Digital Marketing Toolkit – Content Marketing & Automation Must-Haves

Backup & WordPress Maintenance

Funnel Software

Use these products and conquer your market by getting a head start. These are the tools I use to build all of our web properties and our clients' sites, including several eCommerce stores, local businesses, and popular blogs. We endorse all of these products because we use them daily.

As an incurable tinkerer and explorer of new stuff, I have tried thousands of pieces of software in my quest to build the best performing and converting websites. Insatiable curiosity will kill you if you're a cat but can help you make better decisions as a marketer.

Edison tried 1000 lightbulb designs before settling on one final design. So, to save you countless hours of experimentation, here is my selection of final ‘lightbulb' software tools in the online business and marketing world.

Digital Marketing Toolkit – resources, apps, tools, and tips to help you build a comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy

Disclosure: This Digital Marketing Toolkit includes “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission, at no extra cost to you.

Web Hosting

If you do nothing else, get a high-quality web hosting package! It doesn't have to cost the earth, either. Slow sites were acceptable back in the old days of the internet. Now the speed that your pages load directly affects your bottom line. Slow loading means lost revenue.

Cloudways – 24/7/365 Live Chat, Server Customization and Configuration, Reliable and secure. Pay as you go service (only pay for what you use). Dedicated Environment with SSD-based hosting. The customer support is awesome.

A good alternative to Cloudways is WPX. Check out the deals on both platforms to see which suits you best.

Task & Project Manager Tools

To manage your business, freelance business, or side hustle, you need some way of managing projects and the many tasks that you'll be presented with.

TickTick and Todoist are web, mobile, and desktop apps that take a basic to-do list concept and add lots of bells and whistles. Break projects and tasks into smaller subtasks with these apps. It's great for productivity and motivation to ‘tick' off tasks as they are completed. You can collaborate, create smart lists and complex tagging, add habit tracking, and incorporate your calendar.

Trello has been around for ages and is used by millions of people to organize tasks and projects. It's basic, and the premium features are not ground-breaking, but for small teams or solopreneurs, Trello offers a great intro to task management. A good alternative is ClickUp for more advanced task management.

Notion is very popular writing and brainstorming tool, journal, task manager, todo list, and pretty much everything in between. Notion now has some impressive AI writing features that can help you write faster and better, organize your thoughts and ideas, and create a better overall writing experience. Notion's AI writing tools are also much faster than most competitors and even ChatGPT.

SEO Tools

• Inlinks is a new tool that savvy SEOs and marketers are using to beat their competitors. It's not the easiest tool in the world to use, but it's definitely one of the most powerful. The fact that it's billed as an “entity-based Semantic SEO tool” might give you some idea that this tool is aimed at people who are serious about SEO. But it's easier to use than you might think. The tool works on the concept that Google is always looking for certain entities and concepts in a piece of content. If your content does not have everything Google expects, but your competitor does, expect to rank lower. InLinks tells you what you need to add to your content. InLinks also contains great internal linking and auditing tools. Recommended.
• We have lost a bit of faith in the WordPress SEO Plugin called Yoast over the years (bloated, pricey for good features) and despite writing a guide to Yoast, we've switched to SEOPress. We're not looking back. It's excellent.

• Surfer SEO – What's different about this tool is that it takes the approach that Google is already telling you how to get your content on the first page and even to the first position. Examining what's already ranking and creating better content is very time-consuming. That's where Surfer comes in. The tool does the hard work in analyzing all of the top web pages and then comparing to your page via a complete audit. Surfer SEO is a killer digital marketing tool.

Rank Trackers

If you care about organic traffic then it's worth investing in a rank tracker to do the following.

1. Track your site's page ranking for individual keywords
2. Track rankings across different search engines and geographical locations
3. Monitor search ranking fluctuations and historical data
4. Track competitor rankings for keywords

Here are some of the best apps you can use today to track your website's performance based on your target keywords:

• SE ranking is what we use for ranking tracking at Fat Frog Media. Unbeatable price and options. The interface is intuitive and the white label reports are a huge time saver.
• Accuranker offers one of the easiest-to-use interfaces of all rank tracking software. It's also highly customizable and lets you track your own keywords and those of your competitors with precision.

Read more about keyword SERP trackers.

Sales & Landing Pages

The industry standard for sales pages with a built-in shopping cart is ThriveCart. ThriveCart gives you funnels, one-click upsells, product upgrades, A/B testing, coupons, autoresponders, affiliate software, and more. It's a complete solution for businesses that want flexible sales pages that convert customers without the hassle of coding and expensive plugins. Thrivecart is one of those tools that can take your marketing campaigns to the next level with minimum fuss.

