Recommended Products and Services
This is our list of products and services that we recommend to our clients and students.
When you’re first starting off with digital marketing, a web project or other online systems, it can be very difficult to figure out which direction to turn. There’s just a massive amount of information, and it quickly becomes overwhelming.
We’ve been in the business for a dozen years and manage many systems for our clients. We’ve built a list of tools, software, systems and reading that we use ourselves, with our clients, and have all been vetted and tested by us.
Disclosure: Links to merchants mentioned within this post may be using an affiliate link which means that – at zero cost to you – we might earn a commission if you buy something through that link.
We never recommend nor promote anything we haven’t personally tested, used in the real world, and find to be a valuable asset to our business or clients.
We’ve been managing WordPress websites for many years now, and have tried a lot of different tools and hosting environments. We have a core set of tools that we use for almost all of our clients, and these are what we recommend over anything else.
StudioPress WordPress Themes
StudioPress has been building WordPress themes for many years, and their core platform is built on the Genesis theme. That means all the functionality is built into Genesis, and you apply the style on top of it with a child theme. Their documentation is very clear, they’re mobile-aware and responsive, and most of the themes have various color schemes so it’s easy to choose the one that works best for your business. See more here: StudioPress Themes.
iThemes Security Pro
WordPress is a great platform to build your company’s presence. Unfortunately, most websites were set up by people who don’t know anything about web security, and hackers love this. Since 25% of all websites were built on WordPress, there are a lot of targets for them to break into. Most hosting companies only provide a minimum of security, so you have to use a plug-in that locks it down so tight that the bad guys can’t get in. We require this plug-in for all our clients’ websites or we won’t support them. It’s the best insurance policy you can buy for your business. See more here: iThemes Security Pro.
Backup Buddy
What happens if your website fails? Maybe a plug-in conflicted with another one, or you accidentally deleted a page you didn’t mean to. Or worse, a hacker got in and defaced your site. It happens. Making sure you have a solid backup is critical. Backup Buddy is the best one we’ve used, and if your hosting company doesn’t offer a backup service (WPEngine does), you need this plug-in. Back up your database every night and the entire site every weekend, then store the files somewhere other than your web server. Backup Buddy allows you to store the files in Dropbox, Amazon S3 (which we use) and other systems. It’s the second-most important insurance policy you can get for your business’ website. See more at: Backup Buddy.
Gravity Forms
Forms are critical to any website. Whether it’s a simple form to capture their first name and email address for your email newsletter to securely purchasing tickets to your event with a credit card, there’s only one form plug-in that will handle it all. Gravity Forms is one of the top three plug-ins we install on every website we build from the start. Their drag-and-drop form builder makes it easy to use without a technical background, and they have add-ons for all the most common systems like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Authorize.net and Stripe payment gateways, and many more. See more here: Gravity Forms.
WPEngine WordPress Hosting
WPEngine is by far, the best WordPress hosting company we’ve used (and we’ve used many!). The thing about WPEngine is that they only do WordPress, so they do it extremely well. They are more expensive than most of the other “vanilla” hosting companies, but what comes with the hosting is worth the cost 100 times over: free SSL certificates, automatic nightly and on-demand backups, one-click restore from any backup point, top-notch tech support, built-in free staging (test) server to try a new plug-in or theme without messing with production. They even have a plug-in that will suck your existing website over to their servers, making migration crazy easy. We only use WPEngine. See more here: WPEngine WordPress Hosting.
Managed.com Hosting
Managed.com does WordPress and other platforms as well. We’ve tried many other of the common hosting companies, and none of them measure up to Managed.com. Their tech support is top-notch and responsive (when your site is down, you need help NOW), and they provide a full suite of hosting services from cloud-based, shared, and dedicated servers (we have our own dedicated server with them). If you need both WordPress and email in one system, this is the company to choose. See more here: Managed.com
Authorize.net
Authorize.net has been the default payment gateway for a long time for many companies, and we’ve used them for years. It’s a robust platform that has a lot of features. You can bolt it onto your existing merchant (credit card processing) account or set up a new merchant account through them. They do charge monthly fees, so compare them with Stripe before making a decision. See more here: Authorize.net.
Constant Contact
This tool has been around for many years and is well-liked. They have great mobile-responsive, drag-and-drop templates that make it easy to create professional newsletters that make you look awesome. It integrates with a lot of tools, like Gravity Forms and many others. See more here: Constant Contact.
