The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit

Hosting Services 

With any online business, the MOST important factor that will make or break your business is Hosting. You will not be able to earn money if people are not able to come to your website and there is massive downtime.

“Avoid Cheap Hosting” to Get Better Performance & Peace of Mind – Don’t get stuck with cheap web hosting plans that ruin your business. Move to High-Performance Hosting that never lets you down.

TD Web Services: A global provider of hosted IT infrastructure and Cloud computing from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. Our customers range from Web startups to global enterprises. Products and services include Business Hosting, bare metal and cloud servers, private cloud solutions, and more. Because when you host your business infrastructure with us, you get a lot more than just infrastructure. You get the capabilities of our state-of-art platform and team, complete with a thoughtful methodology for designing, deploying, and managing your infrastructure.

Additional Reading: How I Trippled My Traffic After Moving to TDWS

Geek Crunch Hosting: started with a simple philosophy – “How can we make deploying, scaling, and managing infrastructure less painful?” The answer, we found, almost universally led to new ways to automate complex infrastructure and systems, empowering our customers to execute their IT strategies with greater control and efficiency. We are at the forefront of PaaS innovation, consistently delivering new platforms and services that help IT departments worldwide run and grow their businesses.

Blogging Platform

A blogging platform is an online home for bloggers and allows them to do creative works and other business ventures. Running a blog and maintaining it is a time-consuming process but What if it can generate revenues for you that are worth your time? Every blogging platform offers different features and capabilities to help you achieve a variety of goals. Here are some blogging platforms that you can start your blogging with.

WordPress: WordPress.org is an open-source free blogging platform that allows you to build your website or blog within minutes. It is really easy to use it. Simply install on any server and launch your website.

Note: All my websites eCommerce or Affiliate income, are powered by WordPress. 

Joomla: Joomla is the second-most popular open source Content Management System (CMS) and is trusted by some of the world’s most well-known companies and much-loved brands as well as millions of websites throughout the world! It offers a ton of add-ons/extensions that help build things a lot quicker.

Drupal: Drupal is very well suited for creating blogs, and websites for people like music artists, authors, and universities. It is very easy to customize and the deployment is not a hassle at all as the changes are reflected instantly. It is very scalable too.

Wix: Wix is a popular hosted platform to build websites. Their drag & drop website builder offers a solution for small businesses to easily build a website. You can also add a blog to your website by adding the Wix Blog app. It offers quick and easy setups.

Medium: Medium is a very good blogging platform where you can write or import blogs. It is like a social media platform where you can create your account and post your blogs. You can connect to a similar blogger community with this platform but you can not use your own domain.

Blogger: Blogger is a free platform provided by Google for blogging. You just have to create your google account. It is a great platform for beginners because it is relatively easy to use. No coding skill is required for the platform. You can somewhat monetize through ads.

WordPress Themes

We just have seen there are lots of blogging platforms but wordpress is the best platform of all. Here are the best WordPress themes that you can pick to start your blog.

OceanWP: OceanWP is a free theme that comes with many advanced features and customization options. It is the most customizable free multipurpose theme for wordpress websites so far. This theme is completely free and can be used on as many sites you want forever.

GeneratePress: GeneratePress is the highest-rated WordPress theme of all. It can be used to create any kind of website. It’s a multipurpose theme. In the 5 years since it launched, it has been one of the most stable, feature-rich, best-supported, and fast wordpress themes.

AstraWP: Astra Theme is a fair choice for any WordPress web design project. It is ideal for any individual bloggers or agencies. The free version of it is being used on more than 200,000 websites. Astra’s free version offers very limited customizations when compared to other similar themes. 

Thrive Themes: Thrive Themes and tools allow you to make beautiful-looking websites without coding knowledge. Thrive Themes has a good solution for any marketing needs. Thrive Themes manages to offer a ton of valuable plugins for marketers, agencies, and conversion-oriented site owners, all at a reasonable price.

Pro-Tip: Thrive Themes is great for Lead Generation pages. My blogs and also our lead generation pages are powered by Thrive Themes. Our WordPress Stack is usually in one of the following combinations: 

• WordPress + OceanWP + Elementor 
• WordPress + XTheme + Visual Composer
• WordPress + Thrive Themes 

WordPress Page Builder

After the selection of the theme, the next step is to choose a WordPress page builder to create the pages like the Homepage, contact page, the About us page, etc. I am suggesting some of the good page builders.

