We use a lot of tools to help us run Credo smoothly. As such, we thought it would be helpful to explain each of them (and why we use them) so you can consider them for your own digital marketing strategy and business.

Table of Contents

Click any link to go to a specific section.

Recommended SEO Tools

SEMrush

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There are a lot of SEO tools on the market, but a few stand out above the rest. One of these is SEMrush, which is the first tool I paid a premium for and still pay for on a monthly basis. Whether you are doing SEO competitor research, display advertising research, or want to see where your competitors are getting their links then SEMrush has a tool for you.

Check it out. It’s well worth the price.

Best for: professional SEOs and founders doing technical SEO, keyword tracking, and more.

Price: starts at $99/mo and goes up from there. I have been a paying member for years.

Get a FREE 30-day SEMrush trial

Moz

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Moz has long been a well-known brand in the SEO and digital marketing space, from their well-read blog to their annual summer conference MozCon and their SEO tools. Moz focuses its tools primarily on small to medium-sized businesses and location-based businesses with Moz Local.

Best for: professional SEOs and content marketers working with smaller sites and location-based businesses, business owners and DIY website owners.

Price: starts at $99/mo and goes up from there. I have used Moz’s tools since 2010.

Check out Moz (Free Trial)

AHREFs

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People told me for a long time that I should check out AHREFs, but I resisted. I had a tool that worked well for me (doing primarily SEO/content) in SEMrush. I eventually gave AHREFs a go and it has become my go-to tool for my SEO work. While they don’t do the paid data side very well, their traffic data and insights are matched by no one. I love this tool and happily pay for it monthly.

Best for: professional SEOs and content marketers/link builders, primarily used for link audits and keyword research.

Price: starts at $99/mo and goes up from there. I have been a paying member since 2016.

Check out AHREFs

Screaming Frog

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As an SEO, you constantly need to crawl a website (whether your own or a competitor’s) to get insight into the changes that can be made to improve your rankings. My tool of choice, and that of most SEOs, is Screaming Frog. While it can bog down on very large sites (though they are working on this), it is amazing for sites up to around 15,000 unique URLs.

Best for: professional SEOs working on small to medium size websites, hobbyist SEOs and website/business owners.

Price: $209 for the year. This is a steal. I use this tool weekly if not daily. I have paid for this tool since 2012.

Check out Screaming Frog

DeepCrawl

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If Screaming Frog is not powerful enough for your size of the site (usually a site with 100,000+ pages), then you need a more powerful crawling tool to give you the full insights you need.

There are many such tools on the market, but the one I have used extensively is DeepCrawl. DeepCrawl runs in the cloud, which means that you can set it to run and let it go without worrying about pausing it by unplugging your computer or losing your internet connection.

Best for: enterprise websites, teams, and marketing agencies with large clients.

Price: custom based on your needs

Check Out DeepCrawl

Lead Generation Software

These are the tools I have put together over the years to help us drive more leads through Credo.

WebinarNinja

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If your business runs off leads generated, webinars are a fantastic way to share your knowledge in exchange for their information. Whether you’re presenting webinars yourself or inviting on guests (or both!), webinars drive leads better than many other channels.

When we started hosting webinars at Credo, we signed up to WebinarNinja (instead of Zoom, as WebinarNinja is half the price) and haven’t looked back.

Get WebinarNinja

Drip

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Email marketing providers have come a long way in the last few years, and one of the major new players has been Drip. Acquired by LeadPages in 2016, Drip allows you to dynamically tag your subscribers which then powers automation and workflows that are not possible in other ESPs.

Drip has been used to grow six-figure (and bigger) courses and ecommerce companies alike, and we love Drip for our email marketing automation at Credo.

Get Drip

MailChimp

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There are many email marketing tools out there on the market. MailChimp has been our email marketing tool of choice for years now, and while we’ve switched over to Drip as Credo grew, MailChimp was a huge part of our marketing mix and continues to be my personal email list owner.

In recent years, MailChimp has also been making a push to offer more full-fledged marketing tools than just email marketing. They now offer landing pages, easy targeting of your email list via Facebook Ads, and even triggered drip campaigns (which many people don’t think they have).

MailChimp has been around forever and continues to develop and deliver.

Get MailChimp

Kinsta

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Kinsta is my hosting tool of choice. I’ve used various others over time, including some other managed WordPress hosts, but Kinsta is our tool of choice to keep Credo running quickly and avoiding downtime.

Kinsta gives you 24/7 support, staging environments, cache control, easy SSL setup, and so much more. They are a great deal if you are looking for a combination of a number of installs and traffic. Plus, they specialize in WordPress so if you care about a host that is optimized for WordPress then Kinsta is our recommended best option.

