SEO
E-commerce Marketing 101: How to Maximize Sales
Marketing is one of the most important skills to learn as an e-commerce store owner. By learning marketing, you’ll always have a steady stream of new customers.
Plus, knowing the basics of marketing can get you ahead of the competition, and it’s valuable to have a base understanding if you ever hire marketing roles for your company.
In this guide, I share the five main marketing channels and how to use them, plus a few marketing tips to help you earn more and spend less.
There are five main channels you can use to promote your products. They are:
- Search engines
- Social media sites
- Email inboxes
- Display ads
- Brand affiliates
Let’s talk about how you can use each of these channels in your e-commerce marketing plan.
1. Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing covers both organic and paid traffic from search engines like Google.
Both are important. Take Solo Stove, for example. Its online store gets over 300,000 organic visits from Google every month—plus an additional ~28,000 monthly visits from paid ads:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
In order to show up organically on the first page of Google’s search results, you need to learn and implement search engine optimization practices on your website.
This includes things like:
- Figuring out what keywords people are searching for to find your products.
- Aligning with the search intent of the query.
- Getting other websites to link to your website (aka backlinks).
- And more.
I’ll discuss these steps in more detail in the “tips” section below. For now, if you want to learn more, check out our complete guide to e-commerce SEO.
Paid search ads
You can pay to “skip the line” and show up at the top of Google’s search results. This is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and it’s a great complement to your SEO efforts. PPC ads are a quick and easy (albeit sometimes expensive) way to get in front of your target audience.
Here’s a chart explaining why you should utilize both PPC and SEO:
What does this look like? You’ve probably seen ads like these, annotated with the word “Sponsored” next to them:
You can run Google Ads by creating an account, choosing the page you want to send visitors to, writing up various headlines and description ad copy, and selecting keywords to be displayed for.
But there’s quite a bit more to it than that—it takes time and money to learn what works. Check out our guide to Google Ads basics to get started.
2. Social media marketing
Probably the most obvious place to market your e-commerce store is on the many social media apps.
Again, with Solo Stove as an example—it uses both organic and paid social media marketing and has been able to gain over half a million TikTok followers, 347,000 Instagram followers, and almost 300,000 Facebook followers.
Let’s take a look at how you can do the same:
Organic social media marketing
Growing an organic following on social media is a great way to get your brand and products in front of people without spending a ton of money. However, it’s also a lot of work—especially if you plan on growing multiple channels.
If you’re not sure which channel(s) to use, a good starting point is SparkToro. You can type in a product keyword like “mens boots,” and it’ll show you social stats of relevant accounts:
From here, if you hover over the social media icons, you can see the individual channel statistics. This tells you which channels brands have the most followers on, which can be a hint on which channels are most effective for them.
Use this data to decide which channels you should invest your time in first. From there, check out this list of resources to learn more about how to grow your accounts.
Paid social media advertising
The other side of the coin is social media PPC ads. You can use ads to drive immediate sales—but at a cost. There’s a steep learning curve to maximizing sales while minimizing ad costs.
That said, one of the easiest ways to run a successful social media ad is through retargeting customers who abandon carts. This works by putting a browser cookie on a visitor who adds an item to their cart but doesn’t check out, then using that cookie to show them ads on social media of the item they left in their cart.
Again, Solo Stove does this well. I added this heat deflector to my cart…
… then almost immediately saw this ad on my Facebook feed after leaving its site without buying:
There’s a lot more you can do with these ads, though. Check out Mayple’s guide to social media advertising to learn more.
3. Email marketing
Email newsletters are typically one of the highest-converting traffic sources for e-commerce stores. This is because your email list, if done well, will be full of people who know who you are and have an active interest in your brand. That said, you need traffic to grow an email list, so it doesn’t make a good stand-alone marketing channel.
There are many ways to grow an email list, including:
- Email opt-in forms on your site offering a discount or free information.
- Collecting your customer’s emails when they make a purchase (with their permission, of course).
- Running a giveaway for your products.
Once you have an email list, you can send them product updates, content from your blog, clearance sales, etc.
Here’s an example from clothing brand Off The Grid, which uses its newsletter to give tips on how to get the most out of its clothes:
Just make sure you keep your list engaged by deleting inactive subscribers every three to six months and avoid sending too many emails. Your list is one of your biggest assets, so take care of it.
