In case you haven’t met me, you might not realise just how much of a super-massive nerd I am. In fact I am such a super nerd I have recently been nominated for a women in tech award (which I am hoping comes with a cool cape or something if I do win).
And because I seem to have that extra dose of the nerd gene one of my greatest pleasures comes from finding great new blogging tools, plugins and systems (especially ones of the online variety) to help make my life easier.
In fact just ask Carly from Smaggle if you don’t believe me, she gets me to Google things for her because she thinks Google likes me better. It’s just a gift I guess.
And it’s a gift I am sharing with you guys today, because I have found some absolutely amazing nerdy things which have made my blogging life not just easier, but they’ve helped to grow both my blogs too, and it would be rude of me not to spread the love.
Pinners are sexy!
Kate’s favourite nerdy things (aka the best Blogging tools around)
1 – For organisation – Asana
Oh, my. My heart rate just sped up a little with the mention of this one. After a highly traumatic incident when I lost my physical day planner (twice!) I decided it was time to take all my to-dos and planning online.
I also wanted an easy way to create recurring reminders, even recurring task templates with multiple steps to them, AND to also be able to do this for multiple people (as I have a team). And Asana was by far and away the best option. Once you get it all set up it’s super easy to use, plus it syncs across all your devices, and finally.. and this is probably my favourite part… they have “celebration unicorns“.
So sometimes when you tick off a task (not every time, it’s set on random), for no reason at all, a unicorn will fly across the screen to celebrate! I don’t know about you, but for me, that is a pretty good incentive to actually get my shit done for the day.
Celebration unicorns!!
2 – For email – Active Campaign
If I ever get another tattoo, it will probably be one saying #AC4EVA. I love this system that much! I used to be with Mailchimp, and they were fine. Very easy to get set up with (which sadly Active Campaign is not… well not for the total newbie anyway), but if you wanted to do anything “clever” with your emails, like send different emails to people who viewed different sections on your blog, or to have multiple opt-in offers (and then different follow sequences for each), or even if you needed any tech support when something went wrong, Mailchimp suddenly became quite limiting, and also way too complicated.
Enter Active Campaign, which not only is cheaper than Mailchimp (and from my experience has the same deliverability / open rates etc..) but it allows you to do some seriously clever stuff with your emails. Yes, the set up can be a bit fiddly (if you’re not used to using this type of system, I think I will actually do a blog post or workshop on how to set AC up to work for bloggers… what do you think?). But once it is up and running the options that open up to you are limitless and super easy to put together too.
If you want to start doing smart emails, I definitely recommend you check it out!
*UPDATE: You may have seen recently that SBB is moving across to Ontraport. This is because we have outgrown AC BUT we will always love and recommend Active Campaign!
3 – For list building – Thrive Leads ($59)
Speaking of smart emails and having multiple opt-in offers, if you are serious about list building then you also need a seriously clever and seriously smart plugin to create all those opt-in forms. Now I used to be a fan of both Ninja pop-ups and also Popup Ally, and they are still good tools. But that’s like saying I used to like chocolate ice cream, and then I discovered Peanut butter brownie ripple…. It’s just so much better and now I can’t even look at plain old chocolate again.
Thrive leads is a plugin for WordPress.org, it’s US$59 (so actually cheaper than the premium Popup Ally), and the reason I love it so much is it’s just so easy to use, and it has a whole Swiss army knife’s worth of awesome extra features.
So not only can you easily create gorgeous looking pop-ups (and in post opt-ins, sidebar opt-ins, “hello bar” type opt-ins, slide in corner opt-ins, exit intent opt-ins, content locking opt-ins etc.. etc..) you can also set different pop-ups/ forms etc.. to show on different posts/pages or categories (so you can target different opt-in bribes to readers viewing different content).
You can also then connect each of these opt-ins to a different email list, so that way you can continue to send targeted emails to these readers.
Again it’s a little fiddly to set up as some of the options are just named weirdly. But they have good documentation and support so if you’re happy to do a little trial and error I promise you’ll be hooked.
4 – For building blogs – Jupiter theme (US$59)
A lot of people ask me which “themes” I recommend for building WordPress sites, or even which developers I recommend for creating custom blog designs and sites. And actually I do all my own blog design (with some help from my graphic designer), and I do it all without knowing any code because earlier this year I discovered the Jupiter builder theme, and it’s been a super-nerdy love story ever since!
Again this is for wordpress.org (that’s the blogging platform I recommend as well), and this theme pretty much allows you to create any layout for your blog, and to even create completely custom pages and even blog post layout designs. It uses the ‘Visual composer” plugin to act as the “builder” part (which is the drag and drop layout/design creator) but the Jupiter theme designers have even customised Visual Composer to add lots more elements to it.
If you are thinking about selling anything on your blog, or even running any kind of special promotions or challenges (so you want to have pages that look a bit more special and have a few more special elements than you get with your regular theme), and you are happy to spend a few hours getting your head around all the different functions of the builder theme (it can seem a bit overwhelming at first as there are just so many different options and things you can do!) then I would definitely recommend you check out the Jupiter theme (or even look at adding it to a fresh install or subdomain to just create those extra pages, which is what we did with ddgdaily.com)
5 – Remembering passwords / Keeping things safe – Lastpass (free or $12 per year)
I hate to admit it, but up until a few weeks ago, our team had ALL the passwords to pretty much everything saved in a Google document. Hmm… not super safe or smart (and even more annoying we never kept it up to date so I felt like I was forever resetting passwords for people).
So finally we decided to make the investment in something more secure, and that also allowed me to share passwords and login info with contractors etc from one central spot (but without them actually ever knowing what those passwords were).
LastPass is a great tool that has both free and paid options (the free one lets you have one shared “family and friends” folder, and you can save any logins that you need want your team to be able to access in there and then invite them to that folder, or for the paid version it’s $12 per year / per person and you can have as many different folders as you like and invite different people to different folders too).
It’s a browser extension that basically remembers and then pre-fills all your passwords and logins. Again it’s a little fiddly to get set up, but once you have done it your life will be so much easier (and more secure too).
Bonus – For Facebook ads – Adespresso
Ok, not a lot of you will have a need for this, but it’s so damn clever I need to share it anyway (and it has an extra use that you might find useful if you are thinking about creating some sort of product but not sure which one to do!).
Basically, Adespresso is a tool that makes creating and optimising Facebook ads super simple. All you do is jump in, upload a group of images, and group of different heading and text options (and even different links if you want to test how different pages work), and then it automatically creates every single combo of those elements and runs them all as ads simultaneously to see which ones work the best.
It quickly then finds the combos that work better than others, and you can easily turn off those that aren’t working as well, so then not only do you know what pictures and headlines work best (which is a great tool when you are trying to come up with a product idea don’t you think?) but you are also getting your paid Facebook traffic at the lowest rate too.
Adespresso has a 14-day free trial so you can actually sign up and have a play for free, although please remember that Facebook ads are not free (you still need to pay for whatever you use there, but you can set the daily budget to whatever works for you!)