Check out Kinsta

Gravity Forms

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I have used Gravity Forms for years to capture leads on my various websites, including Credo. I love Gravity Forms because it allows me to do everything I want to do – custom CSS, passing variables in URLs to help with conversion, multi-page forms, and even integration with tools like MailChimp, Stripe, and more that I require to build my business effectively.

Couple Gravity Forms with GravityView and you have a killer setup upon which you can grow your business.

Get Gravity Forms

GravityView

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If you are using GravityForms and need to display form entry data on your site, it used to be a Herculean task. A few years ago I discovered GravityView–part of GravityKit–built by my friend Zack Katz. Basically, it’s a premium WordPress plugin that lets you display form entries in a completely customizable format.

I love this plugin and wish more people knew about it, especially membership sites!

Get GravityView

HubSpot

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We use HubSpot at Credo to help us manage our sales funnel and convert more people from form submissions to scheduling a phone call.

For a long time we used the free CRM, but in 2018 signed up for the Sales Starter to help us better automate our sales follow-up and communication processes so that we can spend more time selling and focusing on the right customers as opposed to spending more time on those less committed.

Get HubSpot

Calendly

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I’ve used Calendly for years to send people a link through which they can schedule a call. It’s a well-trusted tool, and you can even embed it on your site so that you are sending people to your website to schedule a call as opposed to Calendly’s site.

We’re slowly moving away from Calendly to HubSpot, but I still highly recommend Calendly for those who aren’t paying for HubSpot.

Get Calendly

SEO Platforms

Sometimes you need an SEO tool to accomplish a specific goal, but sometimes you need a full-fledged SEO platform to track everything from technical issues and rankings to competitors. These are the SEO platforms we have used and recommend at Credo.

Moz

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Round II for Moz! Moz offers Moz Pro, which tracks your technical issues and rankings and makes recommendations for how to improve your rankings.

You can check individual page optimization scores, conduct backlink analysis with Open Site Explorer, conduct keyword research with Keyword Explorer, and much more.

Best for: small to medium size businesses without a full-time SEO.

Pricing: starts at $99/mo and goes up from there.

Check out Moz

Conductor Searchlight

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Conductor, out of New York City, is the SEO platform of choice for many enterprise websites and agencies working with enterprise clients. You can do everything from competitor research to keyword tracking and technical issue tracking and recommendations.

Conductor is powerful because of its reporting suite as well, which gives you insight into how well you are ranking and provides executive-level easy-to-understand graphs and reports.

Best for: enterprise brands and agencies working with enterprise brands.

Pricing: depends on your needs.

Check out Conductor

Raven Tools

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Raven Tools is an unsung hero of the SEO world. Raven’s main powers come from the fact that they don’t try to recreate data that is elsewhere but instead allow you to connect to over 20 different services to bring your data within their platform and glean insights. This includes Moz and Majestic data as well, all contained within your Raven subscription.

Raven also offers technical insights around on-page SEO as well as site speed and mobile user experience, which other tools do not offer. And if you’re a consultant to clients, Raven can be used to offer to report to them on a white-label basis.

Best for: medium size businesses with dedicated SEO teams, and consultants.

Pricing: starts at $109/mo ($99/mo if paid up front) and up from there.

Check out Raven Tools

SeoTesting.com

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Formerly SanityChecker, SeoTesting.com is relatively new to the SEO tools space. I was a bit dubious about it at first, but it has become a tool that I appreciate because it gives me a high-level look at my Search Console data daily and weekly, including changes in clicks and visibility.

Best for: small to medium size businesses without a full-time SEO.

Pricing: starts at $30/mo and goes up from there.

Check out SeoTesting.com

eCommerce software

If you’re looking to build an ecommerce store as a side project or into a full-time business, you have to make some decisions about the platform you use. The right platform for you is the one that aligns with your skills, goals, and expertise. These are the two we recommend right now.

Shopify

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Shopify is a publicly traded Canadian company that is dominating the ecommerce space, and for good reason. They are a fully hosted ecommerce platform with a wide range of add-ons and extensions built around their product, which means that it’s both easy to get started with and able to scale. I’ve used Shopify for a few side project stores myself, and while it has certain limitations on the SEO side and requires a learning curve of development (or hiring a Shopify developer), it is a fantastic platform.

Best for: small to medium size stores (though can scale beyond that) without a ton of development and WordPress knowledge.

Pricing: starts at $29/mo and goes up from there.

