Today, I’d like to share with you our favorite blogging resources.
If you’re just starting out, you’ll find this list invaluable, as it’ll save you time and provide all the essential tools you need to have a great looking and functioning blog.
By the way don’t get hung up on the technical details.
Although you can easily set this up yourself, I will give you a super cheap solution to have someone else do it for you, if you’re how should I say it… uhh technically challenged.
Ok, here we go.
Blog Hosting We Love
By far, THE best hosting company we’ve EVER had is…
Hostgator
Now I’ve personally used 4 different hosting companies in the past, and this one is by far my favorite. I’ve been using them for the last 3 years.
They have fast, reliable, and friendly 24/7 support. And believe me you need it. If something goes wrong, as it has for me in the past, their tech team works around the clock to help you resolve any issues.
As far as which plan to use, if you’re just starting out, their Baby Plan will work just fine. It allows you to have multiple domains, which means you can host a number of websites under one plan. And it’s all under $10 a month right now.
Don’t go for their most basic plan, because there you’ll only have 1 domain you can host. For an extra couple dollars a month, you have the option to host as many websites as you want.
One of my favorite things about Hostgator, is it’s run on a cPanel dashboard, which has something called Fantastico.
This will allow you to build your blog in literally 5 seconds with one click of a button.
They also have VPS and Dedicated Servers, which are great for when you ramp up your traffic and will need a lot more space and a faster server. These are more expensive options, but not something you need to start with.
Plugins
Plugins are important to make your blog more effective.
Most plugins are free, but there are some premium ones which we use as well.
Awesome Free Plugins We Love…
Here’s the list, and you can simply click on the Add New Plugin in your WordPress blog dashboard and type the name.
WP Super Cache – speeds up your blog.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Best SEO plugin for WordPress.
Ad Injection – Allows you to put ads on your blog and control them site-wide from one interface. You can put ads for your own products, affiliate programs, or even sell space on your blog.
Akismet – helps detect and remove spam.
Google Analyticator – Google Analytics plugin, connects to your Google Analytics account for you to track everything.
Twitter Facebook Social Share – adds most popular social buttons on your posts and pages.
WP YouTube Lyte – Quickly embed YouTube videos into posts and pages.
Bulletproof Security – One plugin designed to secure your website from hackers.
WordPress Backup To Dropbox – Great way to keep your blog backed up. Make sure you do this and schedule regular automatic backups of your database.
There are many others out there, but these are the important ones to have for best performance. You don’t want to load up too many as well, because with each plugin you slow down your blog.
Awesome Paid Plugins We Love…
There are a couple of paid plugins I’ll recommend which are very useful.
Popup Domination
This cool plugin let’s capture more visitors and turn into subscribers on both your blogs and static websites with a stylish and customized popup.
Ninja Affiliate
Automatically Convert Keywords Into Money Making Affiliate Links
Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.
Themes We Use And Recommend…
Your blog comes with a free theme, and there are plenty out there.
After trying a number of them, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to use a premium theme.
Now if you’re on a very limited budget, it’s NOT that important right now. You can use a free theme, and it’s just fine.
But premium themes are a lot more robust, giving your blog a nicer, more professional look and feel.
Our Top 3 Favorite Blog WordPress Themes
We have several blogs in multiple niches and we use one of these 3 on almost all of them:
WooThemes – This is the theme of choice for Matt Crystal, Director of Operations at Magnetic Sponsoring.
Genesis – This is Tim Erway’s favorite framework. He uses Genesis themes on several blogs he owns.
Thesis – Out of these 3, Thesis is the most technical one, but also my favorite.
Woo and Genesis provide you with lots of options and customization you can do right from your dashboard, to give your blog a great look and feel.
Thesis gives you a platform to build literally anything you want. The only thing is, it’s not a push button thing. You’ll need someone who knows PHP to add code to your blog. They do have a great forum with lots of support, and I’ve pretty much figured out what I needed to make Thesis look exactly like I want to. You can also hire someone from their forum to do that for you.
If you don’t mind getting a little technical, this is a fantastic theme. Or you can hire someone to do that as well.
