Shane’s Recommended Online Marketing Tools

I love technology and gadgets, so tools for creating, running and growing an online business have long been an obsession of mine. Below, you'll find my recommended stacks for various purposes and stages of your business. What is a stack? It's a set of tools that you need, all for the same purpose and all chosen to work well with each other.

Basic Website Stack

This is everything you need to even be admitted to the game of online business. Before you've got this set up, don't even think of doing anything else.

Website/CMS

WordPress

I built my very first website with WordPress, built dozens of WordPress sites since and have never looked back. What makes WordPress so powerful isn't just that it's free and open source, but that it's also the most widely used and supported content management system you can use. With themes and plugins, you can customize your WordPress site to your needs. And most importantly: your own WordPress installation on your hosting account means you have full control and ownership of your content.

Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can be a pain in the ass. By default, it gives you some useful information, a lot of completely useless information and a simply overwhelming amount of options. It takes a lot of learning, before you really get good use out of this tool. That said, it is by far the most sophisticated analytics tool you can use for free and it's very widely supported and integrated. You won't fall in love with Google Analytics right away, but use it from the start. It will pay off, eventually.

Conversion Stack

Once you have a website set up, one of the most important steps is to put some lead generation in place. Here's what you need to start building an audience in the form of a mailing list. Plus, further tools that will help you create a conversion focused website.

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is one of countless email marketing and marketing automation tools available. Ultimately, it sets itself apart from competitors mainly through it's superior A/B testing features. It also has the most powerful follow-up automation builders in the business.

Lead Generation

Thrive Leads & Thrive Architect

The point of this page is not to promote my own products, but for lead generation it's just inevitable. If you're using WordPress, Thrive Leads is the best list building plugin, hands down. It gives you every opt-in form type you can think of, tons of templates and the ability to split test everything. And on the topic of building your mailing list, I don't know what I'd do without the Thrive Architect plugin for building landing pages, either.

A/B Testing

Thrive Optimize

A/B testing is one of the best tools in an online marketer's arsenal. Google Optimize is the best solution that's available for free, but it can be frustratingly complicated and slow to use. Result: you don't use it as much as you should. As a solution for this problem, we created the Thrive Optimize plugin for WordPress, which makes it a breeze to run split tests on your langing pages.

Webinars

GoToWebinar

Many new webinar platforms have come and gone, but GoToWebinar is still my top recommendation. The reason is simple: reliability. I've tested many other webinar services and I've had connectivity issues, quality issues and other problems with all of them, at a far greater rate than I ever have with GoToWebinar.

Marketing Stack

Tools that make you and your marketing team better at research and at creating effective marketing material.

PPC Ad Manager

AdEspresso

AdEspresso is a must-have as soon as you're spending more than $500/month on Facebook and/or AdWords ads. This tool will help you create many ads quickly, test them all against each other and easily narrow your ad set down to the variations that work best. It doesn't do many things that you can't theoretically also do with the Power Editor, but it's much faster and more convenient.

Market Research

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great market research tool. Enter any domain and it will show you the most socially shared content on that website. Enter any keyword and it will show you the most shared content (across all websites) on that topic. It also reveals the top influencers who shared specific posts. These features help you gain a good understanding of what's popular in your market and who potential influencers are that you can reach out to.

SEO

ahrefs

SEO hasn't been a major part of my marketing strategy in the past few years, but the one SEO tool I still use is ahrefs. It gives you a complete diagnostic view of how your site is performing in search. And it gives you the same complete view of any competitor website you care to know about.

Productivity Stack

These are the tools you need to get work done online, efficiently and effectively.

Password Manager

LastPass

To operate with some semblance of productivity and security online, you need a password manager. And the one we recommend is LastPass. If you aren't already using a password manager, you're probably using the same few passwords on many different websites or you've notes or spreadsheets with all your passwords written down. Both of those are terrible for your online security. A password manager will fix this security problem and also make your life a lot easier.

