help you discover the exact words and phrases that people use in search engines when looking for information.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is part of Google Adwords. This tool is useful for learning what your customers are searching for, get keyword ideas, do market research around a niche, obtain potential traffic forecasts and the level of competition.
Price: Free
Bing Keyword Planner
Similar to Google Keyword Planner but on the Bing search network. While the volume data for each keyword will be less (Bing has less marketshare compared to Google), a keyword’s relative position against other keywords should be similar.
Price: Free
Ahrefs
Audit your website, explore competitors, research keywords and backlinks – all in one place. Powered by seriously big data and trusted by top SEOs.
Price: Paid
SEMrush
Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform. The platform enables discovery of growth opportunities, and help users run experiments to more accurately measure results.
Price: Paid
Website Creation
There are many different ways and technologies you can use for designing websites. Some are hosted by another company, others you host yourself.
WordPress
WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). There are two versions: WordPress.org which is open source, self-hosted and free, and WordPress.com which is a freemium hosted system owned and operated by Automattic Inc.
Price: Free and Freemium, depending which OPTION you choose
WPAstra
A fast, lightweight and customizable WordPress Theme. It’s customizer powered, SEO friendly and compatible with major page builders and Gutenberg. (Gutenberg is WordPress’s own drag and drop editor for the WordPress.org platform).
Price: Free and Paid
Elementor
Elementor is a free WordPress Page Builder, with over 3 million active installs. Create beautiful websites using a simple drag and drop interface. Include advanced targeting options for your marketing.
Price: Free and Paid
SquareSpace
SquareSpace is a hosted software as a service (SAAS) for website building and hosting. Its customers use pre-built website templates and drag and drop elements to create webpages.
Price: Free and Paid
WIX
WIX is a hosted cloud-based web development services that enables users to create websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools.
Price: Free and Paid
W3Schools
w3schools is a freemium educational website for learning coding online. It is the world’s largest web developer site. A fantastic resource when you need to know a little bit of HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML tutorials, and more.
Price: Freemium
Sucuri
A website security and protection platform that delivers peace of mind. Stop worrying about website security threats and get back to building your online brand.
Price: Securi Scanner: Free | Securi Security: Paid
Landing Pages
In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign.
Unbounce
Get more leads, sales, and customers with landing pages built just how you want in Unbounce’s drag-and-drop builder. Unbounce landing pages improve conversion rates and drive business.
Price: Paid
Leadpages
Turn your next idea into a published landing page in less than five minutes. Leadpages has mobile responsive landing pages. 100s of templates to choose from.
Price: Paid
Website Hosting
Website hosting are services that enable individuals and organizations to make their website visible and accessible via web browsers.
WP Engine
WP Engine provides managed WordPress hosting for mission critical sites around the world, and is optimized for WordPress-based websites.
Price: Paid
Siteground
Siteground provides Web, WordPress, Woocommerce, Cloud hosting as well as other tools and services for seamless site building. Outstanding customer support.
Price: Paid
Email Marketing
Email marketing uses email to promote a company’s products and services or to connect with the customers. It is an effective sales driver.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an all-in-one integrated marketing platform for small businesses, to grow your business on your terms. It’s easy to use with email marketing, ads, landing pages, and CRM tools.
Price: Fee and Paid
Active Campaign
Integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM. Save time while growing your business with sales automation.
Price: Paid
Hubspot
HubSpot offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software — plus the methodology, resources, and support — to help businesses grow better. Get started with free tools, and upgrade as you grow.
Price: Free and Paid
ConvertKit
ConvertKit provides a complete suite of marketing and promotion tools and email marketing software designed to help increase email conversion rates, audience building and helping you earn a living as a content creator.
Price: Free and Paid
eLearning Platforms
eLearning platforms provide content creators, education and training providers with resources and tools necessary to deliver and manage of online education.
Kajabi
An all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create online courses, launch marketing campaigns, build landing. A complete online business platform for serious entrepreneurs, experts, and influencers.
Price: Paid
teach:able
Create and sell your own online courses with the Teachable platform using your unique and valuable skills and experiences. Easily build a beautiful course website, share your knowledge and be rewarded for it.
Price: Paid
Thinkific
A software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. Create your own online courses and membership under your own brand, and see first-hand the impact of teaching online will have on your business.
Price: Free and Paid
Social Media Tools
Social media tools are specialised digital technologies that assist and/or automate repetitive or easily batched tasks to make them faster and easier to complete.
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform with a media dashboard that enables you to manage multiple networks and profiles. It is an open platform that integrates with tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, Adobe etc.
Price: Free and Paid
SocialPilot
An easy-to-use social media marketing tool that helps professionals, teams, and businesses automate their social media management. It helps customers at every step – right from publishing posts on their profiles to analyzing their posts’ performance.
Price: Paid
Agorapulse
A Social Media Management platform that enables marketers, businesses and agencies to manage all their social media messages, schedule and publish content, identify key influencers, monitor social channels, and more
Price: Free and Paid
Stock Images, Video and Audio
This is professional-grade content available for free or bought. The creators retain ownership and dictate the parameters for how each item can be used.
CanStock Photo
Search for stock photography images, videos, illustrations (and you don’t need an account or subscription). Also great for health, well-being and medical images.
Price: Pay as you Go
Shutterstock
Search for stock photography images, videos, illustrations. Also great for web buttons and banners.
Price: Pay as you Go
iStock Photos
Search for stock photography images, videos, illustrations. Also great for web buttons and banners.
Price: Pay as you Go
Getty Images
Search for stock photography images, videos, illustrations. Also great for web buttons and banners.
