As a business, increasing your traffic and growing your following and readership are among the most challenging endeavours. Having a profitable business is usually a primary goal for every economic activity. So, deciphering the best marketing tools for business that will help you in your mission is of paramount importance.
Counting on the best selection of marketing tools for business including a toolkit of the best blog writing tools, the most helpful scheduling tools, and the easiest-to-use design tools will lighten your life as a business owner or marketer. And finally, help increase your monthly revenue.
Below is a comprehensive list of applications and tools that will help you reach the success you need and want.
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Best Blogging Platforms
Squarespace
Squarespace is a site builder, and web hosting tool and includes a set of marketing features to help you design, create and manage your site, engage with your audience and grow your traffic. It provides an easy manner to build your site and brand without the necessity of hiring a web designer or a coder.
Squarespace allows you to create your site without knowing to code. You have various optimized layouts at your disposal to help you in your endeavors and intuitive builders to help you achieve your goals. You have at your disposal analytics, landing pages, e-commerce options and highly responsive customer service to support you. This is a paid tool with a free trial period.
WordPress
WordPress.org is the option you need if you want a self-hosted site that you plan to monetize and transform into a profitable business. It is highly customizable, you can literally create your site the way you want, but you will have to deal with code. You own your site and your content, and you can use all the plugins you want, free and paid, and also you can choose from thousands of themes, no matter your budget. It will cost you the hostage of the site (see BlueHost below).
Bluehost
It is a popular web hosting service that gives you a free domain, free site builder, and a WordPress installation. Their customer service chat is 24/7 and their pricing rates are very affordable. Bluehost comes highly recommended for beginners as they have low rates and practice a 30-day money-back guarantee.
HRank
HRank is a great tool when you need to choose or change your web hosting provider. This web hosting rating system analyzes more than 300 providers particularly shared web hosting providers, aims to be always updated and free. It is based on analysis, research, and experience, and takes into consideration criteria such as response time, uptime, support level, company’s history and experience, website usability, etc.
Best Marketing Tools for Business: SEO and Analytics Tools
Ahrefs
There is no such blogger or content creator who doesn’t want to see his work ranking as high as possible on search engine results. Ahrefs offers you an edge for high-ranking success through competitor analysis, keyword search, technical site, and SEO auditing, content analysis, niche monitoring, and rank tracking. It provides you with a competitive advantage by monitoring your competitors’ activity and niche and availing tools to grow your traffic. Ahrefs might not be a very affordable blogging tool for beginners, but it provides a strong pillar for future success.
Yoast
Yoast is a famous by now SEO Plugin tool. Available for free or on premium options. Getting more traffic and visitors, increasing your readers’ engagement, and making their return is a high desideratum of bloggers. Using Yoast facilities, you are sure of getting keyword optimization for your content, previews of your social media pages, readability verified, and categories control, among other technical background stuff. You have the possibility to edit your title tags, slugs, and meta descriptions as it provides a solution to anything that hinders your SEO ranking.
Google Keywords Planner
Keyword research is crucial to any blogger and in this highly competitive blogging era, counting on excellent keyword research and a strategic tool is key. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a reliable tool to help you find the right words to target and to keep remaining relevant. It gives you a comparative analysis of the keyword trends for your niche, therefore, narrowing down your keyword list to just the most important keywords.
Google Analytics
Bloggers need to be aware of what strategy, what content marketing is working and what is not working for them, and their established goals. Measuring your content metrics is the way to go if you want to be a result-driven blogger. Google Analytics is a free tool that makes you aware of your traffic volume, sources and conversion rates, audience characteristics, most visited sections of your site, most visited articles of the blog, referral sources, and many more detailed insights. You gain the knowledge of what exactly is increasing your traffic and conversion rate thus turning your insights into adjusted strategies and a profitable business.
Best Marketing Tools for Business: Social Media Scheduling Tools
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a paid social media marketing scheduling tool coupled with an editorial calendar tool. In short, with CoSchedule you can manage your team and their workflow, schedule social media posts on various platforms, manage communication campaigns, etc. This is a one-stop-shop for many marketing operations. Be it content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and automation, analytics, workflow management, headline analyzer, email title analyzer, you name it CoSchedule has a reliable solution.