Pabbly Recurring Payments (with single payments) is a worthy alternative to Thrivecart, especially if you'd prefer a monthly subscription. We use Pabbly at Fat Frog Media for our monthly recurring services.

Check out this list of the best platforms to sell digital downloads online.

Website Optimization

Site speed can be greatly improved with the help of a cache. And we like W3 Total Cache. However, while the default installation settings will give a bump in performance, it takes some tweaking to get the most out of this plugin. On the other hand, WP Rocket takes care of many of the technical configurations that W3 Total Cache leaves to the user. I still believe that a properly configured W3TC beats WP Rocket in performance by a small margin, but the latter offers convenience at a price.

UptimeRobot keeps an eye on your websites and servers to make sure that you are notified in case of any downtime or costly failures.

Video SEO

TubeBuddy – rise to the top of YouTube with TubeBuddy. This free plugin offers a better overall analysis of your YouTube channel and individual video optimizations. But less competent with the finer details. Better for beginners and cheaper too.

Graphics & Design Tools

Canva is the most popular non-technical graphics design tool on the planet. And it's excellent. I use the Pro version for everything these days. It also connects to social media platforms directly.

Visme has evolved into a really great tool for creating infographics, presentations, social graphics, proposals, resumes, reports, newsletters, and a lot of other assets that many businesses need. Rather than spend a lot of money on a designer, use Visme to build them with the quick-start templates.

There's also a flawless background remover tool included in the platform.

Forms & Lead Generation

Building your email list is super important. I'm sure you know so I'll get straight to the point. Use one of these two options.

• Woorise makes it easy to generate leads from your website with high converting forms, landing pages, and content giveaways. Connect your forms, surveys, and quizzes to autoresponders, webinars, and CRMs.
• With many different styles to choose from, A/B testing, and inline, after content, and pop-up options, ConvertBox is great value and comes with lots of analytics tracking and insights that can help drive digital marketing decisions
• Convert Pro is a WordPress plugin and doesn't require the loading of external assets. In theory, it should be faster. Convert Pro is more customizable and offers some extra flexibility.

WordPress Themes

If you're not using WordPress, you probably have a very good reason not to. If you don't have a good reason, get a WordPress website and reap the many benefits.

If you want a super fast WordPress theme, choose GeneratePress.

If you're looking for versatility, customizability, and good looks, try Astra.

Image Optimization

Once you've uploaded images to WordPress or your website hosting platform, you'll want them to load quickly for users. If not, they will click off to another site. Nobody likes waiting for web pages to load. That's where an image optimization tool comes in. Check out Shortpixel, a plugin for WordPress that automatically compresses your images. There's no loss in quality but the file size drops right down. A brilliant plugin for making your WordPress, Shopify or pretty much any blog faster.

An alternative to ShortPixel is EWWW Image Optimizer. The advantage of EWWW is that it also includes a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster delivery of images to global visitors.

Writing Tools

Writing content for the web requires an extra set of skills but you don't need to invest hours in researching when you've got Surfer SEO and Frase in your digital marketing toolkit. Both tools can help you create, optimize, and compare your content to content that's ranking higher.

Both tools not only help by giving you the right keywords, content length, and headings, they also audit your content and make suggestions that will push your content to the top of the search engines.

For AI-powered Ad copy writing and general website copy, check out Anyword (20% discount with promo Anyword20)

Pro Writing Aid. I discovered this app in 2017 and have been infatuated with it ever since. It's so good. For me, Pro Writing Aid is like Grammarly and Hemingway App fused into one excellent tool.

If you're big into research and spend a lot of time trawling through research papers, white papers, long web documents, and blog posts, Genei's AI-powered tools will help you produce content from your research faster.

Social Media Tools

Blogging and online business success require some form of social media interaction, whether you like it or not. Use these tools to make your life easier, less cluttered, and more productive.

Content Studio does everything you might need for finding good content, scheduling, adding retargeting pixels, and automating posting. Post to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business, and Linkedin. If you do social media in your digital marketing strategy, try it out.

You also need tools to quickly create social media images, flyers, promotional materials, and logos. Canva offers templates for every type of social channel, a background remover for your ecommerce products, logo maker, ebook designer, and a lot more. A subscription to Canva is a great way of combining multiple tools into one. Canva is one of the best value marketing tools money can buy.

Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Porter Metrics offers beautiful and free Google Data Studio templates that present all the SEO data you need in an easy-to-understand format. Great for client reporting or in-house reports.