4. Display ads
Have you ever been bombarded by display ads on every website you visit after looking at an online store but leaving without buying anything?
This is because the online store you visited placed a cookie in your browser that allowed it to “retarget” you with display ads across any websites that run these retargeting ads. What I already showed in the “social media ads” section above was a retargeting ad too.
It’s been found that it takes anywhere from 28–62 (or more) “touchpoints” to make a sale.
A “touchpoint” is any time a potential customer is shown a brand, either through an ad or by visiting your website or social media channel. Every time they see your brand or product, that’s one touchpoint.
That’s what makes these retargeting ads so effective. You can get multiple touchpoints of your product at a relatively low price compared to traditional PPC ads.
The catch is that you can only show retargeting ads to people who have either visited your website and allowed the cookie in their browser settings, or to people in your email list.
HubSpot has an excellent beginner’s guide to retargeting if you want to learn more.
You can also run general display ads, which are suitable for making people aware of your brand and products. You can use them to get people to your site, then run retargeting ads to those people who visited your initial ad but didn’t purchase.
For example, Advance Auto Parts paid to show me these display ads across various blogs even though I haven’t visited its site before:
Check out Google Display Ads if that’s something you’re interested in.
5. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is where someone promotes your product or service and makes a commission any time they send you a sale.
This typically works by giving your affiliate a unique ID that they include in their URL when they link to your website. It might look like this:
https://www.yourdomain.com/your-product?ref=UniqueAffiliateID
When a customer makes a sale through the URL with the unique affiliate ID attached, your affiliate program will attribute that sale to that particular affiliate so you can pay them their percent of the income.
For example, Solo Stove has an affiliate program, and I used to promote it in my articles and videos, like this blog post and YouTube video review:
To learn more about setting up an affiliate program for your e-commerce store, see this guide.
Now that you know where to promote your products, here are a few tips to help you maximize your sales and minimize your marketing costs:
1. Don’t compete solely on price
Above all, never get into a price war. You will never be able to compete with giant brands on price. They can afford to lose money until you’re long out of business.
Instead, compete on things like quality, customer service, experience, and value.
Make sure the entire experience of finding your brand and buying from you is seamless and easy. And use your marketing to educate and entertain, not just to promote your product. If you offer people something of value first, they will be more likely to buy, even at a higher price point.
For example, Squatty Potty both informs and entertains in what is arguably one of the best ads ever made:
Or, back to Solo Stove, it makes videos that teach you the best way to use its products:
2. Don’t offer big discounts
Offering discounts may be an easy way to make a quick buck. But in doing so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. By offering frequent discounts, people may come to expect your discounts and won’t buy your products at full price because they know discounts are coming.
3. Begin with keyword research
Search engines can be a lucrative source of free marketing if you’re able to rank highly on them. But SEO can take years—especially for a beginner.
That’s why it’s best to do some keyword research to figure out what your customers are searching for so you can start optimizing your site right away. (You’ll thank me in two years.)
You can do this with Ahrefs’ free keyword generator tool. Type in a broad keyword that describes your products, and the tool will spit out keyword ideas with some basic data:
Keep in mind that you’ll want to find different keywords for different purposes.
For example, “brown leather boots” may be a good keyword for your category page, while your product pages may be better served with more specific keywords like “brown leather ugg boots” or “womens brown leather knee high boots.”
Basically, use broad keywords for category pages and specific keywords for product pages. Again, refer to our e-commerce SEO guide to learn more.
4. Optimize your website for search and conversions
Continuing from the last tip, you should take the keyword research you did and optimize your category and product pages for their best keywords.
This is called on-page SEO, and it involves:
- Talking about your target keyword in your title, URL, and within the page itself.
- Writing a compelling title tag and description to make your result stand out on the SERPs.
- Optimizing your images to load fast and have descriptive filenames and alt text.
- Including internal links between your pages to make them easy to find.
There’s a bit more that goes into it, so read our on-page SEO guide to learn more.
Beyond SEO, you should also optimize your website for conversions. After all, you don’t want to spend all this time and money on marketing only to lose sales, right?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) includes things like using high-quality images, effective copywriting, and clean website design with minimal distractions. I highly recommend going through Shopify’s CRO guide.
