With all the amazing tools at your fingertips in today’s digital world when it comes to real and scalable business growth, there’s never been a more confusing time for you to choose the right platforms that work for your situation.
In today’s article, we’re going to dive deeper into some of the most important (so we think so) tools that have helped not only our team, but millions of people around the world.
You see, these tools are tried and tested and guaranteed to grow any business in any stage.
We’ll talk about things like website CMS or “Content Management Systems”, hosting companies, social media growth tools, and much more.
So without further ado, let’s dive in!
WordPress – Build a website online easily
WordPress is by far the most popular CMS (content management system) on the web.
Powering over 35% of the whole internet, WordPress is truly a tool of unlimited potential when it comes to helping you grow your business.
There’s literally endless possibilities when it comes to creating your website on WordPress.
Being open source (software that allows users to freely modify the code), WordPress has exploded into a huge industry that sees developers create amazing add-ons, themes, templates, and much more.
Instead of having to understand different coding languages, WordPress puts everything you need right at your fingertips.
You can run a blog that will help drive traffic to your business or you can create a B2B service website.
You can go full Shopify (less the monthly cost) and create an e-commerce site that runs on WooCommerce (A Popular WordPress Cart & Checkout system).
I’m not kidding when I say that WordPress is my favorite way to bring a website from vision to reality.
The customizations are, like I mentioned, endless. If you are looking for an end to end solution to set your website up on (and grow your business) then WordPress is your prime candidate.
In addition, there’s no shortage of website developers that are well versed in WordPress and can help you do anything you need.
ActiveCampaign – Automate your email marketing
With so many email marketing (and CRM) choices out there, my personal favorite is ActiveCampaign.
I’ve tried other platforms like MailChimp (too restrictive), Infusionsoft (too expensive with low deliverability), Aweber (meh), and others.
I’ve really come to enjoy the flow of using Active Campaign.
It’s user friendly (to some degree), but if you can’t figure something out their support team is amazing and their knowledge-base is filled with top tire video and written training.
The ActiveCampaign platform is truly impressive when it comes to what it can do to help you grow your business.
Aside from just automating your email marketing, you can use the ActiveCampaign platform to activate your entire customer experience.
Some of the popular features of ActiveCampaign is obviously email marketing, segmentation, dynamic content, and messaging.
Popular features inside their automation suite include, but are not limited to automation, contact management, segmentation, and once again, email marketing.
A newer addition to help you grow your business was their sales automation, lead scoring, and win probability.
ActiveCampaign truly doesn’t stop at email marketing alone…
Included is an advanced reporting system, integrated forms to collect web responses and send them directly to your ActiveCampaign dashboard, and also site tracking.
Like I mentioned earlier, you get a full library of training and support plus migration services, gmail extension, email segmentation, automation goals, and an iOS CRM app.
Ahrefs – Monitor your website performance online
With over 2000 servers, 64k CPU cores, 400TB RAM, 40PB+HDD, and a 10PB SSD it’s no secret that Ahrefs loves data for search engine marketers.
Every 24 hours they discover 40 million new pages along with updated metrics of 300 million pages and a total content index size of 3.06 billion pages.
Their massive keyword index stores over 10 billion keywords on 10 search engines in a whopping 171 countries.
I could go on and on about their stats, but you get the point.
They’re a bada** platform that helps you rank your website which means getting more website traffic.
And that means they are a tool that helps you grow your business.
With a 7 day trial that will cost you $7, Ahrefs is any marketers dream suite of tools.
Just like Active Campaign, they have an impressive knowledgebase of training and tutorials to help you become a better search engine marketer.
Ahrefs also has a frequently updated (and totally free) YouTube channel that will help you in your quest of top tier Google search rankings.
Once your 7 day trial is over, the Ahrefs basic package will cost you $99, but in all realness you’d be a lot better off with the middle package of $179.
Bluehost – Reliable hosting for your website
Bluehost is a web hosting platform that offers a free domain for the first year, a free SSL certificate, a one click WordPress install, and 24/7 support.
That being said, if you don’t know what hosting is then here’s the definition:
Website hosting companies are platforms that house the files of your domain on a server which then make them accessible online.
Without a hosting company, you can’t grow your business online because you’ll have no place to set up your website.
I know it’s a bit confusing, but there’s two things to remember when getting started growing your business online…
In order to set up a website presence, you need at least a domain and a hosting package.
Domains are the actual name of your website and are something you pay for up front on a per year (or multi year basis) while hosting is like the back office for your website.
The hosting package is the server and it houses your domain and all the files which then display on the domain name.
Bluehost is a great platform to use for your hosting because, like I mentioned, they provide free SSL and also a free domain name for the first year.
In addition to that, they also have the WordPress one click install (which helps regular people like you and me) connect WordPress with one click.
Google Analytics – Analyze data for your business in one place
The holy grail of website analytics, Google analytics is a place where you can see very detailed stats of your website.
All you have to do to start tracking the basic analytics is place a piece of javascript (code) on your website.
WordPress has plugins that make this very easy.
If you want to grow your business online and you’re new to this, make sure that you or your team sets this up properly.
Google provides ample amounts of training on their Analytics Academy.
You can actually get Google certified if you want.
Plus, analytics is always free which is amazing because the platform gives you so much information (that you need) if you want to grow your business.
