I wanted to give you an insight into the tools that we use in order to build & manage our site, take payments, and conduct our marketing effort. We consider these tools the best digital marketing tools for membership websites today.
Our focus is on using a small set of simple to use tools that we consider the best available in their class. Life is too short to experiment with dodgy software… so feel free to adopt the same software we use and get on with building your site.
Best Digital Marketing Tools
I arranged these into sections, and listed the best tools that we’ve found to do our work, along with a description of each. We’re not paid to promote these – we just use them and find them worthwhile so I wanted to share them with you here.
Administrative Software
GSuite
GSuite is a set of administrative software tools that is essential for running our business. It includes a coporate email address for team members, an administrative file system and office software. We store all of our corporate information in this system. Highly recommended.
Slack
Slack is an enterprise communications platform. Think of it as MS Messenger or WeChat on steroids. You PM coworkers, start channels to communicate with groups, pin notes to remember for later, and even take part in group calls. We use Slack to communicate with our team, plan 3 month sprints, bring up technical issues… it’s really invaluable. And it’s free.
Website and Hosting Software
Kleq
We formerly used Kleq to create and host our website, but due to SEO limitations and our SEO focus, we moved back to WordPress. Kleq is otherwise the best membership website builder on the market today. It’s dead easy to use, you can build great looking sites, and it’s specifically set up with dedicated sections for membership websites and every integration you’d need. Kleq also provides in-house hosting which is very fast and saves us money each month. Just don’t use it if you want to have highly optimized SEO in a tough niche.
WordPress
The standard website & content management software. WordPress is a well known quantity today, and it’s gotten better and easier to use since I started making websites way back in the early 2000s. With modern page builders, you don’t need to know any CSS – everything is drag and drop.
Kadence
Our theme was built by Kadence, which offers some very fast, attractive, and highly customizable designs. Our website took me just over a day to put together. If you want in on a highly effective hack for putting together outstanding looking websites in as little as a few hours, send us an email.
Email Marketing Tools and Payment Tools
Active Campaign
We use Active Campaign for our email marketing and have done so for multiple sites. It’s not as easy to use as Kleq, and there are a few bugs, but it is very powerful, allowing for very sophisticated automations and member segmentation.
Stripe
We think that Stripe is a great payment processor. It is fairly cheap, and able to handle recurring payments via credit card.
Wise
We use Wise as our preferred online banking solution. Basically all of our payments go through Wise. It’s very fast, converts currency with a 0.5% fee (rather than 8-10% that your bank will charge you) and is by far the best way to send money internationally.
SEO Marketing Tools
Mangools
We use Mangools as our preferred keyword research tool. One study found it to be the most accurate tool for assessing keyword traffic. It also turns up a very large number of keywords to write on.
Allintitle
Allintitle is a software tool that helps to quickly and easily bulk assess Google’s “allintitle” data when doing preparation research for the Avalanche SEO Technique. Assessing this data by hand is otherwise tedious and time consuming.
SEO Minion
We use this to comb the Google SERP to build a list of People Also Ask questions related to particular keywords. We use this list to find easy keywords to write on within our niche. This technique generates hundreds of different keywords, many very easy to rank for.
Page Optimizer Pro
This tool provides edge analysis to help outrank competing keywords. We use this to give us an edge ranking for tougher keywords.
Trello
Trello is a simple project management tool that uses job cards and decks to coordinate work between teammates. We use this to coordinate the team during our writing and publication process. Highly recommended.