Elementor: Elementor helps you make your design most perfect and attractive. It helps you to add advanced styling, design elements, and layout to your WordPress content. You aren’t required to have knowledge of coding. Elementor is a popular page builder plugin for WordPress with over a million active installs. Elementor has a free version and a Pro version with variable pricing options.

Pro Tip: We are moving from other builders like Visual Composer to Elementor. Most of our websites use a combination of OceanWP + Elementor.   

Visual Composer: Visual Composer is a WordPress page builder that is bundled with many themes sold on ThemeForest’s marketplace. Visual Composer is a professional drag-n-drop website builder. Design layout of your WordPress website pages according to your content requirements.

Beaver Builder: Beaver builder makes it easy to create customized WordPress content. That can also be used to create beautiful landing pages. The Beaver Builder page editor allows you to visually edit what individual pages will look like. All you need to do is choose a content block from the menu and drag it to the appropriate place.

WordPress Performance & Security

WordFence: Wordfence Security is one of the most popular WordPress security plugins in the market. Its features and performance are really the best for WordPress security. WordFence Security plugin comes as both a Free and Paid version. The paid version has extra features and premium support. 

Note: ALL my website is secured by WordFence.

Jetpack: Jetpack security is quite easy to use. The security includes backups, malware scanning, and also protects from spam. Jetpack is one of the best plugins to cater to commonly required features such as security and backups. It is really easy to use. It has a fully professional support team.

WP-Optimize: WP optimize is a really progressive plugin that cleans your database, It compresses large caches and images on the site. It is a highly efficient tool that provides you all the things to keep the website fast and fully optimized. WP-Optimize scores highly in the pricing department as the stand-out features of the plugin such as database optimization and heartbeat API control are available in the free version.

Technical SEO

RankMath: Rank Math creates the perfect foundation for your on-page SEO. It is faster, easier, and more intuitive. It allows you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free. The plugin is lightweight and packed with many features. From setup to everything else, it’s simple to use, drastically better than its competitor plugins.

MonsterInsights: If you are looking for the best google analytics plugin for your WordPress site, monsterInsights is the best option for you. The plugin brings Google site tracking services right to your WordPress dashboard and hence making the process of tracking your site simpler and faster. The plugin is packed with powerful features that help track visitor’s behavior.

Google Tag Manager: Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website (or mobile app) without having to modify the code.

Pro-Tip: Google Tag Managers is far easier, efficient, and more optimized than most WordPress plugins. All our core sites use GTM to manage Google Analytics, FB Pixel, Twitter Tags, etc. 

Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin: Enhanced eCommerce Google analytics plugin tracks the entire user journey on your eCommerce store from the home page to product views and from cart page to checkout page to thank you page. You’ll be able to track even the smallest interactions with your products, such as how many people read your product details and add items to their carts.

Google Search Console: Google Search Console allows you to index your web page within the Google search engine. That way your visibility within this search engine increases, which means more people will find your webspace. For people who make web pages, this tool is essential. Also for those people who are constantly reviewing their websites in search of improving errors.

UberSuggest: Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that helps you find new content ideas, learn about your competitors, and get keyword suggestions for your content. It acts much like other paid tools. It helps to identify keywords to target, as well as related keywords. It also provides useful information for competitive analysis.

Moz Free Tools: Moz free tool has become one of the top SEO tools since its founding in 2004. Moz Pro, the site’s monthly subscription, includes a wide range of features designed to facilitate more effective SEO campaigns and improve your digital marketing results. Moz includes an incredibly robust set of features, so other services may be easier to understand for companies new to SEO.

Gnosys Digital: Gnosys digital is one of the best result-producing brands when it comes to SEO. There are very good reviews regarding their services and support we have got. They provide social media packages as well. Overall, they use good marketing strategies.

Note: When it comes to Gnosys Digital, we have designed our commercials where the marketing budgets are flexible. There is no retainer model which helps clients to manage their budget more efficiently.   

Editors

Google Docs: The best text editing application available which also allows you to do collaborative editing to the same document. It allows you to access, edit and share the document. It also supports multiple devices and platforms. You can access your document from any device as it is available on your google drive. You can also monitor the contribution and editing work done by others with the version restore function. 

Libre Office: LibreOffice is a document management platform that allows users to create, edit, save XLS spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint files to the cloud.LibreOffice’s online application helps create and edit files of any format. It enables businesses to handle files and directories through bookmarking and sorting by size, type, name, and last modified. 