5. Start a blog
Having a great product and effective ads can only take you so far. If you want to utilize organic marketing channels like social media, search engines, and newsletters, you need to offer more than just advertisements for your products.
That’s where content comes in.
Photos, videos, and blog posts give you the ability to capture customers at different stages in the marketing funnel whom you otherwise wouldn’t have sold to.
Here’s what this may look like and what people may search for at each stage:
Let’s say you own a shoe store. A potential customer has a problem; they need a good pair of waterproof shoes that are functional but also look good. So they do a Google search for “stylish mens waterproof shoes” (the “service or product” stage).
The results aren’t shoe stores. They’re all blogs that talk about shoes:
It’s possible for you to write a blog post of your own with the goal of ranking well for that keyword and promoting your own shoes. You can also use that article as content to add to your email newsletter and social media feeds.
Pro Tip
Expand this idea for other issues potential customers may have, like learning different ways to tie shoes or ideas for outfits that can go with your shoes. You’re only limited by your creativity.
Check out my guide to e-commerce blogging to learn more.
6. Create video content
Video content is becoming more and more important. If you want to do well on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even Facebook, you need to make videos. Plus, many of the SERPs now contain video results in addition to blog pages.
For example, we manage to rank for the keyword “learn seo” with both a blog post and a YouTube video:
We wrote a full guide to video SEO if you want to learn how we did it.
But what kind of videos should you create?
It depends on your audience, the platform, and your product. In general, shorter videos do better than long ones, like this five-second TikTok by Guess that got over 800,000 views:
Of course, there are a lot of ways to utilize video in your marketing plan, and there’s plenty of space for longer videos. Check out our guide to video marketing to learn more.
7. Make standard operating procedures
Many of your marketing tasks will be repeatable. Things like outlining your content, sharing your posts, and even running ads can all be standardized to make things quicker and easier.
This is why you should create standard operating procedures for these tasks. A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a document that outlines exactly how to do a task step by step—often with screenshots or videos—that allows you to hand off the task to a virtual assistant to free up your time and streamline the process.
For example, we have a guide to creating SEO SOPs. But you can make an SOP for any repeatable task, such as:
- Creating blog or product images.
- Adding new products to your newsletter and social media feeds.
- And so much more.
Here’s an example of a step in our SOP for creating content at Ahrefs:
Creating an SOP is easy. Just create a Google Doc and use headings to organize your task into steps and add screenshots or even videos to show the process. The clearer and more concise you can be, the better.
Final thoughts
Learning e-commerce marketing is a surefire way to make a lot more money from your online store. There’s a lot to learn, so take it one thing at a time.
Eventually, you should aim to hire a VA or marketing team to help with these tasks so you can focus on other areas of your business. Having a basic understanding of how they’re done will help you make good hiring decisions.
SEO
What You Need To Know In 2023
In a recent interview, Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, sat down with Todd Beaupre, YouTube’s growth and discovery lead, to discuss the algorithm’s future and its implications for creators in 2023.
Beaupre shares many insights that can help content creators understand and navigate YouTube.
This candid Q&A uncovers vital details, such as:
- The importance of focusing on audience satisfaction over algorithmic manipulation.
- The role of audience feedback and survey responses in refining YouTube’s recommendation system.
- Strategies for creators to build long-term relationships with their audiences for sustained success.
- YouTube’s dedicated efforts to support new or smaller creators.
- Advice on managing multi-format, multi-language content and the advantages of channel experimentation.
- The future of content discovery on YouTube, including the potential of emerging technologies and user interface enhancements.
This article overviews their enlightening conversation, with all the details on optimizing your YouTube content in 2023.
From Algorithm To Audience: A New Perspective
Q: What’s the main thing creators should focus on for the YouTube algorithm?
Beaupre emphasizes the importance of not thinking about algorithms but audiences. Creators are often asked about the best time or frequency to upload videos to optimize algorithm favorability.
Beaupre encourages a shift in perspective:
“Creators often ask about optimizing their upload time or frequency for the algorithm. But we want creators to shift their thinking. Rather than focusing on the algorithm, they should focus on the audience. Replace the word “algorithm” in their questions with the word “audience.” We design the algorithm to serve the audience, so understanding audience preferences will help the algorithm favor their content.”
The Satisfaction Metric: A Holistic View Of Engagement
Q: Can you explain the significance of the satisfaction metric in the YouTube algorithm?