Discover more about your target audience with Google Analytics, the big daddy of website (and app) analytics software. It's easy to get started with but if you want to get more than the basic reports you will need to invest some time in properly learning the software. Check this beginner's guide to Google Analytics for a primer. Anyone interested in learning about their customers and getting insights into visitor behaviour should install it. Of course, not everyone loves Google Analytics and many website owners prefer a more privacy-focused analytics solution. If that's you, try Fathom Analytics, a privacy-first analytics tool that doesn't use personal data.

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) could be considered a companion product to Analytics. It performs a different purpose but both are intricately tied and provide tons of data on visitor behaviour.

We also use Bing Webmaster Tools, which takes care of Bing and Yahoo search monitoring, URL submission, and reporting. Although Bing searches are tiny compared to the big G, the market share owned by Bing is actually growing. It accounts for 10-20% of some of my sites' organic traffic. At the higher end, that's one out of every 5 people. Nothing to be sniffed at.

Outreach Tools & Email Finders

• Hunter.io is without a doubt the best email finder tool. The Chrome plugin lets you find and verify email addresses directly from a company or blog page. It's so easy you won't know how you lived without it. Perfect for businesses doing backlink outreach or collaboration outreach. Hunter offers a free plan and there's even a free cold email campaign tool. Amazing.
• Find That Lead is a lead prospecting tool. Use the prospecting database to find key players in any business or easily grab email addresses from a website even if they're hidden.

Backup Software

Your hosting company might take backups of your site, but that's only one point of failure. And they won't keep backups or a long time so you need a second option. And what happens if the hosting company goes out of business? Or if they ban your site for something (deserved or undeserved)? You lose everything. You must have your own off-site backups.

WPvivid Backup is a great backup solution for your website. Save copies of your sites to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, or by FTP to another server. It's a very efficient, fast system that won't slow your websites down.

An alternative, and equally competent backup tool, is BlogVault.

Online Review Management

If you run a local business or care about your reputation online, a review management system is a must. It's hard to track Google reviews, Facebook ratings, and reviews on Yelp and Tripadvisor. ReviewShake lets you centralise management of your online reviews. Reply to customers directly, spy on your competitors reviews directly in the app, create review widgets and review listings for your website, and more.

Video Marketing

Video is becoming one of the hottest channels in marketing and if you're not creating videos, you're missing out.

Video Editing Service

Veedyou Media is an online video post-production company that works with content creators such as social media influencers, videographers, video productions studios or average Joe's and Jane's that are looking to get their raw footage edited into beautiful films.

Video for social media

Video production used to be expensive. But with OFFEO you can create pro-level videos with titles, graphics, scene blends, and lots more. And it's very good value.

InVideo is another great video marketing tool that creates videos with titles, transitions, overlays, and graphics. You can also import blog posts and have automatic images and text titles to match the content. A huge timesaver.

Video Hosting

Host your own videos, in your preferred formats on Publitio, a platform that takes care of processing, delivery of images, videos & audio files for web and mobile apps. Publitio has a built-in media player with video ads support and is one of the most economical solutions available. Definitely one of the best tools available for video marketers, course creators, or marketing agencies. Vimeo is another great option. Spotlightr is great for creators and business owners who want to earn revenue from videos through easy ad placement or crate high-converting calls-to-action. There's also added security built in so nobody can steal your videos.

URL Shorteners and Affiliate Link Management

Improvely tracks and optimizes links so you can avoid click fraud (on Google Ads), learn about visitors, and test new landing pages instantly. Get full data on commission sources and cloak your affiliate links.

ClickMeter is a beast of a tool that manages, tracks, and analyzes your links from one central database. You get an automated UTM generator and link shortening service. ClickMeter track the clicks so you can analyze the top clicking countries, devices, platforms, and more. There's a handy plugin for Chrome browser that allow you to create links even quicker.

Thirsty Affiliates does a great job of cloaking long ugly affiliate links, protecting your links, and analyzing the traffic to those links. It's a very flexible plugin. Tracking clicks, masking affiliate links, and public URL shortener services are all possible with this little power pack.

BetterLinks is another WordPress link shortening tool worth checking out. There's a good free version of the plugin that you can use right away.

Shorten your links to look like this: fatfrogmedia.com/short, instead of fatfrogmedia.com/affiliate-product&ref=343731100

Which one looks better?

Ebook & Marketing Material Creation

Create eBooks, reports, marketing materials, PDFs, Kindle books and even transcribe YouTube videos to ebooks in minutes with Designrr. It does a lot. Designrr is great for creating course material, lead magnet, and for creating ebooks. Check out the full review. Also check out Crello's ebook creation tools which come as part of a full design suite.