I have tested out a ton of tools over the last 5 years. Here is what we use and love. Plus I made notes on when in your business you might need these. One of the big problems out there is everyone saying you need all the tools at each stage of business we have found different tools to play different roles.
FYI, we are an affiliate of some of the below links. However, all these suggestions are based on our experience and extensive research.
Core of The Business
These are the core pieces that make up the A Sweet Pea Chef Business and now Married to Your Business as well.
SEO Tools
I use these tools to research topics and find and rank for keywords on ASPC and Married to Your Business. I also wrote an SEO for Food Bloggers Post on how we generate over 180,000 organic searched a month.
Payment Processors, Product Distribution & Shopping Carts
Gumroad: A solid digital product distribution system. I usually start my products on gumroad. If you’re looking for a quick way to get a product and shopping cart up and running with nothing to pay upfront.
Click Funnels: I use Click Funnels for my shopping carts not just the sales pages it covers the whole funnel. You can A/B test every page, there are a lot of templates you can use out of the box or make your own. Plus it integrates with Stripe my payment processor of choice.
Stripe: In my opinion the best payment processor. Super easy to use and get started plus you can transfer you money super fast just takes a couple of days.
Convertkit – Convertkit is an awesome! This is what we use to send all of our emails, sequences, broadcasts you name it. Works great and easily integrates with Click Funnels and SumoMe so thats plus.
SumoMe – So SumoMe has a bunch of great free stuff I use all the email tools they have. I use the paid version so I have A/B testing but the free version is super helpful and I recommend starting there.
Video Stuff
Wistia: We use Wistia to host all of our videos that don’t go up on ASPC’s Youtube Channel. The video
Speechpad: We use this service to get all our videos transcribed. Super easy to use, prompt and accurate.
Social
Buffer: We use buffer to schedule all our facebook group posts so we have everything planned out in advance. No last minute stressing for plans.
Tailwind: Since ASPC is a food blog Pinterest is a big source of our traffic and we use Tailwind to schedule all our pins out in advance.
Books
80/20 – Sales and Marketing – This was an amazing book that really helped us to start focusing on the right things in our business and paid immediate dividends.
Profit First – After years of not paying ourselves and not making enough of a profit this book changed our business profits and our personal finances in a dramatic way.
Dotcom Secrets – One of the things we always lacked in our business was a good understanding of sales funnels and the best way to break them down and create them for ourselves.
Zag – When we were struggling with making a profit we almost quit the whole food blog niche. But instead Jason Van Orden of Internet Business Mastery made me read this book and instead we pivoted and rebranded and BOOM!
Youtube Black Book – Chris Sharpe of Yoga With Adriene and Hilah Cooking shares his Youtube knowledge. If you want to know how to make a successful Youtube Channel start here.