Beaupre addresses an essential aspect of YouTube’s algorithm: audience satisfaction.
While watch time is a commonly known factor the algorithm considers, Beaupre says that not all watch time is equal:
“Everyone knows that watch time is one of the factors we look at. But we’ve realized that not all watch time is equal. We also need to understand the value an audience derives from a video. To do this, we run surveys about recommendations and specific videos, feeding those responses into the recommendation system. This helps the algorithm identify patterns of satisfying content, looking at various signals like likes, dislikes, watch time, and survey responses.”
A Long-term Strategy: The Key To Creator Success
Q: What kind of strategy should creators adopt for success on YouTube?
Beaupre says creators who prioritize long-term audience value over immediate views stand to benefit more long-term.
He explains that a video’s potential to leave a lasting impression and foster a long-term relationship with the audience would correlate well with satisfaction.
“I would advise creators to think about the long-term value for their audience. Rather than focusing on getting a lot of views in a week, think about creating a lasting impression with your audience. This could mean they’ll want to return to your channel in the future.”
Supporting Smaller Channels
Q: How does YouTube support new or smaller creators who don’t have a large audience?
For creators with smaller audiences, Beaupre reveals that YouTube has a team focused on helping them identify their audience, using various approaches like assessing video titles and descriptions.
“We have a team that focuses on this exact challenge. They use different approaches, like assessing video titles and descriptions, to help these creators identify their audience. We track the success of new creators on the platform, and we’re committed to helping them succeed.”
Multi-format, Multi-language Content:
Q: How should creators manage their channels with the rise of multi-format, multi-language content?
Beaupre touches on the evolving content landscape, including long-form videos, Live, Shorts, and podcasts.
His advice to creators navigating this space is:
“My advice to creators is simple: “Same audience, same channel, different audience, different channel.” We’re looking for ways to make it easier for creators to manage their channels in this multi-format, multi-language world. We encourage creators to experiment with different formats on the same channel and see how their audience reacts.”
The Future Of Discovery On YouTube
Q: What’s the future of discovery on YouTube?
Speaking about the challenges and opportunities ahead, Beaupre highlights several focus areas.
These include leveraging emerging technology, such as large language models, and making the discovery experience more enjoyable.
“We have several areas of focus. We’re excited about emerging technology like large language models, which could improve recommendation quality. We’re also working on enabling seamless user journeys across various formats. Another challenge is to make the discovery experience more enjoyable for users. We’re exploring opportunities to make the interface more entertaining and less overwhelming.”
Final Words
Beaupre signs off with the message that YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes the audience’s satisfaction.
By creating long-term value for your audience, understanding their needs, and experimenting with different formats, you can better align with the platform’s goals and succeed.
Source: YouTube
Featured image generated by the author using Midjourney.
SEO
TikTok Dominates Short-Form Content, Instagram Reels Not Far Behind
Three platforms dominate short-form video content: TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
A recent study conducted by Social Insider dives into the performance stats of these platforms, analyzing key metrics to determine which comes out on top.
In this article, we’ll examine these key insights:
- TikTok holds the crown for the most engagement.
- Comments pour in twice as much on TikTok as on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
- Brands post twice as much content on TikTok as on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
- Instagram Reels leads the highest watch rate, while YouTube Shorts lags.
- Each platform’s algorithm plays a role in how content performs.
- Each platform caters to specific audiences and marketing objectives.
Keep reading as we unpack these findings and explore what they mean for users and marketers alike.
TikTok Reigns Supreme In Engagement
TikTok, widely recognized as the forerunner of the short-form video trend, claims the engagement rate crown.
The study finds TikTok outperforms Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts in interaction, scoring double the comments of its competitors.
“From an engagement rate perspective, in this TikTok vs. Reels vs. Shorts performance comparison, TikTok sets itself apart as the undisputable winner,” the study notes.
The study compares engagement rates, revealing that YouTube Shorts averages around 3.80%, Reels hits an average of 4.36%, and TikTok boasts a significantly higher rate of 5.53%.
The Power Of TikTok’s Virality
TikTok’s success is partly due to users’ ability to harness viral trends, enabling explosive follower growth.
The study mentions that a social media strategy focusing on authenticity and humanized approaches can lead to rapid success.