We’re a Constant Contact Certified Solution Provider, which means we’re trained and have passed a certification exam. We can help you get your email marketing systems set up correctly so you succeed.
ONTRAPORT
Having an all-in-one tool that gives you all marketing tools in one place is important, and having it at an affordable price is even better. ONTRAPORT is this platform, and it’s what we use for our own business. It has everything you need to build out a robust automated marketing platform for whatever business you’re in for not very much money. It includes a full CRM, auto-responders, sequences, email marketing, landing pages, text-to-sign up, affiliate portals and so much more. We’ve tried other CRM systems, and this is The One (yes, that’s an oblique reference to “The Matrix”). See more here: ONTRAPORT
Leadpages
If you need to create landing pages or squeeze pages for marketing or Google Adwords, Leadpages is a terrific tool that integrates directly with WordPress websites. They have a bunch of pre-built templates that you can drag-and-drop exactly what you want into place. They’re mobile-friendly so they authomatically work on any device, and the platform gives you data about how many people went to the page and how many completed the form (conversion rate). It integrates directly with many tools including GotoWebinar, Constant Contact, and a bunch of others. So if for instance, you want webinar registrants to automatically drop into your email list, Leadpages makes it super-easy.
Free Facebook Advertising Training
If you’re interested in really learning how to do Facebook ads, Leadpages has a 100% free course that takes you through it A-Z. Learn exactly what they do in their own advertising that has made Leadpages so successful and how you can implement the same tactics and strategies for your own business. We don’t teach FB ads, but a lot of people want to use it because it’s so effective. 1/8 of the planet is on Facebook, and you can reach pretty much any demographic you want by targeting image and video ads to your ideal customers. This is the best course we’ve found, and you can’t beat free!
Screaming Frog SEO
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free tool that lets you crawl an entire website. It will pull all your website links, graphics, SEO data (title, description, keywords, headers, etc.) and put it into a table for you to analyze. This is useful for finding all the pages and broken links in your website so you can fix anything that’s not right. The free version crawls 500 pages, and works well if you have a small website. The paid version crawls unlimited pages plus has some other features and costs £149/year. If you’re serious about SEO or work as a web consultant, this tool is a must-have (we use it all the time).
New Rules of Marketing and PR (David Meerman Scott)
The New Rules of Marketing and PR was a landmark book when it first came out in 2009. David Meerman Scott turned all the marketing experts on their ear and showed us how to market in the “new world” – the online world. It’s no longer about “blast your message to everyone hoping it sticks to a few”. Instead, attract those who are interested in your services and ignore the rest. We have given away probably 50 copies of this book away at our public talks and believe that every business owner should read this book.
If you pick no other book from our list, get this one.
Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug)
Don’t Make Me Think has been around for many years, and this edition has been updated for today’s markets. The point is, if your visitors have to “think” about what to do next, they’re just going somewhere else. Your website, the design, and everything else should just lead your visitors to the ultimate conclusion: to engage with you. We’ve seen SO many bad designs of websites that just leave us scratching our head. If your customers can’t figure it out, they’re not going to engage with you. It’s that simple.
Neuro Web Design – What Makes Them Click (Susan Weinschenk)
Neuro Web Design explains how we as buyers make emotional decisions no matter how much we think we’re making a logical choice. By building in the emotional triggers that compel our buyers to purchase our stuff, we’re far more likely to make a sale than just pitching our goods. Susan Weinshenk is a Certified Usability Analyst and trainer from Human Factors International (I am too!). She combines usability and the psychology of why we buy into one good book that can really make your website sell so much better. Much of the psychology is based on the next book (listed below) from Robert Cialdini. Highly recommended.
Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini)
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a fascinating book. If you really want to get in the head of the buyer and learn the six influences that make us buy, this is the book for you. There are subtle clues that we all “know” but aren’t conscious of when we make a buying decision. Cialdini brings them to light so you can use them in your own marketing materials and website to help your buyers make the decision to engage with you and not your competitors.
Google Analytics Breakthrough
I’ve known the authors of Google Analytics Breakthrough for many years. These guys are the real deal and was very sad when my friend, Shiraz Asif passed away recently (he and I shared the same birthday too!). I took an amazing Google Analytics class from Eric Fettman a couple years ago too. If you want to geek out on how to really measure your marketing efforts and actually make informed decisions about how to make sure your marketing is doing what you want it to do, this is your book. They are close friends of Avinash Kaushik, the author of another breakthrough book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, which revolutionized online marketing. Both books are highly recommended for those who want to impress the boss with your online marketing prowess.