For blog traffic increase, efficient email campaigns, social media calendar management, and optimizing all your headlines, email subjects, and social media posts, CoSchedule is your multipurpose tool. They have a free 14-day trial period, so why not investigate what can happen in those 14 days.
Tailwind
Pinterest is a visual search engine whose capabilities are untapped completely yet. It is a pure gold mine for most niches and for bloggers, businesses, and entrepreneurs in search of alternative ways to grow their blogs and sites. It has the capacity to be your highest traffic driver, better than any organic search engine or social media channel be it Facebook or Instagram.
However, to be successful on Pinterest, you have to pin more than 10 times a day and that’s time-consuming. This is where Tailwind interferes and saves the day. Tailwind helps to schedule your pins for an entire week in an organized manner and in advance according to an optimized calendar. They have a very user-friendly dashboard that provides you with detailed analytics.
It is a paid tool whose benefits outweigh the costs and it’s a must-have if you want to make Pinterest a primary source of traffic for your site.
Later
There is numerous software that has made it possible to deal with social media content automation. Blogging requires you to constantly connect with your audience through various social media platforms which can be tedious. Later is an Instagram scheduling app that helps you plan, schedule, and auto-publish your Instagram posts. 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 affordable.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare plugin creates beautifully crafted social media icons that make sharing content on social media pages a breeze. It simplifies the button setup process and works exceptionally well for WordPress platforms. The buttons are light so as not to interfere with the page loading speed. It is a paid tool on a yearly subscription basis.
Hootsuite
This is a social media management tool that helps you keep track of all your social media activities through a properly structured dashboard. You are able to schedule, manage and report all social media activities carried out by you or by your team members. Hootsuite also measures and reports the impact of your social media campaigns hence giving you an accurate overview of ROI. It is a paid tool with a 30-day trial period.
Top Marketing Tools for Business: Email Marketing Tools
Convertkit
“Money is in the list” is a cliché but reveals the truth. The best-performing way to monetize your blog is via your email list and Convertkit is one of the best tools to grow quickly and manage your mailing list and mail campaigns. Convertkit was expressly conceived for creators and their needs. Convertkit helps you design, test email content, measure the performance of your campaigns, and automate them. And finally, grow your audience.
You do not have to be a tech genius to use Convertkit as the interface is intuitive and user-friendly and is designed to make your tasks easier. You are able to manage thousands of blog subscribers in a relaxed and convenient manner. In addition, it provides you with the option to effortlessly switch from all the other email marketing apps.
Mailerlite
When starting your blogging journey, Mailerlite offers a free email marketing platform for up to 1000 subscribers. It empowers you with a drag-and-drop email builder, automated landing page creation, beautifully crafted popups, and an email automation platform. This gives you the luxury of creating refined campaigns and growing your following with ease for free till you reach 1000 subscribers.
MailChimp
One of the most if not the most popular email marketing tool, free for the first 2000 subscribers with a limit of 12,000 emails monthly. MailChimp allows you to create a campaign that will suit best your communication goals. It also provides many customization options for the design of your mail if you want images or videos in your mail messages.
The design of the opt-in series is very rigid for the free account and the reason why I renounced on MailChimp after the first two months. Transferring your subscribers to another email marketing app is a painful and tedious process if you have thousands of subscribers to move.
As for the design of the opt-in forms, Converkit is by far the best option. So, if you are seeking convenience, and ease and are a serious blogger with thousands of followers, Converkit is what you should choose.
Traffic and List-Building Apps
Sumo
This is a comprehensive suite of tools that help grow your site’s traffic. Sumo is free for accounts with under 200 subscribers. For around $25 a month, you get an open option of 10 tools to work with what best suits your needs. With Sumo, you are able to track your success as you continue to build a following. Tools like list builder, scroll box, welcome mat, and sharing buttons among others increase your shares and subscriptions.
Milotree
It is a cost-effective tool due to its affordable pricing. This is the quickest way to grow your social media following and email list, and subscribers. Milotree provides you with an easy way to convert your site visitors into followers. It cuts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest among others. It is a mobile-configured pop-up that auto-converts your current traffic to subscribers. It has analytics, therefore, enabling you to track and monitor growth and results.