Brands post twice as much content on TikTok as they do on Reels and Shorts, further emphasizing TikTok’s dominance in this space.
Reels & Shorts: Not To Be Overlooked
While TikTok may lead in engagement and content volume, Instagram’s Reels and YouTube’s Shorts have their strengths.
Reels, for instance, records the highest watch rate among the three platforms.
This could be credited to Instagram’s follower-based model, with Reels serving as a potent content type for brands with a large audience.
On the other hand, YouTube Shorts functions more as a discovery tool.
Most Shorts’ views originate from the homepage. From there, YouTube starts recommending long-form content.
This recommendation system can increase a channel’s subscribers, views, and traction on long-form videos.
A Multifaceted Approach for Marketers
Given each platform’s different strengths and audiences, the study suggests a diversified approach for brands.
“Using TikTok, Reels, and Shorts complementarily and creating unique content for each, aligned with the individual’s platform audience and design, is the best approach marketers and brands alike could have,” the study concludes.
Ultimately, TikTok leads in engagement and content volume, Instagram’s Reels has the highest watch rate, and YouTube’s Shorts is the most effective discovery tool.
Each platform has a unique role in the short-form video landscape. The key for brands and marketers is understanding these roles and crafting strategies around them.
Featured image generated by the author using Midjourney.
SEO
20+ Blogging Tools to Improve Your Workflow
If you want to make the most of your time blogging, choose the right tools because they’ll save you a lot of money and effort.
But there are a lot of tools out there—and not all of them are worth it.
Well, I’ve been blogging for over a decade and have used hundreds of tools in that time. To help you sort the wheat from the chaff, I’ll list all the tools I’ve used to grow several blogs to a six-figure income—and what each of them is useful for.
Just want the best blogging tool stack? Here are my 10 most-used tools for blogging:
- WordPress – Best content management system (CMS) to manage your blog.
- Google Docs – Best word document editor to collaborate with your team.
- Wordable – Easily upload your articles from Google Docs to WordPress with one click.
- Ahrefs – Best all-around SEO tool for ranking high on Google.
- Notion – Best task management and content planning software.
- Google Search Console – Best tool for making informed SEO decisions.
- Canva – Best graphic creation tool.
- Snagit – Best screenshot capture and editing tool.
- Loom – Best screen recording tool.
- ConvertKit – Best email marketing software.
Want more? Keep reading.
Let’s kick things off with a list of tools you can use to research, write, edit, and publish your blog posts.
WordPress
What it is: A content management system (CMS) to build your website and publish blog posts.
Why I love it: It is the most robust, SEO-friendly CMS on the market. Because it’s open source and so popular, you can do almost anything with WordPress with the right plugins or a good web developer. I’ve been using it since I started my first blog at 15. It’s not the easiest blogging tool for beginners, but it’s much more powerful than “beginner-friendly” website editors like Wix or Squarespace once you learn how to use it.
Price: Free.
Google Docs
What it is: A document editor.
Why I love it: Google Docs is an easy-to-use free document editor that makes collaborating with writers and editors a breeze. I’ve been using it to write my blog articles for over 10 years. It just works.
Price: Free.
Wordable
What it does: Uploads articles from Google Docs to WordPress in one click.
Why I love it: Google Docs has hidden code that’s brought over when you copy-paste content to WordPress. Wordable fixes that by uploading the document to WordPress while keeping the formatting but removing the extra code. It also cleans up and optimizes your images.
Price: Free up to five exports per month (then $50/month).
CoSchedule Headline Studio
What it does: Scores your headlines clickability and SEO.
Why I love it: It helps me write killer headlines—which is important for both clickability and SEO. Better headlines mean more clicks in the SERPs which, in turn, can help your content rank higher on Google. The tool gives you ideas of power words and uncommon words to use to make your headline more interesting, and its AI can write and suggest headlines for you.
Price: Free ($19/month or $99/year for premium).
Grammarly
What it does: Makes suggestions to improve your writing and fixes grammar and spelling mistakes.
Why I love it: Sometimes when you’re in the flow of writing, the words just pour out of you—and you don’t want to interrupt that flow by fixing typos or grammar mistakes. I use Grammarly post-draft to fix my mistakes after the bulk of the article is finished. It’s also compatible with Google Docs and WordPress if you get the Grammarly browser plugin, which is nice.
