Our Top Online Marketing Tools And Resources

It’s strange but so many top online marketers keep their tools and resources secret.  We get it – especially when you are talking about traffic sources that you want to keep secret – but honestly why not share your knowledge and help someone else get a good start? That’s why we always have a link on our website to our top online marketing tools and resources but today we want to share them on our blog too because we get asked all the time and it will be easy to share here and you can bookmark the page as well 🙂

Obviously if we added them up there are hundreds of tools and resources that we use so we will just keep this simple and give you our top online marketing tools and resources that will get you off to a flying start if you’re new or save you time if you are struggling with getting everything done yourself – things like autoresponders, capture page systems, graphics tools, social media posting and planning etc

Let’s get started with our top online marketing tools and resources then …

Our Top Online Marketing Tools And Resources

An Autoresponder is the # one of our top online marketing tools and resources.  We use and recommend Aweber although we do use other services as well such as GetResponse and Infusionsoft but we have them for different purposes.  To start you ONLY NEED ONE!

Facebook Marketing Tools

Ad Espresso – This is one tool that we can’t live without and has made our life so much easier when it comes to creating Facebook ads.  It has all the features of the Power Editor, but much more user friendly.

Ad Espresso gives you the ability to split test, optimize, create multiple ads all in a few simple clicks. No more creating multiple different ads in the ad manager to split test, as ad espresso has a feature that will do it for you just by checking off a few selections.  It’s Facebook ads on steroids and we love it

Ad Espresso has many powerful features and again….our most favorite tool.  You can even get a FREE trial to test out the program

Adrespark – This is a tool to manage your pictures for Facebook and Instagram ads and a great addition to save you time creating great ads .

Social Media Automation

Love it or hate it social media is THE BEST WAY to communicate with your audience and the best one will depend on your audience demographic.  Whichever that is you will want to be using at least one of our top online marketing tools and resources for time saving communication

Once you have decided where your audience hangout (which social media) then you will want to share content with them to engage them and interest them in your offer (s)

We love Buffer – it’s an App (application) that you add to your preferred browser (Google Chrome, Firefox etc) and allows you to share your content on various chosen social media. The basic version is free and the paid version gives you more options.

Our other favourite is PostPlanner and we’ve been users since it first began.  The best thing is that if you are ever stuck for content they come up with ideas for you.  More like, more shares and more clicks so what more could you ask for!  It is Facebook specific but of course you can then integrate it with Buffer and share on other social media such as Twitter and Linkedin.  It’s scheduling feature is brilliant can be done right from the Post Planner back office.  We all want more time after all.

Although no strictly a social media automation we have to mention here RebelMouse because it actually creates effectively a website of your favourite social media content which you can share with your audience.  Here’s ours just to give you an example.

Websites

Like having an autoresponder service having a website is also crucial to your success online and another essential of our top online marketing tools and resources.  We recommend a wordpress.org website and with hundreds of themes to choose from this will become your home online just like ours is.  You will need a domain (we use GoDaddy for ours) and hosting.

You will need hosting if you are building out your own wordpress website and there are plenty to choose from such as Hostgator and GoDaddy for example.  We use TSOHost and have found it very reliable.

Like your autoresponder service your website is a precious asset so do make sure to back up regularly!

WordPress Training : Highly recommend WordPress101 

Talking WordPress these are two of our favourite “essential” plugins

WordPress Plugins

SEO Pressor : We have been using this for the past 4 years or more and use it every time we create a blog post as it allows us to get the best SEO on our blog posts.  It provides you a super simple check list once you have decided on your keyword or keyword phrase and helps you optimise your post as you create it.  Using this tool we are often able to rank a blog post on page one of Google for our keywords.

Pretty Link : We love PrettyLink and use it all the time to help us make long URL’s look very professional.  In particular affiliate links can look very ugly and you can make them look very nice. So for example our affiliate link for Pretty Link Pro is https://prettylinkpro.com?aff=chrisandsusan and using a domain we have called chrisandsusan.me we can now have http://chrisandsusan.me/prettylinkpro  Much better don’t you think?

