dscienceinc
Every year we are experimenting with new tools. Some we thought would be awesome turned out to be complete flops… I am looking at you, Hootsuite. Other’s have become like an invaluable family member. This is a list of 13 tools we LOVE that will make your life easier.
The tools we fell in love with…
CoSchedule
This is a recent find for us, but has to be my number 1 favorite tool already.
Coschedule is for bloggers and content marketers who need a single location to organize, develop, and post all their content. Be it blog posts, videos, or social media posts, Coschedule rocks. One of my favorite pieces is the ability to re-up social media posts after an article has gone live.
Already this tool has saved us countless hours. 100% a must have if you regularly publish content.
Sumome
What I love about Sumome is the plethora of tools all wrapped up in one. Not only do they have an amazing social sharing toolbar, they also add cool new features all the time.
I particularly love their heatmap tool. Monitoring where people click on our website has helped us organize and redesign our site for maximum performance. After just a short time we were able to drop our bounce rate by over 20%, just by redesigning our site to better suit our audience.
Tailwindapp
Pinterest is one of our best traffic sources to date, and our attention is in growing Pinterest even more. Tailwindapp is awesome for scheduling, posting, and monitoring Pinterest.
I love their analytics. Being able to see what pins are doing best and what drive the most traffic is invaluable for planning our new content for 2016.
Canva
Guy Kawasaki was right joining the Canva team. Canva is an amazing design app that makes it so easy to design, even I can do it. This is saying a ton!
To put it into perspective our lead designer Emelina, (who makes all the graphics for our site), has used Canva to make most of these images. Not Photoshop or Illustrator. She likes how fast she can toss up a design and export it as a small file.
Grammarly
When it comes to writing blog articles this tool is like the Konami code for grammar.
Grammarly is like “Microsoft spell check” on steroids. Best of all the free program is usually more than enough for most bloggers. Honestly I haven’t needed to step up to the paid version yet.
Hemingway App
This is a free online program that helps with the flow of your article, and writing. It visually indicates what sentences are too difficult to read, and where you may be speaking in a passive voice.
It is an amazing tool to use before you send any content to your editor.
Leadpages
If you don’t use Leadpages, I would honestly be surprised. Making landing pages and opt-in offers is a breeze with this program. Not only does it streamline the process saving me hundreds of hours, but it makes it extremely easy to A/B test.
Leadpages has helped me increase my opt-in rates by as much as 30%.
Bit.ly
What can I say about my short little friend. Bit.ly is one of the best link shortener’s out there, giving you options to customize the link. Instead of your links looking like this >>>bit.ly/1OkqRfP <<< you can make your links look like this >>>>bit.ly/doubleyourinstagram <<<<. That is super cool but even better is the ability to track how many clicks and from where they are originating from. Knowing that 435 clicks have come from Instagram to our landing page is perfection at its core.
Deathtothestockphoto
Co-founder David Sherry is awesome. We had the distinct pleasure of meeting him in person and interviewing him. They provide an amazing service, giving free monthly stock photos for everyone to use.
No need for your blog or advertisement to use crappy stock photos, make an emotional impact with these beautiful images. There’s also a paid version where you get access to their monthly archives. We use this too, and totally recommend it.
Google Docs & Evernote
When my computer crashed I had to stop using Microsoft word. It might have best thing that could have happened.
Evernote and Google docs do about the same thing. If I have to pick just one I choose Google Doc’s, because well it’s Google they aren’t going anywhere. That being said I loved both, I have written tons of notes on Evernote and Google doc’s. It just comes down to preference.
Dropbox Business Class
Everyone knows Dropbox—cloud storage is awesome. That being said we have really been using it more than ever. Our business is using more data between the photos and videos we take. Having one location to backup and access all our files is great.
The only downside to Dropbox is how long it takes to download and upload files. That is why we still use a removable hard drive for the files we are using right now.
GetResponse
When it comes to email marketing providers I am a big HUGE fan of Getresponse. Many people swear by Aweber, and almost everyone I know starts on Mailchimp because it is free.
That being said, Getresponse is my go to provider.
I absolutely love their user interface and the ease of adding auto-responder sequences. Honestly if you are testing email marketing providers, i can’t stress enough how much it is worth checking out.
MediaTemple
There are a ton of hosting companies to choose from. Bluehost being the cheapest, and one I recommend for those who are just starting out. We on the other hand use Mediatemple.
First off, their customer support is fantastic. Second, they have so many additional services that help our growing blog. Like a CDN network, or having a virtual IT staff handling our website. Those things are really exciting to me as a self-proclaimed marketing hack and slasher.