Files & Documents

Google Drive

Specification documents, SOPs (standard operating procedures), strategy and planning documents and any other business related document you can think of belongs on Google Drive. Drive is also where you can store all other files related to a business or project. Use it with the desktop app to sync your Drive folders with local files and you'll always have your business critical files at your fingertips, on any device, anywhere. Even if you are a solopreneur, I recommend using Google Drive, because once you start working with people, it is simply the best environment for keeping files in sync and working on documents collaboratively.

Task & Project Management

Trello

If you're starting our solo, Trello is just one of many tools you can use to manage your tasks and projects. How useful it is for a single user depends on the kind of work you do and how you use it. But as soon as you start working in a team, no matter how small, Trello really starts to shine. It's free to use, highly customizable and very, very useful

Digital Product Stack

These tools will help you set up a value based business, in which you sell digital products, services or memberships to your customers.

Payment Processing

Stripe

You know how you know Stripe is a leading solution for online payment processing? Because every other online payment processor is desperately trying to be like Stripe. Stripe is a great, fairly priced and widely supported solution for accepting credit card payments on your website.

Digital Product Delivery

SendOwl

SendOwl does some of the most boring, but also most important stuff for your business. Namely: invoices and EU VAT tax compliance. It also does some cool stuff like letting you accept Apple Pay and Bitcoin payments and adding a one-click upsell feature. Another important aspect to SendOwl is that it has reasonable pricing, whereas most other VAT compliance solutions are priced for the enterprise (i.e. stupidly expensive). Another great advantage: SendOwl automatically creates a simple affiliate program for your products.

Membership Site

MemberMouse

MemberMouse is the membership product we use for Thrive Themes. It integrates with PayPal, Stripe and other payment processors and gives you a lot of flexiblity in creating products, membership levels and protecting posts, pages and more. We've had our fair share of issues with this product, but the same is true for every other membership plugin I've ever used...

Customer Support

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a solid, affordable helpdesk system. When you start getting a good number of customers, you'll soon outgrow your email inbox as a tool for customers support. When that time comes, I recommend Freshdesk as the next step up.

Teamwork Stack

Here are some indispensably useful tools for when you start working with a small team (whether remote or on location). What stays the same is my recommendation for Trello - it's equally useful for small teams and for solo work.

Team Communication

Slack

Whatever you do, don't use email for communication in teams. Trying to keep up with email threads that multiple people are involved in is a surefire way to go crazy. Slack is one of many team messaging services and it has gained a lot of popularity. For our team, it's been the best, most efficient way to keep communication flowing (even with many on the team working remotely).

Contracts

HelloSign

As soon as you start working with people, you start needing contracts. Whether that's contracts for employees or freelancers, non-disclosure agreements or anything else where you need legal documents. HelloSign is an easy solution for legally binding, digital signatures. That means you don't have to send paper mail back and forth with remote team members. Since HelloSign also has a free plan, I recommend using it starting with your very first hire.

Advanced Project Management

Atlassian Jira

If you're managing a team of marketers, writers or anything other than developers, Trello is your tool. But if you're managing a software development team and you need to track versions, branches, bugs and more, I recommend you start using Jira. It's a very customizable project management tool made specifically for software development and it can accommodate even large teams and complex workflows.

Content Marketing

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a content marketing calendar for teams. If you have 3 or more people writing content for your blog, it's worth trying CoSchedule, to organize who publishes what and when. CoSchedule also has a very useful social media posting feature, which can replace some standalone social media tools.

Design Collaboration

InVision

InVision is an app for design teamwork. Your designers upload their work to InVision and anyone else on the team can easily add comments and give feedback. InVision can also be used to string together several designs into simple prototypes. In short, InVision is much, much better than emailing designs back and forth until you arrive at the final version.


Books That Will Make You a Better Entrepreneur

Books aren't as sexy as the latest new app that promises to run your business for you. In practice, though, I've gotten far more value out of the books I've read than out of all the tools I've ever used, combined. It's insane how much value you can get for a fistful of dollars, from books. Here are what I consider the cream of the crop, when it comes to books that will make you a more effective entrepreneur and leader:

Books That Will Make You a Better Person

The following books aren't directly about entrepreneurship, but they will help you cultivate the mindset, habits and character traits that will make you more effective, more productive and better overall.

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