If not, then stick with the other two which are great and aren’t nearly as technical.
The ONLY Choice For Marketers Who Want To Quickly & Easily Transform Their Blog Into A Sales System
Here’s one more theme to use on a blog when you want to create slick squeeze pages and sales letters.
OptimizePress
Building Your List
There are lots of options when it comes to choosing an autoresponder to build and manage your list.
The one I recommend for our industry, and the one most people use is Aweber.
Aweber
Another option if you’re in a non-business opportunity field is iContact.
iContact
There are others, but we recommend these two.
You can also try them for a month and get a feel for it before committing to one.
Keep in mind that, once you choose the autoresponder, it’ll be hard for you to switch later, because most will require for your list to reconfirm if you want to move them over to another company, and you’ll end up losing a chunk of your subscribers. You can do it, but it’s a hassle, so it’s best to choose one and stick with it.
Also, no matter what service you use, always keep a backup of your list!
Seriously, your account can be shut down at any time for any reason without any notice, and poof, you’re out of business.
Although it’s never happened to me, but I’ve heard some nightmare stories.
There are a few more things I’d like to share about list building and autoresponders, kind of best practices, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.
This ought to get you started.
Pay Someone Else To Do It
One last thing I want to share is the resource I promised if you want to outsource your blog set up.
Before I do, let me tell you my personal feelings on this.
When I started online I knew NOTHING about websites, blogs, autoresponders, or even what HTML is.
But what I decided to do, is to learn how to do a lot of these things myself. Not because I enjoy doing anything technical. I really don’t. But I found that it’s a lot easier to hire someone to do something, when you know exactly what needs to be done.
Plus if I ever need to tweak something quickly, more often than not, I can do it myself.
Today there are plenty of video tutorials, there’s a ton of stuff on YouTube on how to set up every single thing I’ve shared in this post, and in my opinion it’s worth a few hours of your time to learn this.
It’s kind of like, if you own an oil change station, you don’t need to change the oil yourself, you can hire a mechanic for that. But you should know how to change oil and what the engine looks like at the very least.
It’s not difficult at all, and if you spend a couple of hours to learn this stuff it’ll save lots of time and frustration in the future.
With that said, here’s a fantastic resource you can go to and hire someone for FIVE BUCKS to set up your blog, embed videos, or almost any other small service like that.
www.fiverr.com
I’ll give you one more place I’ve personally used a lot, where you can find pretty much any kind of technical help. From the basic blog set up to the most advanced web design, graphics, coding, etc…
www.Odesk.com
NOTE: Before you hire anyone, make sure to check their feedback and any reviews. I never hire anyone who doesn’t have good reviews for similar type of work.
For small jobs I also never pay anything upfront.
To be honest I was hesitant to hire my first person for some reason. But I once spent two hours on the most stupid thing and still couldn’t get it to work properly. Which is when I decided to try this, and found someone who did it for $10 and had it done in less than an hour.
I even found a graphic designer from Philippines that will work wonders in Photoshop for $5. But don’t ask me for his name, because I’m already keeping him pretty busy.
Ever since then I’ve been outsourcing as much as I possibly can. Even when I know how to do it, but don’t want to spend the time.
Ok, that’s it for today, I’ll have more great tips for you tomorrow.
Cheers,
Vitaly Grinblat
P.S. I’d love to get your feedback on this and if you’d like to get more tips like these or anything else you’d like to see us write about to help you grow your business.
21 Responses to “Top Blogging Resources We Love And Use”
Great info. I am using most of the tools you guys recommend. I do live one Marketing theme called Profitstheme also! Kinda like OptimizePress but … it’s awesome and created membeship sites in an instant and cool squeezepages too
Great list of resources. I’m a huge fan of thesis for sure, although it definitely isn’t a beginner theme for sure, but it’s one of the most customizable ones out there.
I’d add “Yet Another Related Post” for adding links in the footer of a blog post for related content on your site as well.
Cheers,
Kurt
Thanks for the above tips they are very helpfull.
Keep it up
Awesome stuff I use most of these plugins but had no ideas about the wordpress back up to dropbox plugin that’s just awesome will be using it on my blog today!
