Recommendations
Welcome! I created this resource page to easily list recommended blogging services, products, and companies that I use daily and have had a wonderful experience with.
Disclosure: This page contains some affiliate links and I receive commissions for purchases made through these links. This is at no extra cost to you, but rather paid for by the company as a “thank you” for the referral. Please note that these products are all ones that I recommend, and I won’t put anything on this page that I haven’t personally used and loved. Thank you for your support, and I truly hope you enjoy these products.
If you are looking to start a blog or want to change your current hosting*, I’d recommend checking out Bluehost. As a beginner, I faced a few problems regarding my blog and its functions (because tech and I don’t get along well sometimes), but Bluehost‘s support team was extremely efficient and helpful, and I was able to get all these issues fixed. They were named one of the top hosting companies in 2018 (for good reason!) and as a small “thank you” for visiting my site today, if you sign up with my link, you’ll get a discounted intro offer of $2.95 per month.
When I first created this blog, I made the mistake of signing up through wordpress.com and not wordpress.org (read the difference here) and took a plan that required me to pay $8 per month so I could have a bit more freedom with my site. Don’t be like me and check out Bluehost below, which will give you all that same freedom, and much, much more, with a significantly lower price.
*If you are looking to change your current hosting provider, but are scared to lose your website’s content, break its theme, etc. – Bluehost offers free, easy, and secure migration when you sign up for one of their plans. Your website won’t be changed or negatively affected in any way. To learn more about the migration process, click here.
Having a solid newsletter plan is essential to growing your business and engaging with your audience. I’ve found that ConvertKit works best for me compared to other email providers such as Mailchimp, Aweber, Mailerlite, etc.* With ConvertKit, I’ve been able to create beautiful emails and opt-in forms, and have been offered wonderful support and assistance as I needed it. (Which wasn’t very often!) They also offer various pricing plans that each include their own features, including automated sequences, free migrations from your previous email provider, integrations with your other favorite tools, and more designing freedom, so you can start with the one that’ll work best for your business.
Oh, and also – did I mention you don’t even need your own website to start collecting subscribers? Yes, you can create a landing page through ConvertKit which you can promote across your social media channels and still gain subscribers. Still not convinced? Want to take a deeper look at how ConvertKit works? Click here and press “Watch the Demo” for a video walkthrough of all of ConvertKit’s best features.
*Want to compare the features of all those email services against those of ConvertKit’s? Click here to compare between Convertkit and Mailchimp, Aweber, or Mailerlite.
Below is an example of one of my forms, and if you’d like to be sent biweekly simple living, decluttering and/or money management tips in your inbox, feel free to sign up, I’d love to have you!
Canva is the free tool I use to create all my social media content, from my Facebook quote images to Pinterest pins. With Canva, I’ve been able to create beautiful graphics with very little effort and assistance. They offer a variety of different fonts, stock images, and elements to use in your designs, all for free. If you sign up my link below, you’ll get an phenomenal editing service plus one premium element (which is an element [these include different shapes, stock images, stickers, etc.] to use in your designs you’d normally have to pay money for) all for free.
Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduling and automation tool. When you sign up for Tailwind, it analyzes your account and provides you with an optimal posting schedule for Pinterest and lets you schedule your content to be pinned at those times. It also comes with a handy tool called “Tailwind Communities,” which allow you to connect with other like-minded bloggers and share each other’s content to your audiences. This tool is a great way to save time, be efficient, and keep your audience engaged. Since using Tailwind, my Pinterest following and monthly views have gone from 20-30 and 1k-5k to over 1.4k and 100k (and counting!) respectively. (as of June 2021)
Another essential part of your blog is its sharing buttons. These make it easy for your readers to share your content on their social media platforms, which allows you to gain more viewers and grow your audience. The colorful buttons you see at the top of every post and that float on the bottom of your screen are the sharing buttons I use on this site, and they come from a plugin called Social Warfare. With the free program, you get to choose from 5 commonly used social media platforms to add to your webpages. From there you can change the position of the buttons (top, bottom, floating bar), hide/present the share count, and customize other display settings. When you switch to the Pro option, you are given more social media platforms you can add to your site (there are a total of 13), more design options (for example, being able to change the color of the buttons to match the branding of your site), and other features such as a “Click to Tweet” button, Bit.ly link shortening, share recovery (absolutely crucial – this is something I wish I had back in my earlier blogging days, when half my posts’ Facebook shares disappeared!), analytics and a popular posts widget. Their customer service is also great, providing beneficial support in a timely manner. Whether you choose the free option or Pro plan, Social Warfare is the best sharing buttons plugin for your small business.
Of course, no blogging resources list would be complete without an SEO service, and the best one by far is Yoast SEO. It is very user-friendly as well as easy to understand and use. It gives you personalized recommendations and step-by-step instructions to help you improve your SEO (which stands for “Search Engine Optimization.”) This plugin is the key to ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc. Using this product has brought me (not just me – hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of bloggers worldwide) many readers from various search engines, and amazingly, this number increases by a lot every month.
When you sign up for WordPress with Bluehost above, this free (and highly effective) plugin comes built in to your post editor. If, for some reason, it isn’t – no worries! You can always navigate to your WordPress dashboard, and then click Plugins > Add New, search for “Yoast SEO”, download, and activate! And if you ever get stuck, Bluehost‘s amazing support team is always ready to guide you.
If you want to start monetizing your blog, the first things I recommend starting with are display advertising and affiliate linking. One of the top affiliate programs for a newer blogger, or any blogger in general, is Amazon Affiliates. Amazon is your one-stop shop for almost everything you need, may it be clothing, snacks, makeup, skincare, organizational items, books, toys – whatever. You can find an affiliate link for almost anything you’re writing about, which makes it a quick and easy way to start earning money from your website. Plus, it doesn’t cost you anything to be a part of the program!
If you click here, you’ll find out what an Amazon affiliate link looks like. Once you sign up, you’ll have to create a customized affiliate tag that Amazon will use to track people’s purchases to your account. (Do you think you can you spot mine in this link?) Don’t worry, Amazon will walk you through creating your own tag and all the other processes needed to fully set up your account, and you’ll be done and ready to start promoting great products in no time!
