Blogging

• Divi by Elegant Themes – The theme that seems to be able to do everything. I now use Divi to build all my websites and have moved away form Genesis because it’s much easier to customise. That Marketing Dude is built on this bad ass theme. You may need to learn a little CSS but there’s awesome communities on Facebook that can help you out. Check Divi out if you’re after a new theme!

• Genesis Framework – Our favourite place to get themes is the powerful Genesis Framework. The Genesis Frameworks keeps your site running smoothly, look great and keeps your site secure like Fort Knox. See why I recommend Genesis!

• Jaxxy – A great keyword research tool if you don’t like using the Google Keyword Planner tool. You can get 30 searches for free to check it out and then it’s only $19 per month for the basic plan which will suit 90% of you. $50 per month for their “Enterprise” plan which is still EXTREMELY affordable compared to most keyword tools.

• WordPress – The worlds most popular blogging platform! Originally released in 2003 it’s grown and now has millions and millions of people around the world using it. It’s what all of our websites are run on.

Domains and Hosting

• Namecheap – Our domain registrar! We have been with Namecheap since early 2013 and we don’t want to switch to anyone else. We love this company because they give you cheap domains with a years free privacy protection and they don’t try pushing their other services onto you. If you want a domain, we recommend these guys. Check out my review post to see why I suggest you to register your domains with them too.

• SiteGround – These guys are who I’m hosting all my sites with right now. Absolutely amazing! Their customer support team are legendary and there’s no queues to talk to someone in the live chat… Literally seconds until I’m chatting with someone who’s extremely helpful. Tech support is also insane! Helped me pinpoint the location of malware on my sites when I was hacked. Little more expensive for shared hosting but worth every penny. Check out my review post to see why I left HostGator for these guys!

• WP Engine – #1 for WordPress Dedicated Hosting! – After WordPress specialist hosting? WPEngine are one of the best in their field for WordPress dedicated hosting. Plus they come at a reasonable price. With no downsides compared to shared hosting, WPEngine will keep your website online and loading extremely fast! All things that are important in the eyes of the search engines… Google, I’m looking at you! I love their staging area (which is unique to WPEngine), fantastic for testing new themes and plugins!

Email Subscriptions & Marketing

• ConvertKit – These are the new kids on the block and they are killing it. You’ll get everything that you get with AWeber plus extras including automation rules (plus you get charged per unique subscriber unlike AWeber). I’ve moved across to ConvertKit after using AWeber for close to 1 year and I love it. Nathan Barry… Nice work. Check out ConvertKit and see if it’s the service for you dudes and dudettes.

Affiliate Marketplaces & Product Distribution

• Share A Sale – The place to go to find excellent products to promote, or if you have a product you want to sell it’s a great place to set up you affiliate marketing campaigns. I’ve only used this place as an affiliate, not a merchant. Excellent for affiliates to find a wide range of PPL (Pay per Lead) and PPS (Pay per Sale) products.

• Gumroad – I’ve recently started playing around with Gumroad for a drinking games book I created in Fiji. It’s extremely easy to use if you’re selling digital products and want the customers to go through a simple process to buy it. I’ll definitely be using Gumroad in the future especially seeing as their fees are really low.

Images

• Pixabay – A fantastic place to find images for your sites without having to worry about copyright infringements. All the images on this site fall under public domain so you don’t need to provide attribution either. It’s best place I’ve found that has a decent selection of images. 99% of the images on this site that I haven’t taken myself come from this website.

• StockSnap – Hundreds of new photos added weekly… All royalty free and require no attribution (music to my ears!) You can even get new pictures sent to your inbox!

• UnSplash – You’ll find a new high resolution picture added here every day. These are stunning images! These all don’t require you to provide attribution either and are all royalty free as well. This is one of my favourite sites to get pictures from. #LoveIt

Image Editors

• Pixlr. – A web based image editor that’s easy to use and which you can create some stunning images with. With 3 different pieces of software offered to you, Pixlr Editor, Pixlr Express and Pixlr o Matic, you have all the tools you need to create awesome pictures for your business or for your personal pictures that you’ve snapped all around the world… Check out my review on Pixlr, the free image too.

• Photopea – Wanna create and edit Photoshop files but you don’t want to pay for photoshop? Well, Photopea is here to the rescue. You can download PSD templates and edit them online FOR FREE using this online tool. It also works for GIMP files too if you use that program.

• GIMP – Think of this as a free version of Photoshop, but the lite version. It’s a fantastic little image editing software that doesn’t cost you a penny and is just like photoshop just without all the bells and whistles. You’ll be able to edit your images easily and even create some cool looking banners and graphics for your site with this tool.

• Canva – Awesome tool to help you create images for virtually anything you need. A HUGE selection on templates, free images (all paid images are $1 each) and all the dimension presets you could ever need.

• JPEGmini Lite – Free or paid (free give you 20 image compressions per day). Drag and drop any JPEG image into this Mac App and see your images get compressed by up to 80% without any loss in image quality. I use this all the time before uploading an image online!