Google Keep: Google keep has a relatively basic design, still the features they are providing are really good for taking and sharing notes. Like Google docs, slides, and sheets, the notes can easily be shared with other users also. It doesn’t allow you to use sharing links or share notes for reading only.

Evernote: Evernote is used as a tool to organize various documents and enhance collaboration across teams working on the same documents or project simultaneously. U can record your ideas to the software anytime you need. Evernote allows users to create project task lists and assigns them people so team members can collaborate and give status updates when required. 

Content Idea Generation

BuzzSumo: Buzzsumo is a popular content marketing tool that can help you analyze popular content, understand your competition, and monitor backlinks. With this platform, it is easy to stay on top of trending topics and it is also a tool for understanding social media sites and sharing their content, it is also a great tool for finding influencers on various social media platforms.

Quora: Quora is a nice platform to answer questions about anything. Part of what makes Quora so awesome is that it makes it easy to find a summary of what people think about something. Also, you will be able to know people’s interests and generate content accordingly.

Google Trends: Google Trends is a great tool to use when doing SEO or PPC for a company. It allows you to see seasonal trends of keywords, both broad and brand, and this gives you an idea of how to optimize your website to be on pace with the trends at hand so that you can decide your content accordingly.

Proofreading

Grammarly: Everyone, including professional writers, makes mistakes in their writing. Grammarly provides fast and accurate grammar and spell-check. Grammarly checks your writing against its database of content and style errors as well as anonymously collected data from its daily active users. 

Note: This eBook used Grammarly. 

Stock Images

Pixabay: Pixabay is the best free graphics stock market. It offers free uses of its downloaded graphics even for commercial use. Pixabay provides free stock photos for your artwork, video thumbnails, and a number of other stuff. If you’re looking for free random pictures, Pixabay is the best place to get them online!

Pexel: Pexel has a very rich gallery of stock images. Pexels is free, so you can use the images for your personal project or for mocking up a design with your client. The collection consists of over a dozen thousand hand-selected photos in several categories, all of which are tagged and available in high resolution.

Freepik: Freepik allows you to use all free resources for personal and commercial projects. Freepik provides hundreds of free photos and vectors. As a free registered user, you are allowed to download 30 resources per day. If you are a premium user, this number increases to 100 downloads per day.

Flickr: Flickr is an interesting combination of social media platforms and cloud storage provider. Basically, it enables you to store your photo and video content online in a safe, secure manner. Flickr offers one free and one premium subscription option. The free plan allows you to upload and store up to 1000 photos and videos, with no total storage limit. However, you will be limited to 200MB per photo or 1GB per video. 

Outsourcing Websites

Gnosys Digital: Gnosys digital is the best outsourcing website. They provide WordPress services like landing page design, dropshipping website design, bio links, and general WordPress support. Also all social media marketing on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, youtube, Tumblr posts. You can even buy turnkey websites from Gnosys digital. Their support and services are really very appreciable.

UpWorks: Upwork is great to find freelancers for both big and small jobs, as well as finding someone on a more permanent basis. Upwork favors ongoing contracts, as it offers reduced fees for contracts reaching over $500 billed. However, Upwork is not without its flaws. At times it can be hard to contact Upwork help directly.

Fiverr: Fiverr is a good platform for freelancers and buyers, but it’s important to rely on your own expertise, as low-cost gigs. Fiverr makes contacting and hiring a freelancer pretty simple. But again, we can not give a guarantee that each and every freelancer provides the best quality services.

Productivity Tools

SuiteCRM: CRM software not only helps you stay organized and build better relationships through contact management. Today CRM is a  critical business tool.CRM platforms gather various types of data about current and future customers. Those platforms analyze the numbers and show the results in nice and easy-to-understand graphics and reports. This is why it is one of the best investments a startup or small can have. 

Pro-Tip: We are using SuiteCRM for our Sales Management. It runs on TDWS Enterprise Hosting. 

Trello: Trello is a project management tool designed to help individuals and teams collaborate better and keep their projects organized. They offer a freemium model that lets users work with an unlimited number of boards, lists, and cards. It can also be integrated with cross-functional departments.

Odoo: Odoo is a fully integrated and customizable open-source suite of business applications including sales, CRM, project management, manufacturing, inventory, accounting and other business needs in one software solution. 