Price: Free.
ChatGPT
What it is: An AI chatbot.
Why I love it: I use ChatGPT for researching and outlining a lot of my content. It can help you identify topics or ideas you didn’t think about in your initial content outline. I have also started playing with it to improve my content and my life in general, such as using it to help me come up with road trip itineraries for specific needs—like finding the best routes based on weather and areas with free camping—then turn that trip into a blog post and social media videos.
Price: Free ($20/month for premium access).
Hemingway App
What it is: A text editor that grades your writing using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
Why I love it: As someone who performs and writes about fairly complex SEO tasks on a near-daily basis, it can be hard to know if my writing is easy to understand for the complete beginner. While the Hemingway App won’t necessarily help me break down these complex tasks, it will tell me if my writing is overly complex from a readability standpoint. If it is, I can simplify things more so that nearly anyone can read it. It’s up to me to make sure it still makes sense, though.
Price: Free.
Next up, let’s look at tools to help you create a content calendar and keep your content organized.
Notion
What it is: A productivity software.
Why I love it: Notion is one of the coolest software I’ve ever used. You can customize it to do almost anything: manage your to-do list, plan a content calendar, collaborate with your team, and much more. I use it to keep track of my projects and goals (both personal and business), plan out my content, journal, take notes about new things I’m learning, and more. I use Thomas Frank’s Ultimate Brain template, which has a steep learning curve but totally transformed how I plan my life and business.
Price: Free (premium plans start at $8/month).
Slack
What it is: A messaging app.
Why I love it: I used to use Slack to stay in touch with my team. However, now that I use Notion, we mostly just communicate via that app. Now, I use Slack to join communities with other bloggers and content marketers and keep in touch with masterminds I’ve met over the years. Check out some of these Slack communities for SEOs.
Price: Free (premium plans start at $7.25/month).
Google Analytics
What it is: An analytics dashboard for your website.
Why I love it: Seeing analytics data (e.g., what pages people are visiting on your site, how long they’re staying on your site, and where that traffic came from) is important to make informed decisions about what types of content to produce and where to promote your content. I check the analytics at least once a week to see which pages are performing best.
Price: Free.
Google Trends
What it does: Shows search trends for topics over time.
Why I love it: It’s super useful for finding trending and breakout topics. For example, I was recently looking for new topics for my camping website and found that searches for “lake berryessa camping” have risen 70% in the last 12 months.
Price: Free.
Search engine optimization and blogging are two peas in a pod. If you want to grow your blog organically, you need to learn SEO. Here are a few tools to help you rank higher on Google:
Ahrefs
What it is: An all-in-one SEO tool suite.
Why I love it: I use Ahrefs for a lot of things. For me, it’s been most useful for keyword research and finding backlink opportunities. My most-used feature of Ahrefs is the Content Gap report within the Site Explorer tool, as shown in the screenshot above. I like to spy on my competitors’ keywords to see what they’re ranking for that I’m not. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface of what Ahrefs can do.
Price: $99+ per month (free tools available).
SurferSEO
What it is: A software that analyzes current Google search results to score your content based on how well optimized it is compared to competing results.
Why I love it: I use SurferSEO to help me outline my content in a way that is more likely to rank well on Google. It has a content editor with a content score system that goes from 0 to 100 to grade how well optimized your content is for a given keyword (100 being the most well-optimized article). It also has a Chrome extension that lets you use it in combination with Google Docs.
Price: $49+/month (depending on tier).
Yoast SEO
What it is: A WordPress plugin that helps you better optimize your pages for search engines.
Why I love it: Yoast makes it easy to set your page’s meta tags, add robots.txt and sitemap files to help Google more easily crawl your site, and quickly see what pages aren’t optimized for search.
Price: Free ($99/year for premium).
Google Search Console
What it is: A tool to monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in search results.
Why I love it: I use Google Search Console to help me find pages that are losing traction on the SERPs over time. Just go to the “Performance” report; then for the date, compare the last three months to the previous three months (or longer). Anything that’s dropped in traffic should be considered for a content refresh. I also use it to keep tabs on my site’s performance in general and see if it has any issues like not passing Core Web Vitals.
Price: Free.
AnswerThePublic
What it is: A software that finds common questions people ask on Google that are relevant to a given search query.