There are literally thousands of plugins you can use for many different things.  Be cautious of free plugins and ask around if in doubt as some can create ways for the bad guys to hack into your website!

Sales Funnels

Creating sales funnels into your business is essential and up until recently it has been really difficult and time consuming creating the necessary resources.  Now it’s super simple.  There are are two main options here and our suggestion is to find the one that works for you and your business.  The two most popular are Click Funnels and Lead Pages.  You really don’t need both so choose what suits you best.  We use Lead Pages and really love it. The additional feature in Click Funnels that more experienced marketers and product creators love is their affiliate platform built in.  Whichever you choose they are primarily used to quickly and easily create capture pages, sales pages and funnels and one of our highly recommended top online marketing tools and resources.

Video 

Video is a really great way to provide information and build trust with your audience. If you are going to create videos using your mobile device then we highly recommend a SmartLav Kit as it will give you great audio to go with your video and honestly people will watch a video if the sound is good but not if it isn’t so be warned.

Don’t forget to add the YouTube App to your phone so you can quickly upload your videos from your phone ready for your audience to view

Video hosting – we use YouTube for our educational and information videos but for sales videos and opt-in videos we use Amazon S3 and EasyVideoSuite

Webinars

We find that webinars are a great way to build our business by providing value information to our audience.  We have an entrepreneurs show called “An Audience With” which we host monthly on ChrisAndSusan.TV and use the Google Hangout platform.

For sales webinars or where we want to share slides we prefer to use GoToWebinar as it’s easier to manage and to monitor and you get a free 30 day trial.  We also love the feature recently added which means you can also be seen on video via your webcam if you want to. For us it’s perfect because we love video and it helps us build better relationships with our audience.  If you don’t like being on video then you don’t have to be.

Graphics and Video Editing

Graphics are a big feature and an essential mention in our top online marketing tools and resources.  Some are free and some are paid for and we wrote about this just recently.

Canva : Canva is a great program to create individual custom designed images. There are thousands of photos and templates already available in Canva but you can also upload your own photos using free images from sites such as Pexels and Pixabay. We use Canva to create our Facebook Ad images and Facebook many of our status updates and blog post images

MoonPixlar : MoonPixlar is fantastic program very much like Canva but the options for creating very individual custom images is pretty awesome.  Highly recommended.  It’s not free but it’s the best tool we have seen outside of Photoshop.  We created the feature image in seconds using MoonPixlar.

Video Editing : We use Screenflow for our tutorial videos and recording webinars we want to watch later or to create a back up copy of if they are our own.  It’s really easy to use.  We also like it for recording tutorial videos that can then easily be uploaded to YouTube or your favourite video hosting platform.

Additional Top Online Marketing Tools and Resources

To be honest we could keep adding tools and resources because there are so many we take for granted now in our business so we’ll just include a couple more

Evernote : we use Evernote on our mobiles and on our laptops and we can sync all our stuff in one place.  We see something we want to keep or a note we want to look at later and it’s always there  It’s huge advantage is that you can access your notes from any computer or mobile device by just logging in and you can choose to share a note with anyone you want.

RoboForm : Roboform is invaluable to us.  It’s an online password saving device that we can sync from mobile to pc and only have to remember ONE password to unlock all the remaining passwords to sites we want to access (we have hundreds between us)

Snagit : Snagit is a wonderful time saving tool from Techsmith (the same people who make Camtasia) that allows us to snag images, videos, create screencasts etc.  Another resource we could not be without.

Online Business Training

Clearly we’re hot on online business education and it’s what our business is all about

We highly recommend MOBE because it’s focus is education and entrepreneurship and you choose which you want – training or a business or both.

We have focused on online and business education ever since we began our online career a little over 5 years ago now and have seen many different platforms come and go so we only recommend what we use ourselves and that we know works.

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