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Our resource page is packed with guides, products, services and tools that are useful for bloggers and websites owners. These are resources that we have investigated and truly feel deliver value to you.
CMS & Blogging Platforms
WordPress.org
WordPress.org is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). WordPress is written in PHP and uses MySQL as its database management system. It is distributed by the American company Automattic. Originally it reached great popularity in the creation of blogs and has now become one of the main tools for the creation of commercial web pages. In October 2019, WordPress was used by 34.7% of websites worldwide. Its direct competitors are Joomla (2.7%) and Drupal (1.7%) while 43.6% of websites do not use a content management system.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a blog hosting service managed by Automattic that is based on the multi-user version of the WordPress CMS. The service allows the creation of one or more blogs for free, and offers some additional paid services. For each registered blog, WordPress.com offers a third-level address such as mypage.wordpress.com. Third-level domains are also called "sub-domains."
Ghost.org
Ghost.org is a free and open source blog engine written in JavaScript and distributed under the MIT license. It's designed to simplify the process of online publication by bloggers. The idea for Ghost was first realized in early November 2012 in a blog post by founder John O'Nolan, former head of the WordPress user interface team, following his frustration at the complexity of using WordPress as a blog engine rather than a content management system.
Blogger.com
Blogger.com is a service created by Pyra Labs and acquired by Google in 2003, which allows you to create and publish a blog online. To publish content, the user does not have to write any code or install server or scripting programs. Until March 2010, blogs could be installed on a user-selectable server (via FTP or SFTP). In 2006, all blogs created with a Google account were transferred to Google servers. Like WordPress.com, Blogger offers a third-level address such as mypage.blogspot.com. Users can also point their own domain to Google's servers through DNS.
Web Design, Themes & Plugins
ThemeForest
ThemeForest is a digital marketplace, owned by Envato (Formerly Eden), that sells themes and templates for multi-platform websites such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento. In August 2014 it was listed in the top 100 of the most visited sites in the world by Alexa, the Amazon-owned web analytics company. As of Marche 2020, the Avada WordPress theme has achieved more than 500,000 sales, making it the best-selling template to date.
WrapBootstrap
WrapBootstrap is a marketplace for premium Bootstrap templates and themes. What is Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a cross-platform library or set of open source tools for designing web sites and applications. It contains design templates with typography, forms, buttons, boxes, navigation menus and other design elements based on HTML and CSS, as well as additional JavaScript extensions. Unlike many web frameworks, it only deals with front-end development. Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
CodeCanyon
CodeCanyon is another digital marketplace (also owned by Envato) and is a sister-site to ThemeForest. They distribute plugins, scripts and code for platforms and operating systems such as WordPress, HTML5, PHP, JavaScript, Bootstrap, iOS and Android.
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace for digital services. The company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2010 and offers freelancers the opportunity to offer their services worldwide. The services (called Fiverr gigs) start at $5, where the name of the platform comes from (fiver = five), and now range up to several thousand dollars. Fiverr has provided more than 50 million services since the company was founded.
Marketing & Monetization
Sumo
Sumo (formerly called SumoMe) is a WordPress plugin that offers a multitude of useful tools to help you grow your email list. According to WordPress.org, "Sumo is the most powerful tool to grow your email list, increase conversions, and generate more sales for online businesses. More than 37,000 online businesses use Sumo to convert more purchases and delight their customers."
Buffer
Buffer is a suite of applications for managing social networks by providing the means for users to schedule posts and make updates to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest and LinkedIn. In December 2012, TechCrunch magazine reported that the site had reached 400,000 registered users. Just a year later, in December 2013, co-founder Leo Widrich announced that the site now serves a million users.
Google AdSense
Google AdSense is, together with Google AdWords, one of the products of the Google online advertising network. Basically, it allows publishers to earn revenue by placing ads on their websites, as text, graphics or advanced interactive advertising. These ads are managed and sorted by Google in association with AdWords advertisers through a complex instant auction system. Google AdSense uses a number of technologies to display relevant ads to visitors, whether indexing website content, geographic location and other factors (including special promotions of major brands). This helps advertisers reach the audience they're looking for while delivering relevant ads to users.
Skimlinks
Skimlinks is a content monetization platform that allows you to earn a commission every time you drive a purchase on the merchants website. They specialize in in-text, contextual advertising and help online publishers make money by automatically finding links and turning them into affiliate links. After adding a couple of lines of code on your site, Skimlinks will automatically monetize your links and you can easily scale your business by monetizing the links across all your channels.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp (capitalized as MailChimp until 2018) is a email marketing service that offers a wide selection of preset automation types with built-in triggers. The platform is owned by Rocket Science Group, an American company founded in 2001 and based in Atlanta. During the year, its user base grew from 85,000 to 450,000. Mailchimp started as a paid service, but they now offer a free version that allows up to 1,000 subscribers with no cap on the amount of emails you can send. In 2019, the service had "approximately 11 million active users and a total audience of 4 billion people."
