As both a marketer and a member of the SubHub team I'm often asked by clients , friends and followers to list the tools I use as part of my job. While I often post about cool apps I recommend for a particular area of marketing or content creation, I've never gone into much depth about the
tools I use myself on a daily basis.
So, consider this post the opening of my own special box of marketing goodies! The tools, apps and sites that i'll be listing below are used regularly as part of my job. Most are free, while some are inexpensive. All of them I consider invaluable.
Analytics
Google Analytics - The king of analytics tools. Free, reliable and comprehensive
GoSquared - Live website stats and real-time traffic reporting
Google Webmaster Tools - See how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site, plus view which sites are linking to you. Worth submitting your website sitemap to as well
Social Update Tools
HootSuite - Update your social networks, share / shorten links and view click stats
Sprout Social - Update your networks, monitor keywords, contact management, analytics and more
TweetDeck - Handy desktop tool. Post to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Good for organising your social streams
Social Monitoring Tools
Google Alerts - Monitors the keywords you specify across the web and emails you when they appear
Social Mention - Another multi-platform visability checker, including alerts and a handy buzz widget for your website
BrandsEye - Tracks all online conversations about a brand, event, campaign or individual
Blogging / Content Creation
SubHub - All of our free resource articles sit on the SubHub platform
Email Marketing and List Software
MailChimp - Extremely user friendly and powerful email newsletter and list software
Link Sharing & Shortening
Hootsuite (with ow.ly) - Use Hootsuite via a bookmarklet to post and shorten links
Bit.ly - Another URL posting / shortening and reporting tool. Integrates well with
TweetDeck
Bookmarking
Historious - Simple booking marking service, with browser bookmarklet
Packrati - Automatically post the Twitter links from your tweets/retweets to Historious and Delicious
Evernote - Really handy for saving web pages or parts of web pages for multi-device access
Images
iStockPhoto - Inexpensive stock photo site with high quality images
Document Sharing and Reporting
Google Docs - Very useful for sharing spreadsheets and other documents
Dropbox - Allows you to create, backup and share files and folders in the cloud. Love this tool!
Planning and Brainstorming
Canva's Bubble Map - A great visual tool to map out complex problems.
Tom's Planner - Easy to use online project planning and sharing tool
Mindomo - One of my favourite tools for forward planning. Allows you to visualize and communicate information in an easy to read format
Image Creation & Manipulation
SumoPaint - Very easy online image creation and manipulation tool
Video Creation and Editing
Camtasia - Awesomely easy screen recording and video editing software. Makes the creation of fly-through videos and tours a breeze. Integrates with PowerPoint as well
SEO / Keyword Tools
WordTracker - Powerful keyword research and analysis tool
Website Grader - Measure the effectiveness of your SEO and see when improvements are required
Quick Wireframing
Frame Box - Awesome browser-based wireframing and mockup tool. Very easy to use
A/B & Multivariate Testing
Optimizely - Test variations of text and images extremely quickly on your website. Simple to use, with easy to understand results
Visual Website Optimizer - Similar to Optimizely but with more multivariate testing options