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Marketing Tools for Business: Writing Tools
Grammarly
This is a free blogging tool that is useful even for the best and most experienced bloggers. It ensures your blogs have a zero error rate when it comes to typos and grammatical errors. As we all, bloggers and writers need to verify our work from this point of view. Grammarly is one of the best grammar and spelling checking tools, compatible with all web browsers, and extremely easy to download and install.
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 material, make it accessible to anyone you want to share it with and collaborate during content creation. Being a secured cloud storage system, it is perfect for files, photos, and video back up.
Video and Image Design Tools
Canva
We are all visual creatures, there is no doubt about that. Thus, the visual appeal of your content is what attracts your followers to you. It goes without 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 photos and design elements database.
You can customize layouts for all social media channels, for various presentations, for ebooks, you name it. It simply empowers you to go wild with your creativity hence standing out; it is easy to use and less complicated than dedicated design apps. Its editing and resizing features are efficient. Canva has a free option that you can use with confidence and a superior paid option.
PhotoShop
PhotoShop is a powerful Adobe product that gives you the ability to create your images the way you want, with lots of advanced design features at your disposal. Photos creation, enhancement, editing, simulation and 3D artwork are made possible via PhotoShop. Additionally, you can design layouts for websites, mobile applications, logos, banners, just about any work of art. It is a paid tool with either yearly or monthly subscriptions.
Blogstomb
Images have the ability to make your website slow and this is such a turn-off to your web visitors. In an age of instant gratification, no one waits for a site that takes ages to load. Photographers use Blogstomb to resize and edit photos to give them the perfect look they are after. It is a one-off purchased application.
Screencastomatic
Video editing and recording are made to look like they cost a fortune. The best blog sites have now transitioned from images to videos. Screencastomatic is a free tool that helps create videos, add narrations, edit videos, and share them. The content produced is clear and of high quality. It is a tool creating a revolution in screen recording.
Marketing Tools for Business: Sales Generating Tools
Leadpages
Your target audience needs to be driven from just being readers to being part of your sales funnel and becoming paying customers. Landing pages are the vehicle to do that. Statistics sustain and even guarantee a more than 55% increase in sales with the effective use of landing pages. Leadpages is a land page builder tool that will help you create a conversational-driven and effective landing page.
It is a paid tool that gives you multiple and vast selections of drag-and-drop templates to create your lead gen campaigns on.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is one of the most commonly used sales funnel tools to drive sales. It helps you build pages easily inside sales funnels that are built for conversion. You do not need to be a tech wizard as most of your task is reduced to drag and drop. It is a paid tool (14-day free trial) that every internet marketer need. Putting your information out in the best way possible is how your customers get to connect with you and purchase your product or service. Clickfunnels grow your business through result-driven sales funnels.
BeaconStac
This is a fancy tool that can help expand your business via a QR code generator. Start to create branded digital experiences and your business will stand out. Customized QR codes are a way to do that while inserting your logo, frames, CTAs, personalized backgrounds, and data patterns. Try a new way to manage digital campaigns and customer behavior.
Team Management Tools
Slack
Slack is a team and project management platform. It allows proper, real-time communication between teams that work together. There are over 1000 applications that can be integrated with the platform, thus saving time to get feedback and manually reviewing work.
Trello
Content campaigns entail so much work and keeping everyone on track and up to speed can take a lot of time. Trello ensures there is less stress and more productivity during the campaign duration. It reduces email strings, keeps timelines, and monitors productivity. It is a free tool that is fun, flexible with organized boards to make your work faster and easier.
Marketing Tools for Business: Income-Generating Platforms
SendOwl
This is a digital selling platform whereas a blogger, you can sell your products and services. It is easy to create a product you want to sell and get clients to buy it directly from you. It is 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, and secure and provides a huge network of people for you to reach out to and benefit. Their payment plan is affordable as they start monthly charges at $9.
Teachable
It is an amazing and go-to platform to create and sell online courses. They offer both free and paid plans to cater for 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 blogger, if possible, in his area of expertise. Having the correct resources makes it easy to produce high-quality, interesting and thought-provoking articles. Planning, organizing, managing and analyzing the content and all communication campaigns and continually improving the results are what make the best blog sites and consequently, you need the best blogging tools to support your marketing activity.