Pro-Tip: For High Performance Odoo Hosting, use TDWS Cloud Servers. 

OpenProject: Open project is a free and open-source online project management software with collaboration features. It has project planning and scheduling tools that enable people to easily define project objectives and specify work to be done related to scope.

Desktop Image/Video Recording + Editing Tools 

Camtasia: Camtasia is available for both Windows and Mac OS, and let you record screencasts. Offers a one-month free trial. You will be able to record your screen with voice or without voice according to your need. You can easily download the recorded video.

Loom: Loom helps to provide a video screen capture of workflows or issues in the product for both QA and current users/customers of the product. With Loom, you can record your screen, voice, and face to create an instantly shareable video in less time than it would take to type an email. From onboarding new employees, troubleshooting customer issues, or code reviews, Loom makes it easy to get your message across quickly and clearly.

Snagit: Snagit’s image and video capture is powerful, but not complex. You’re in control of everything you capture, right down to the pixel. Snagit is one such tool that can be used for screen capture, record and editing.

Image optim: ImageOptim is one of the simplest macOS apps. It simply navigates to the image file and needs to compress, click, and drag the images into ImageOptim’s window. You’ll immediately see a few spinning circles beside each file as ImageOptim mashes away unnecessary bits of the file to bring its size down.

MPEG Streamclip: MPEG Streamclip is an excellent top-quality video converter, editor, and player for QuickTime, MPEG, and transport streams. In addition to that, it doubles as a reliable encoder, DivX editor, and movie downloader, all in a single program.

Audacity: Audacity makes it incredibly easy to import an audio file and quickly edit to create the final Mono podcast I publish. Learning anything new is easy with the tool. Audacity has continually proved its worth within the audio recording industry, despite being one of the few recording applications that’s completely free. 

TubeBuddy: TubeBuddy has been a huge factor to the success for any channel. They are offering their chrome extension 100% free! The extension connects directly to the YouTube dashboard and gives a whole suite of new features!

Social Media Tools

Social Pilot: SocialPilot is a social media marketing automation tool that helps you in scheduling and analyzing your social media marketing activities and thereby increasing your social media efficiency and reach. It is a cloud-based social media marketing and analytics solution for businesses of all sizes. It offers calendar management, branding, scheduling, client management, and reporting functionalities within a suite. Android and iOS apps available.

Buffer App: Buffer Publish is a social media management tool that can help you manage multiple social media accounts and schedule posts.Buffer helps people to manage their social media profiles and schedule out their social media messages according to our strategy ahead of time. It makes it easy to schedule out your social media posts ahead of time and you can also manage multiple different accounts from one place. 

Agorapulse: Agorapulse is a social media marketing tool that enables agencies, businesses, and marketers to manage all their social media messages, schedule and publish content, identify key influencers, monitor social channels, and get stunning reports in one easy-to-use dashboard. 

Tailwind: Tailwind is perfect for an up-and-coming business. It allows you to manage, monitor, and connect, which is whatever small business needs! It is easy to learn with its step-by-step tutorials. It is ahead of its time in social media operations.

ClickToTweet: ClickToTweet provides you with the easiest way to share, track and promote your content on Twitter. It is the best, easiest and simplest way to promote and advertise your blog, website, business, and stuff on Twitter.

Social Media Content Creation 

Stencil: Stencil is a great image and ad creation software. It has an inbuilt collection of thousands of ready-made social media posts, royalty-free images, icons. The editor is very easy to use and saves a lot of time. The stencil has in fact proved to be an all-in-one graphic tool covering a wide range of features.

Canva: Canva gives businesses, organizations, and even individual professionals a very simple design platform that enables them to create amazing and professional quality graphic designs. This online design solution offers a throng of powerful features, including a simple drag-and-drop design tool.

PicMonkey: PicMonkey helps creatives of all experience levels make high-impact images to promote their personal or business brand. Its photo editing and design tools are a powerful yet easy-to-use alternative to complicated creativity software and a key resource for anyone who wants to level up their game.

Piktochart: Piktochart is an intuitive, easy-to-use infographic, presentation, flyer, poster, and report maker that helps communicators tell stories that matter and make a difference. Piktochart comes with a set of features that enable all graphic designers to create stunning masterpieces. These features include: ready to use graphics, charts and maps, High-res downloads, functional innovation, and design flexibility. 