Thanks
Jeremy Watson
Http://JeremysChallenge.com
Kurt,
I love Thesis too.
I probably should have listed this resource, but it’s more advanced.
If you use Thesis, there’s developer who created a whole set of FREE plugins specifically for Thesis, that let you customize this theme any which way you want to.
http://www.byobwebsite.com/plugins
But I don’t recommend this for complete beginners, because you still may need to play with the custom.css page to adjust some settings.
Thanks!
Yes Thesis is definitely solid!
It’s amazing what one can do without having a Dev Teaam – Thanks for the plugin list!
Wish you the best!
Robert
PS. Vitaly – I’ll definitely check out those Free Thesis Plugins – I appreciate it!
Thanks so much! Lots of valuable info and i stole all of it! I am still a beginner using a blog and I have had really bad luck with hiring help for that. So now I am forced to learn myself and I seriously want to shoot everyone that says how easy WordPress is! LOL It gets easier everyday though! Thanks again!
I just bookmarked Fiverr.com. I don’t mind spending money for value. I have spent lots more for less. I am glad I took time to read this blog.
Thanks for the comprehensive list. BTW, Mailchimp is also a great autoresponder to use.
Anton, Fiverr.com is awesome, you’re not gonna believe what some people will do for FIVE BUCKS!
Angie, yes, sometimes I too want to throw a chair through my monitor, or something heavy LOL. What I found is, EVERYTHING is easy, once you know how to do it.
Aloha Vitaly, I enjoyed your post here and lots of great tips you noted here. There are a few plugins I may implement to my blog. Gosh this is a very informed post and I know most will appreciate your detail break downs on each topics and tips. I know I do! I am glad I came by and thanks for sharing! Mahalo, Lani
Ps.. if you don’t mind me saying this social share vertical bar, you may want to move it to the right. It is hard to comment here, it’s in the way. Lol Just helping!
Very interesting! Really want to learn to make an impressive blog for I am a beginner in the rough. But thanks for this info.
Thank you Lani.
Glad you got a lot from the post. We’ll take a look at the bar, I think it shows up differently on each browser, because it’s fine on mine.
BTW, I think Hawaii is THE BEST place in the world. Been there 3 times and it’s my dream to move there one day. Actually if it wasn’t for all our extended family here in sunny Michigan , I’d already be there… blogging away looking over the Pacific Ocean and top of the Molokini. For now I only see it on my desktop
Great tips here thanks. Another great option for sales funnels is ListMachinePro. Little more costly but does an awesome job In list building. Have thesis on your main blog then install WP on a subdirectory for your sales funnel theme. OptimizePress also good but my preference is LMP for is functionality and customization. However you do it, just do something. Action first, questions later. Thanks.
Vitaly,
This an excellent list of resources for anyone working on building their on BLOG and even the more experienced bloggers out there.
I particularly likes the “Ad Injection” plug-in, how does that compare to the to the “Ninja Affiliate” plug-in.
I also use a “ABC Recommends” plug-in to create unique links from my blog to affiliate pages, which allow me to mask my affiliate links.
Thanks for the information.
Thanks for the excellent tips and info. This is really helpful for a beginner. I It will save our time and money. We are looking forward to learn more from you in future. For my autoresponder I first started with Autoresponder but then someone suggested me to use getresponse. Which one do you recommend. Also for creating a webpage do you recommend joomla for a beginner.
Thanks in advance.
Gotta tell you, it;s either my computer or you have a glitch…the box with your social media links is in the way on the left hand side of the page. Check to see what’s up…
very useful tips but what is this cheat sheet. It is sounding negative
Hare,
Cheat sheet = shortcut
Nothing negative
Hyacinth, I’ve never used Joomla. I’ve always used WordPress just like I recommend in this post. Aweber is my first pick for an autoresponder, but iContact has some great features as well. Never used GetResponse, so I couldn’t tell you.
Thanks Bill.
Ad Injection lets you put banner ads in different spots on your blog. Ninja Affiliate automatically inserts your affiliate links into the keywords you set, and cloaks them as well.
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