If you're waiting for an opportunity to come knocking, then I've got news for you. That opportunity is right now, 2020!
Not next year, or the year after, right now!
Yes, I know that probably sounds like a cliche, but seriously! Stop thinking about the 'What ifs', or the 'Someday I'll get around to doing that'... Start now.
We are so fortunate to be alive, living in this era of technology and the internet.
YOU have access to everything you need to start building your equity, your future, your dream online blog or business. When it comes to getting things done, there's a profusion of productivity and creativity tools, services, apps, software, technology, and training available!
You can build any kind of business you envision on the internet, and you can build this business out of nothing other than passion, love, and raw determination. You don't need to have a degree or any special qualification to start. If you have a fire in your belly, that will do just fine.
That's the big question I often hear in the blogosphere. Where do you start?
Well, you can start right here, because I created this resource page to help you cut through the noise and clutter to find the very best tools you need to kickstart and grow your blog or online business.
Take a look below, find what you need and make something BIG happen today. Stop waiting.
I've been hosting Magnet4Blogging on SiteGround with confidence since 2015. They're extremely reliable, secure, and provide state-of-the-art technology and good all-around customer support.
You can read my full review of SiteGround here.
Get SiteGround Hosting (Affiliate link)
Magnet4Blogging has a purpose-built theme using Oxygen Builder for WordPress. The most powerful visual website building toolkit available.
Thrive Themes have revolutionized the way in which we build online businesses using WordPress. My business would not be where it is today without them.
Thrive Themes provides a suite of powerful conversion-focused tools to help you grow your blog or website.
Get Thrive Themes (Affiliate link)
I started my blogging venture in 2010 with Genesis. It's a robust, well-coded, and secure theme framework with lots of easy customization options.
Get Genesis (Affiliate link)
If you're planning to sell digital products or services on your blog or website, the first thing you'll need to do is design some attractive, on-brand, sales pages, complete with your product profiles and marketing content and message.
For this, I use and recommend Thrive Architect. Thrive Architect is a powerful, feature-packed, drag and drop page builder plugin for WordPress.
I have used this plugin to create all kinds of pages and with a variety of conversion goals and purposes for my own online businesses.
Get Thrive Architect (Aff Link)
Creating great content will be your most important focus when building your blog or online business. In addition, you'll need to arm your website with smart tools for optimizing your content and strategies to sustain growth and increase your conversions.
For this, I use and recommend Thrive Themes Membership. You'll get access to powerful plugins for growing your email list, designing sales pages, doing A/B split testing, managing testimonials, creating and tracking your marketing campaigns, and more.
Get Thrive Membership (Aff Link)
Optimizing your blog posts and pages for better search engine visibility is a critical step in growing your blog or online business.
For this, I use and recommend either Yoast SEO or SEOPressor Connect. SEOPressor a is powerful, feature-crammed, all-in-one, on-page and site-wide SEO plugin for self-hosted WordPress websites.
SEOPressor Connect is a subscription-based service/plugin that comes with a host of useful options, including SEO auditing tools, broken link checker, over-optimization indicator, multiple keyword optimization, and more.
Get Thrive SEOPressor (Aff Link)
Growing your email list as well as managing your lists effectively is an integral part of your online business growth strategy.
You can capture emails using Thrive Leads (Available in the Thrive Membership Package), however, you'll need a reliable email marketing service provider to help you manage your list, as well as create and send powerful campaigns to help you promote your content, products, and services, and increase engagement.
For this, I use and recommend MailChimp. They've been around for a long time, and they are 100% cost-effective.
Get MailChimp (Aff Link)
Creating content, promoting content, guest blogging, posting on social media, creating and sending email newsletters, maintaining your blog, managing offline promotions...
With so many platforms to use, it can quite easily become a laborious chore bouncing from one site to the next, juggling your marketing and content creation and distribution all over the place.
Which is why I use and recommend CoSchedule. Since I've started using CoSchedule, my productivity has tripled!
Get CoSchedule (Aff Link)
It's no secret, if you want to build a blog and boost your organic search engine traffic quickly, keyword research is an essential process, especially when you are promoting various products and services to maximize your blog income.
For finding profitable keywords to use in your blog posts, I use and recommend Long Tail Pro.
Long Tail Pro is a monthly subscription service. It's a tool that will save you time, money, and help you cultivate a blog packed with not just useful, but also profitable content.
Get LongTailPro (Aff Link)
Do you want to make it easy for your blog readers to share and promote your awesome content on social media?
The plugin I recommend using for WordPress is SocialSnap. This is a powerful, lightweight, blazing-fast loading social media marketing plugin packed with lots of useful features including on-page social optimization.
If you're a long-time reader of my blog, you may remember that I used to use and recommend Social Warfare. That plugin is available on the WP repository if you're interested in that one instead.
Get SocialSnap (Aff Link)
If you're starting from rock bottom with your blog or affiliate marketing business, and have absolutely no idea where to start, the training website I highly recommend is Affilorama.
Affilorama is a platform that offers sound and practical affiliate marketing training. You'll get access to over 120 tutorial videos, the blueprint for building profitable affiliate websites, and access to a suite of powerful tools for finding profitable niches, keywords, and more.
Affilorama has over 700,000 members and growing. Join today to access the free valuable content, to begin with!
Join Affiliorama (Aff Link)
Are you thinking of writing and publishing your own eBooks to sell on your blog or website? Well, that's a great way to start making money from your online business.
To save you a lot of time and resources, I use and therefore recommend Payhip for hosting all your eBooks and digital products.
Payhip has a low commission rate as well as a host of other useful tools, such as membership tools you can use to create simple memberships for your products.
Join Payhip (Aff Link)
Finally, you can't build a successful or profitable blog without a smart plan or strategy. Trust me, I've been blogging for over 8 years and I know.
Which is why I created the Ultimate Pro Blog Planner workbook for you!
My blog planner contains over 30 printable worksheets and planners and comes in PDF format. There are planners for your blog posts, social media campaigns, traffic generation, content promotion, income and expense reports, and more.