Quotescover: QuotesCover is a free-to-use website that lets you create images composed of a quotation. You can start using the site without signing up for an account. All you have to do is click the “start designing” button on the site’s homepage. You can then enter a custom quotation or browse the many quotations available on the website.

Pablo: Pablo is incredibly quick and easy to use, but that means the features available are super simple. Simplicity is the key to this tool. It has a clear and concrete goal and this is applied to the UX with not so many options and features that confuse non-designers.

Blog Monetization

Google AdSense: Google Adsense is the best ad network that works with our site. Highest payout, highest CPM, most advertisers. Easy to implement, especially with their new Auto Ads feature, just one line of script to embed on your site, and everything can be controlled at the Adsense dashboard and show ads you like. Also, you can monetize their search feature if you implement it on your site.

Media.net: An ad network by Yahoo and Bing. High-quality ads just like AdSense. It is among the highest paying contextual ads networks and one of the best alternatives for AdSense. They are always searching for higher quality publishers and they only accept websites with premium content.

Propellerads: PropellerAds is easy to get started with and publishers can create and paste ad codes on their own. However, for better support, the company provides personal account managers as well. Their ads format can lead to a good conversion and for Publishers the CPM is high as per their GEO of traffic. 

Viglink: VigLink is one of the best ways to make money from blogging. VigLink converts your normal outgoing links into affiliate links, and if users make a purchase, you earn a referral commission from it. The best part is that you don’t need to be signed up for an individual affiliate account on all networks.

AdServer (FREE Available with Enterprise Hosting): With TDWS Enterprise Hosting you get FREE access to EJ Adserver. This enables our Enterprise clients to serve ads on desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile apps. When using EJ AdServers, your clients can take advantage of utilities that help them monetize their website.

Affiliate Networks

ImpactRadius: Impact Radius provides a platform for the advertiser and the media partner to communicate. So, they don’t exactly have what you might call a network type; instead, what they offer is a live marketplace where you can go ahead and connect with advertisers and media partners and a platform where you can manage all your partnerships with ease. 

ShareASale: ShareASale is a very trusted affiliate network.ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate marketing networks currently running.

CJ: CJ still rates as one of the better affiliate networks, and especially for beginners. They provide you with a solid set of tools, on a stable platform with plenty of support. 

LinkShare: LinkShare is a subsidiary of Rakuten Marketing LLC. It falls in the category of some of the largest pay-for-performance affiliate programs in the world. The platform gives both advertisers and publishers a chance to connect and engage consumers. 

Email Marketing Tools

MailChimp: MailChimp is often the first newsletter tool that springs to mind, possibly because they have great marketing and a charming monkey-fied aesthetic.They offer a free plan, with which you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. 

ConvertKit: Convertkit is a marketing automation tool that delivers a simple solution for drip email campaigns and creates easy forms and drip campaigns to automatically send mails to new subscribers.

Aweber: AWeber is a great email marketing software. Digital agencies use Aweber to collect clients. Aweber is also used for other businesses.It is a great platform for automation. you do not have to set up day-by-day emails. You will be able to set up and schedule our email campaigns all at once.

Other Miscellaneous Blogging Tools

Pingdom: Pingdom is a very easy-to-integrate tool that provides information about the load time of the webpage and alerts of downtime of the application. It provides the full report of the errors on the managed pages. The integration of Pingdom alerts on slack proves to be very useful.

TDWS GMS: TDWS Global Monitoring System is here to help you keep track of your website. Everything monitored. Quickly gain a complete view of your IT infrastructure, no matter how complex. TDWS Global Monitoring System provides powerful monitoring of networks, servers, clouds, containers and applications. Fast. Effective.TDWS WordPress ToolKit (TDWS Managed WordPress Hosting): In the past, your hosting provider would usually provide an easy way to install WordPress on a shared or dedicated server using whatever control panel they provided for their customers. All it took was the click of a button and for the customer to provide a few details like the password, database name, and location of the installation. A few minutes later WordPress was ready to go. But this is where support for the application ended. If the customer was to run into any trouble with their site due to WordPress, a theme or a plugin the hosting provider offered little help since few supported the applications that customers installed on their servers. Managed WordPress Hosting service that handles all of your technical stuff like upgrades, performance, and security to allow you to focus on your content. We provide WordPress Hosting for personal sites to multi-server clusters for Web startups to global enterprises.