There’s no excuse when it comes to lack of knowledge in Google analytics, and I can’t stress enough that it’s important to set everything up correctly.
Things like goal tracking, event tracking, conversions, ecommerce, etc… There’s tons of things you can track.
I’d recommend taking some courses in the analytics academy even if you have a team that handles this because there’s always a benefit to knowing what’s going on behind the scenes.
All that being said, analytics has come such a long way since its inception in the early 2000s.
Themeforest – Templates to help with all your digital marketing online
Themforest is a part of the envato market and they specialize in WordPress themes and website templates.
In other words, if you’re looking for a plug and play WordPress website design or an HTML template then Themeforest is your go to tool.
This will help your business grow because when you have an amazingly created website you get a lot better conversion rates.
Whether you’re an ecommerce store, a local business, or whatever, I can promise you that Themeforest has something that would fit your needs.
Aside from Themeforest though, the Envato Market on the whole has so many useful things that I highly recommend checking into it.
From Themeforest to Codecanyon, to Videohive and Audiojungle, and much much more.
Find PHP scripts, download marketing material, graphics, audio photo and video.
There’s more than enough things that the suite of Envato Market tools can help you to grow your business.
HashtagsForLikes – Powerful Growth for Instagram and TikTok
The most sought after Instagram and TikTok analytics tool on the market, HashtagsForLikes is the go to source for data related to the two platforms.
Whether you’re looking to find the best hashtags that will work for your account or you want to see what’s working for other people you can use their spectacularly detailed Hashtag Reporting Tool or their Profile Analyzer.
When it comes to growing your business, social media needs to be considered.
Whether you’re trying to get more traffic to your website or you’re just trying to grow your social media, having an audience on social platforms does matter.
And HashtagsForLikes can help you find the exact data that you need to make better decisions when it comes to creating content, posting the right hashtags to that content, and hence growing your business.
I really can’t stress enough just how crucial this is.
There’s an awesome case study that shows how HashtagsForLikes helped increase reach by roughly 200%.
And at the end of the day, it cuts the time you need to spend on social media because you’re going to have lightyears more data by looking through their dashboard then you ever would browsing a newsfeed.
My thoughts are that HashtagsForLikes has truly revolutionized the Instagram and TikTok data acquisition with their algorithm and gives their clients a truly customized approach and growing their business through Instagram and TikTok.
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Proof – Personalise your website for every visitor
Proof initially started out as a way to increase conversions by adding a little social proof icon near the bottom left of your screen.
This would then let visitors know when other people have taken specific actions on your websites which then give them the impression that your products or services are indeed worth their weight in gold.
Becoming rapidly popular, Proof has grown into a true full service SaaS that you can use to build a personalized website experience for every visitor alongside using their social proof.
Another incredible edition is that they give you the ability to A/B test anything on your website by just adding a snippet of code.
This would have otherwise taken tons of development work and it would have been a major stop in business growth.
As with some of the other mentioned tools that help you grow your business, Proof also has an “Academy” of their own which helps you with useful content.
Their message is to “Make the Internet Delightfully Human”, and rightfully so.
Based in Austin Tx, you know that Proof is here to stay for the long haul, so we recommend you check them out.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a full stop end to end marketing platform that helps you grow your business through social media.
With things like engage, publish, listen, collaborate, report, audience, and shared calendar there’s tons of features at your fingertips.
You can manage the inbox of multiple platforms all in one place, schedule content from multiple platforms all in one place, manage your team (all in one place), and much more.
AgoraPulse is a platform I recommend if you want all your social media platforms in one place that comes with great support at an amazing price point.
Obviously, AgoraPulse offers a free trial (without any credit card required) so if you’re in the market for something like this then I urge you to give it a shot!
Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is a content discovery platform that helps you grow your business by finding the right content that performs best for you.
Alongside content discovery, you also get content research, monitoring and tracking, finding the right influencers among others.
BuzzSumo is one of the biggest content discovery tools and helps over 1000 markets grow their business every single day.
One of BuzzSumo’s biggest benefits is the ability to explore high performing content which will help you model that content and get better results on your social media channels.
If that isn’t enough for you, there’s also the research tool that puts you in the driver’s seat of analyzing billions of data points which then helps you supercharge your complete marketing strategy.
BuzzSumo has a free trial package (7 days) that you can use to get familiarized with the system.
But, after that, if you want to keep growing your business with the BuzzSumo tool then you will have to fork out $99 / month ($79 / month with annual package) which isn’t too big of a deal in the scheme of things.
Although, as always, that’s the base plan. If your business is larger or you need more features then the next plan up is $179.
Conclusion
There you have it, folks. We just went over the top 10 tools to help you grow your business.
During the length of this article we discussed social media tools, website tools, hosting companies, the differences between domains and hosting, Instagram and TikTok growth tools, and much much more.
If you want to grow your business then these tools are a launching point to do so.
I urge you to give the ones a shot that make the most sense for your situation.
Obviously, not every tool will work for you or your business, but we really tried to drill down on the most useful and important tools on the web when it comes to growing your business online.
We want to hear you! Were there any business tools that you’ve used that helped you grow your business online?
Are you using any tools that we didn’t review? If so, which ones?
Lastly — what did we miss?
Leave us a comment with your recommendations and feedback! Like we said, we love to hear from you.