Web Hosting & Domain Names
Bluehost.com
Bluehost.com, an Endurance International Group company, is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions, including web hosting services, eCommerce tools, marketing applications, and more. Built on open source technology, Bluehost designs and operates its own servers, develops innovative new internet technologies, and actively supports and participates in the open source community.
WebHostingHub.com
WebHostingHub.com got started in 2010 and provide easy-to-setup and affordable web hosting plans, supported with domain names, free web applications, custom hosting solutions and web design services. They offers unlimited disk space, which eliminates the worry of running out and let's you focus on other things, instead of technical problems. Their plans offer unlimited bandwidth so that your site can be served smoothly to all your visitors.
GreenGeeks.com
GreenGeeks.com was founded in 2008 by web hosting industry veteran Trey Gardner. Since then, GreenGeeks has grown to over 60 team members with customers in over 150 different countries. They are the leading Green Energy Web Hosting Provider powering over 350,000 websites. GreenGeeks matches 3 times the amount of energy they consume from the grid in the form of renewable energy credits. Your website will be 300% green when hosted on their platform. You can feel good that you're making a difference.
Namecheap.com
Namecheap.com is a web hosting and domain registrar company accredited by ICANN based in Phoenix, Arizona. Namecheap was founded by Richard Kirkendall in 2000. They manage 11 million registered users and 10 million domains. In November 2010 Namecheap was selected as the best domain name registrar in a poll conducted by Lifehacker. Once again, in September 2012 they were selected as the "Most Popular Domain Name Registrar" by Lifehacker. The following year, Namecheap announced that they'd also accept payments with Bitcoin, making them the first in the industry to do so.
Tools & Productivity
IFTTT
IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a type of web service that allows you to create and schedule actions to automate different tasks and actions on your website and also for your mobile applications, such as uploading the same photo to Twitter that was placed on Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, etc. Examples of a trigger are "I was tagged in a photo on Facebook" or "I checked-in on Foursquare." The "that" part of the sequence is called an action. Examples of actions are "send me a text message" or "create a status message on Facebook."
Canva
Canva is a simplified graphic design tool, founded in 2012. The company was founded on January 1, 2012 in Sydney, Australia by Melanie Perkins. In its first year, Canva reached over 750,000 users. It uses a drag and drop format and allows you to access photographs, vector images, graphics and fonts. Canva is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for web design, print and graphic media. The platform is free, but offers additional functionality for paid subscriptions such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise. It also integrates with most of the major cloud storage services (Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Drive, etc.). In 2018, Canva was valued at $1 billion.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free Google service that allows webmasters to check if their site is indexed by Google and optimize search engine optimization (SEO). The service has tools that allow webmasters to send and check their sitemap, check and adjust the indexing frequency, and see how often Googlebot (Google's web crawler) visits a particular page. It can also list the links of internal and external pages to the site, see what keywords in Google searches have led to the site, and the click rate on the words in that list. In addition, it is possible to link Google Search Console with Google Analytics to better measure and unify website statistics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service provided by Google that allows you to analyze detailed statistics on visitors to a website. The service is used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc. of individuals using the site, along with the information on the source of the traffic. It can be integrated with Google Ads, with which users can create and review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversion goals. Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Google Analytics' approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set.
Other Tools
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that gives insight into the most popular content on social networks including regionalization (that is, filtering by language, country, etc.). It also allows you to find the best influencers for specific niches. Search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. work with very broad algorithms that evaluate hundreds of criteria to show you a result. BuzzSumo simply focuses on the amount of engagement content receives within social media. You can choose titles and content that appeals to specific users in a simple way. Another useful feature is the ability to sort and/or filter through a specific social network.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a program that positions itself as a cloud-based accounting software, focused on time tracking, invoice generation, and company expense tracking. The program also has other useful features, including the generation of financial reports and synchronization with other software. In addition, FreshBooks can be synchronized with a bank account to automatically track expenses. The service is totally cloud-based, which means you are not tied to a specific computer or operating system. It also allows users to save and store customer information, and track the time employees spend working on each project.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs gives insight into the number of backlinks pointing to a given website along with useful information for analyzing a company's positioning strategy. You simply have to enter the URL you want to analyze and Ahrefs will automatically show you the backlinks, the number of incoming links, what type they are, etc. It provides the anchor text from which these links originate, which will allow you to know the most important keywords for developing a positioning and link building strategy. Through Ahrefs Rank you can spy on your competition. You can also access relevant information about the authority of a domain, which is important for a website's ranking on Google.
SerpStat
SerpStat is an all-in-one search engine optimization platform that provides keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, site audit, and detailed competitor keyword analysis for digital marketers. Serpstat has unique tools, keyword clustering and text analytics based on artificial intelligence. Serpstat was founded in 2013 by Oleg Salamakh as an in-house service for digital marketing agency Netpeak, which has become its main investor. In March 2015, Serpstat became an independent company.
Rankinity
Rankinity is an internet site rank tracking provider that helps to identify the current positions of your website in different search engines like Google using the specified search words and phrases. Their system enables you to get the clear picture of your website rankings immediately. No page reloading is needed. Rankinity is an effective tool for evaluating the success rate of your SEO and promotion activity.
