The Most Useful Marketing and Business Tools!
Welcome to The Most Useful Page On The Internet – my (Joe’s) best recommendations, tips and hacks, to help you on your journey to open a thousand doors for yourself!
This is meant to make it easier for you to find the things you need next – if you don’t have a good recommendation, or want to discover new tools or resources, then this is made for you. It’s meant to save you time so you can do your great work, and get to great places, faster!
This is The Most Useful Page of Business and Marketing Tools
Unfortunately I’m not Tim Ferriss, Jim Collins or Seth Godin. BUT I have found some very cool and interesting tools for business and marketing in my time. On this page I’ll cover things like recommended reading, subject-matter-experts you can follow, through to smaller things like worksheets, what to use for a website, store your passwords, and streamline your operations. I endeavour to update these over time.
Some of the other Most Useful pages I have make up separate posts, and will cover different things like life hacks and lifestyle design, as well as property.
Instructions
Just scroll down the below to navigate, or use Ctrl + F on your keyboard to find what you’re looking for and hopefully I’ve covered it!
If you find this tool useful, I recommend adding it to your favourites or browser toolbar for easy access going forward.
Note: Not an ‘Influencer’
Disclaimer, I’m not an influencer, and I don’t have affiliates with the below, unless I’ve stated otherwise! I believe in intentional sharing (Share the great things that others make with those it can help, and in turn, others will share the great things you make), which is why I’ve put this together. Enjoy!
The Most Useful Page of Business and Marketing Tools
Marketing Education
Books on Branding and Marketing
In my opinion, start with Seth Godin. One of my life lessons so far is look for the master framework and principles first, then the practices and tactics second. I think Seth takes the ultimate helicopter view of marketing – I’m a particular fan of This Is Marketing.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding for Branding more specifically by Al Ries and Laura Ries.
Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller – this and the below were revolutionary for me in terms of the importance of clarifying your message. I think I wasted four years of business absolutely flunking at this.
Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller with Dr. J.J. Peterson
Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby (go the Aussies!) for Digital Marketing.
Podcasts on Marketing
I love the Neil Patel and Eric Siu Marketing School for short daily knowledge bursts of about 5-7 minutes duration. Perfect to put on in the car on a short drive to work!
For something longer, I quite like Social Media Marketing Podcast by Michael Stelzner – every episode is particularly insightful about one core area of social media marketing.
Free Online Courses and Library
I’m a big fan and frequent user of Hubspot Free Courses. Their Inbound Marketing approach is basically modern marketing in a nutshell, and they have a fantastic library of digestible, quick lessons on many digital marketing areas.
A Quick and Easy Marketing Degree for less than $60
Read This Is Marketing by Seth Godin, then read the two Donald Miller books; Building a StoryBrand and Marketing Made Simple. Write notes on each, and try to practice this straight away on a real project.
The Greatest Marketer of all Time has Never Been Given any Credit for his Marketing.
Can you guess who it is?
Marketing Tools to Use
Just because I use them doesn’t mean they’re the best, or the best for you long-term, but they’re a good place to start so you don’t waste time trying to decide!
Landing Pages
I personally use Leadpages as the price point is lower than others like Clickfunnels which also has a good reputation and will do more for you.
Different landing page providers have different benefits, but if doing it yourself, to save you time, Leadpages is pretty handy. Remember my motto, start terribly, fail and learn fast.
Email Marketing Tools
I’m a notorious tight arse in most areas of life and while Mailchimp is popular and free I prefer Active Campaign for email marketing. It just feels cleaner and has great capabilities.
Keyword Research
I like Serpstat, Google Keyword Planner and Answerthepublic. Although, I’ve found focusing too much on ‘keywords’ not to be that useful and it’s easy to get stuck putting too much effort into trying to game google in my experience.
Rather, ask this question – how did you find this page? What does that tell you about blogging, SEO and ‘getting discovered’? The hypothesis I’m testing still is if it’s good, if it’s worth finding, and I do it justice, people will find it anyway.
SMS Marketing
I did some pretty deep research into this, and for Aussies, Burst SMS appears to be best value. Used correctly, this can be a really intimate marketing channel not to be underestimated but learn from my mistakes – find ways to uncover genuine permission data.
Online Business Tools That Will Blow. Your. Mind.
Outsourcing and Finding Contractors or Freelancers
I’m loyal to Upwork – I have never tried Fiverr or Freelancer but I think they all function in a similar manner. Flexible (fairer) contracts and cheaper labour live here. I have an assistant in India, social media manager in Macedonia, book-keeper in Pakistan and more.
Funny story – I came to connect with and help launch Andrew Riis’ podcast Hello Stranger because I saw him post on a Facebook group looking for a VA. I direct messaged him and told him about Upwork. We’ve been pals ever since.
Automation
I’ve only ever tried Zapier. But gee, it’s a deep world. Much like discovering Upwork, the first time you look at Zapier, it’s like becoming aware of The Matrix. You play around heaps and then settle for like 2-3 automations… but hey, who said we can’t have fun?
If you’re confused, an automation is stitching together two things you use online, like email and dropbox, or email and Facebook Ads, or Website and CRM. For example, when I get an invoice in GSuite, I save it under a particular label in email, and Zapier pulls the attachment through to a specific Google Drive Folder. It saves me manually saving each one!
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
If you don’t need an industry specific CRM, and something generic, Pipedrive is really clean, simple and super cost effective.
Hubspot has an initial free CRM tool but the freemium model is steep for most digital nomads and freelancers.
Password Management (Reducing Login Fatigue and Password Storage is Life-Changing)
Simple concept, but Lastpass changed my life (no exaggeration). There are others, but the free version of Lastpass does pretty much everything you need.
Online Deals On Really Cool Software
Appsumo is one of the few places that can really get me to loosen my purse strings. Used for picking up cheap tech at bulk discounts.