Price: Pay as you Go
Unsplash
Unsplash is a platform powered by an amazing community that has gifted hundreds of thousands of their own photos to fuel creativity around the world. Licence allows the content to be used in commercial projects. Purchased by Getty Images in 2021.
Price: Free
Pixabay
Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.
Price: Free
Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages. All content can be used for commercial projects.
Price: Free
Epidemic Sound
A digital music library of online music and audio clips, available for use in audio visual productions. The library is of the highest quality, usable on all social platforms and royalty-free forever.
Price: Pay as you Go
Fonts, Graphics and Colour
Fonts, graphics and colour account is a big part of web design. Use the psychology of visitors to effectively communicate your brand message.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ apps, including industry-leading tools and services for vector art and illustration, photography, video editing, graphic design and web development.
Price: Paid
Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. It’s the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS.
Price: Paid
Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is best in class for creating concept art, print projects, logos, icons, UI designs, mock-ups and more. It’s already the top choice of thousands of professional illustrators, web designers, game developers and other creatives.
Price: Paid
Affinity Publisher
The Affinity Creative Suite of professional applications for desktop and iPad has everything you need to bring your ideas to life. From the smoothest, fastest photo editing (Affinity Photo), graphic design (Affinity Designer) powerful publishing (Affinity Publisher) software.
Price: Paid
Envato
Everything you need to get your creative projects done. Graphic templates, web templates, logos, stock images, video templates, sound effects, graphic templates and more.
Price: Paid
Adobe Color Wheel
This interactive color wheel is easy to use and takes the guesswork out of choosing colours. You can edit or refine themes and experiment with different combinations. Check your colour choices using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Price: Free
DaFont
A great tool for finding different fonts that you can download for your projects. The fonts presented on this website are their authors’ property, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.
Price: Free and Paid
PicPick
All-in-one design tool for Windows Users. A full-featured screen capture tool, Intuitive image editor, colour picker, colour palette, pixel-ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and more.
Price: Free
CANVA
Use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature to design design presentations, social media graphics, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts to choose from.
Price: Free and Paid
CoverAction Pro
Create 2D and 3D covers for your ebook, kindle, reports, binders etc. Create any artwork you want using templates. You need to have Adobe Photoshop to use this product.
Price: Paid
Video Editing
The majority of businesses are now using video as a part of their digital marketing strategy. It has a high conversion rate and return on investment.
Adobe PremierePro
Adobe Premiere Pro is a timeline -based video editing software application developed by Adobe Systems and published as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud licensing program. It is an industry-leading video editing software for film, TV and the web.
Price: Paid
DaVinci Resolve
DaVinci Resolve is the world’s only high end professional solution that combines video editing, colour correction, visual effects, motion graphics and audio post-production all in one software tool. It comes in two versions: the free DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Price: Free and Paid
HitFilm
FXhome, the multi-talented crew of coders and creatives bringing you professional and accessible creative software including the free HitFilm Express and the paid version HitFilm Pro. The company motto is that all artists should have access to great software.
Price: Free and Paid
Filmora
FXhome, the multi-talented crew of coders and creatives bringing you professional and accessible creative software including the free HitFilm Express and the paid version HitFilm Pro. The company motto is that all artists should have access to great software.
Price: Free and Paid
PowerDirector
Whether you’re new to editing or an experienced creator, if you can imagine it, you can edit it with PowerDirector. Drag-and-drop transitions, easy-to-apply effects, and ready-made motion graphics, to tell your story the way you want.
Price: Paid
Camtasia
Camtasia is an all-in-one screen recorder and video editor. Camtasia makes it simple to record and create professional-looking videos on Windows and Mac. Record your screen, add video effects, transitions and more.
Price: Paid
Screenflow
Screenflow by Telestream is an all-in-one screen recorder and video editor. Screenflow makes it simple to record and create professional-looking videos on Mac. Record your screen, add video effects, transitions and more.
Price: Paid
iMovie
With iMovie for iOS and macOS, you can enjoy your videos like never before. It’s easy to browse your clips and create Hollywood-style trailers and stunning 4K-resolution movies. You can even start editing on iPhone or iPad, then finish on your Mac.
Price: Free
Video Hosting
There are several high quality video hosting platforms to choose from.
YouTube
Host your videos on YouTube, or set up a Channel for yourself or your business. Use the YouTube Creator Academy to learn how to get the most out of using YouTube and help grow your channel with free online courses.
Price: Free
Vimeo
Watch, share and upload your high quality videos, High Definition playback, No disruptive ads, powerful privacy settings.
Price: Free and Paid
Wistia
Video Hosting for Business. Wistia provides professional video hosting with amazing viewer analytics, HD video delivery, and marketing tools to help understand your visitors.
Price: Paid
Podcasting
Ever thought of creating your own Podcast for your business, here are some links that you may find useful.
Apple Podcasts
A catalog that creates dialogue.. Apple Podcasts is home to the largest and most talked-about collection of shows across all subjects. From globally recognized names to the most authentic independents
Price: Free
Libsyn
Libsyn has from the start stayed true to developing a platform where podcasters have the freedom they need to deliver the kind of podcast they want – from a hobby podcasters to enterprises.
Price: Paid
Webinars and Online Meetings
Webinars can help establish you as an expert in your industry and a trustworthy and reliable source of information, especially now with COVID-19.
Zoom
Zoom is a cloud-based video communications app that allows you to set up virtual video and audio conferencing, webinars, live chats, screen-sharing, and other collaborative capabilities.
Price: Free and Paid
Demio
Demio is easy to use and includes all the tools needed to run high converting webinars. It is highly interactive using polls and an easy system to hand out extra content mid-webinar.
Price: Paid
Affiliate Disclaimer:
Some of these links are affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission if you purchase from this page.
None of the fees of these resources have been increased to compensate us.