Why I love it: I use ATP to ensure I’m addressing all the common frequently asked questions people have around a given topic when I’m writing an article. It also helps me to show up as the answer for People Also Ask questions on Google.
Price: Free (premium plans start at $9 per month).
To The Web Title Tag Preview Tool
What it is: A tool to see at a glance if your meta title and description are too short, too long, or just right.
Why I love it: I use it to make sure my title tags won’t be truncated (cut off) in the Google search results. If your title tag is too long (or too short), you can see it with this tool and adjust it accordingly.
Price: Free.
Let’s face it—there are only 24 hours in a day. You don’t want to waste your time manually sharing every blog post on social media or sending individual emails, do you? These tools will automate some of those time-consuming tasks for you.
Buffer
What it is: A social media scheduling tool.
Why I love it: Posting the same thing to four different social media channels is both a pain and a waste of time. Buffer makes it so that I can push updates across channels from one dashboard and see how they’re performing without logging in and posting from each channel separately. I also hired a freelancer and trained her to schedule all my blog posts to all my channels on Buffer for a double-whammy of time-saving awesomeness.
Price: Free (premium plans start at $6/month per channel).
ConvertKit
What it is: An email newsletter automation tool.
Why I love it: I love the fact that ConvertKit is extremely intuitive and easy to use. I’ve tried Mailchimp, BirdSend, and a handful of other email marketing tools—none of them were as simple as ConvertKit. I also love that its powerful automation features allow me to set up custom email drip campaigns that are tailored to individual segments of my audience, which increases engagement rates by allowing me to create highly personalized emails.
Price: Free up to 300 subscribers (then starts at $9/month).
Zapier
What it is: An automation API.
Why I love it: What’s not to love about automation? I use Zapier to send me an email when someone fills out one of my Typeforms to inquire about my services, but you can do a lot with it. Check out its list of use-case examples to get ideas.
Price: Free up to 100 tasks/month (starts at $19.99/month for paid plans).
Last but not least, I have a suite of tools I use to create images, videos, screenshots, and more.
Canva
What it is: A drag-and-drop image editor.
Why I love it: I use Canva to create featured images and social media share images for all of my blog posts. It’s incredibly easy and intuitive for a non-designer like myself to create high-quality graphics that look professionally made. It also has an AI photo editor to automate—or at least assist in—the process.
Price: Free ($12.99/month or $119.99/year for premium).
Snagit
What it is: A screen capturing and editing tool.
Why I love it: I’ve used a lot of screen capture tools, and this one has been by far the best. We use it at Ahrefs for all of our screen captures to show you how to use our tools. I also use it in my blogs to add extra information when needed and in my standard operating procedures for freelancers.
Price: $62.99 (free trial available).
Loom
What it is: A screen recording tool.
Why I love it: It’s simply the easiest way to record your screen and share it with your team, blog readers, or whoever. I use it to record tutorials, how-tos, and other videos to help my employees learn SOPs and to show exactly how to do certain tasks in my YouTube videos.
Price: Free (unlimited video starts at $8/month).
Descript
What it is: An audio and video editor.
Why I love it: Descript is much more powerful than a simple audio or video editor—it has cutting-edge AI software that allows you to do things like “greenscreen” any background, remove all the “ums” and “uhs” from your audio, and easily rearrange clips. It even has an AI tool that can clone your voice in case you forget to say something. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Price: Free (paid plans start at $12/month).
Fotor AI Image Generator
What it is: An AI image generator. Duh.
Why I love it: It’s fun to create totally unique custom images for your blog posts based on text prompts using AI. While it’s not great yet, it’s come a long way and soon will be able to create photo-realistic images to use in your content. I also use it to occasionally give me fun things to share on Instagram.
Price: Free ($12.99/month or $119.99/year for premium).
Unsplash
What it is: A free-to-use, high-quality stock image library.
Why I love it: I use Unsplash to find high-quality photos to use in the Canva graphics I create for my blog posts—such as featured images and photos to visually show what I’m discussing in the text. I used an image of a truck on my page about truck driver statistics, for example.
Price: Free.
Final thoughts
Having the right tools for blogging can help you produce better content faster, get more out of your blog articles, and grow at an exponential rate.
The tools in this guide are the ones I’ve personally used and, in my opinion, are worth investing in (if you have the need for what they do).
Questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.
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