Whether you are thinking about starting a blog to make money or you’ve already been blogging for years but are ready to make some money, these tools can help you reach your goals. After six years blogging professionally, these are my best blogging tools – my favorites – the ones I reach for over and over again.
The links in this post are affiliate links, because guess what? 50% of my income or more comes through affiliate links and I’m making money blogging. But you can also rest assured, every single item listed in this post is a tool I use currently to build and grow my income through blogging. These are the things I would not want to do without. So you could also call this list Amy’s favorite blogging tools. These are also the blogging tools I like to talk about, so if you have any questions – ask me!
When you first start out blogging, you might not want or be able to invest in these things all at once. That’s okay. You can start with $0 and build a business. If you do not have capitol to invest, you should start setting aside 25% of your income to re-invest in your business and save that amount from month-to-month until you have enough to choose one. Pin this post to your work-at-home mom or blogging board so you can find it again and choose which blogging tool to invest in first.
Blogging Tools to Make Money through Email Marketing
The very first thing you need to do if you want to make money (I’m not kidding here) is start an email list. Email lists are the most valuable marketing tool you will have. Get an email service and get a form up on your site – day one. Create a one page PDF gift (called a lead magnet) to give your new subscribers and that will be even better. Don’t wait to get started building your email list until you “have your act together.” Start now.
Here are the three tools I highly recommend for email marketing. Have any questions? I’d love to help!
Convert Kit. I’ve tried a lot of email services. Mail Chimp, Mad Mimi, Active Campaign, and MailJet have all been put through the ringer. Convert Kit was my “aha” moment. In Convert Kit, I’ve found exactly what I’m looking for in an email service provider.
- Easy Tagging
- Easy Sequence Building
- Easy Formatting of Emails
- Easily Personalize Emails with First Name
- Just basically everything is set up to be easy, fast, and sweet!
LeadPages. Top notch landing pages convert leads. Whether you are trying to sell a product or gather emails – LeadPages is a fantastic tool. A bit pricy, so maybe not on your first rung of purchases. I use LeadPages to host and deliver free gifts to entice subscribers, and build beautiful landing pages for email collection and product sales. I love this tool. I’d love to chat more about it if you have questions.
- Easy Page Building
- Integrates with ConvertKit
- Beautiful Pages
- Exit Intent Popup Forms
You can see some of my Lead Pages in action:
Gathering Emails: https://encouragingmomsathome.lpages.co/be-encouraged-homeschool-mom-copy/
Making Sales: https://encouragingmomsathome.lpages.co/homeschool-copywork/
Building an Effective Email List by Heather Bowen. I just went through 2/3 of this course *this year* and it has changed so much about how I email my people. If you can only take one course, I recommend this one.
Blogging Tools to Make Money through Sponsored Content
Make a Media Kit. Once you have an email list, you have an audience and can start offering sponsored content. This can range from ad space to blog posts or social media posts. In order to land sponsored content you will need a media kit. I recommend taking the course Media Kit Smash to learn how to create one. In fact, I love all of the courses at Blog Clarity and they are very reasonably priced. Content Brew was my first blogging course ever and I still refer to the ideas inside!
Improve your Design. A good blog design goes a long way to landing sponsored content. Starting out, you can’t likely afford a designer for everything, but maybe you can hire someone to create a strong logo. I’ve even had friends have great success using Fiverr to get logos made. I recommend getting the Genesis platform and a good child theme like the ones from Restored 316 as soon as possible. If you don’t know what that means, ask me! I’d be happy to chat.
Increase your Traffic to Make Money Blogging
Eye Popping Images. Excellent images, especially vertical pinnable images will get more eyes on your content, which will in turn enable you to get more sponsored posts. I started using the free version of PicMonkey to make images and eventually upgraded to the paid version – which is still one of the cheapest graphic design options available.
SEO Course by Pajama Affiliates. These ladies are a little edgy, but the way they teach SEO research for keywords makes so much sense. Since implementing the changes in how I do keyword research from this course, I have increased my organic search traffic to nearly 50% of my total traffic.
Jaaxy is an INCREDIBLE keyword research tool I use to find appropriate keywords for nearly every blog post I create. Write your blog posts to help people who are looking for that content find the content! I’ve tried a few different keyword research methods and this tool rocked my SEO world.
Lead Magnets. Free gifts in the form of short printables can spiral your traffic and also help build your email list. Create free printables using the beautiful and affordable graphics and fonts from The Hungry JPEG.
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