Get a free 14 days trial

WooCommerce

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WooCommerce is a full-fledged ecommerce platform that sits on top of WordPress. If you already have a WordPress site, then WooCommerce is an easy way to add a store to your site and either sell your own products or affiliate products through your site. I use WooCommerce on one of my own side project affiliate websites.

It takes a bit of learning to configure your categories/subcategories and linking for SEO, but it’s easy to get started and there are many other plugins that allow you to automate things like product feeds, which saves so much manual entry.

Best for: small to medium size stores on WordPress.

Pricing: plugin is free, though there are paid add-ons.

Check out WooCommerce

Conversion Optimization Software

If you’re looking to test different parts of your website to improve conversions, there are a few tools on the market that can help you do that.

Optimizely

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Optimizely has stood the test of time against other competitors and built an amazing business. They make it very easy, with their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for making changes. I have mostly used Optimizely for testing headlines, calls to action, and elements like that. There is a bit of a learning curve, but you once you learn it this tool is powerful for small businesses.

Get Optimizely

LeadPages

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LeadPages is one of the leading landing page creation tools on the market. LeadPages also own email provider Drip, and when you combine the two (or combine LeadPages with MailChimp) you get a potent combination.

LeadPages is great for quickly building landing pages for specific campaigns. They make it easy to style pages into your style guide and then publish pages live on your site.

Best for: businesses and agencies looking to build landing pages.

Pricing: Free trial, starts at $37/month paid annually

Get LeadPages

Tools to run your business

Freshbooks

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When I first began consulting as a self-employed person, I knew that I needed a way to keep invoices straight. I signed onto FreshBooks and have not looked back. FreshBooks offers a free 30-day trial then it starts at $10/mo. I happily pay them $50 a month because they track my invoices, I can set up recurring invoices for clients, and they provide me the option of getting paid through Stripe (which every consultant should be using).

FreshBooks also has the concept of “estimates’ which you can use to send an estimate of service costs to your clients. This works well for freelancers providing hourly services but does not scale well to consultants and agencies. I do not use this feature, but many freelancers do and find it useful.

Check out FreshBooks

Proposify

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If you don’t need a full-fledged invoicing software tool like FreshBooks but still want to send proposals to your clients that you can track and have signed within one system, then you should check out Proposify. Run out of Canada, Proposify is a market leader that continues to add new features and integrations that make operating your business seamless.

Proposify also integrates with FreshBooks, Xero, and other invoicing and business finance tools so that you never forget to invoice or get paid for the work you provide.

Check out Proposify

Gusto

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When I started employing people and wanted to get myself onto payroll as well to even out monthly expenses within my business, I signed up with Gusto. They’re mainly based in Denver where I live, and they’ve been incredibly helpful in dealing with payroll taxes and more across state lines.

They’re easy to use and make this part of my operations seamless!

Check out Gusto

Bench

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After I set up FreshBooks for invoicing, the next thing I did was get a bookkeeper. I decided to use Bench, because their service integrates with all of my billing (Stripe and credit cards) and my bank accounts. They reconcile my books for me at the end of each month and prepare my tax documents each year, which sets me up for financial success.

Get a free month of Bench

FancyHands

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Part of being successful is knowing when you need to outsource certain tasks, such as research. I have a personal assistant in Denver but also use FancyHands to conduct research for both personal and business means.

I use them for things like researching a physical therapist with herniated disc experience who takes my insurance, all the way to finding a graphic designer for the Credo site.

At $29/mo for five requests of up to 20 minutes each, it’s a steal.

Check out FancyHands

Books

I firmly believe in learning from those who are smarter than you. These books have impacted my business and personal life in major ways.

The Four-Hour Work Week

I first read The Four Hour Work Week in December 2008 and it changed my life. This book single-handedly made me realize that I could live life on my own terms and experience a life of adventure and travel. We are not meant to stay in one place and work a soul-sucking job!

These days I re-read this book every 4-6 months and learn different and new things every time. Whether it’s hiring or using a virtual assistant or tricks to travel and work well, this book has literally changed my life.

Buy on Amazon

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Running a company is hard and it is easy to feel like you’re doing it alone and no one else has ever gone through it before. That is not true, and this book shows it.

Written by Ben Horowitz, who is now a venture capitalist, about his experience building a publicly traded company that almost went under but went on to sell for over $1 billion, I read this book right after I started working for myself. I recommend that every entrepreneur or wants-to-be-an-entrepreneur read it.

Buy on Amazon

The Millionaire Next Door

The Millionaire Next Door is a must-read book about finances. It is aimed at personal finances, but the concepts hold true across the business as well.

If you want to save and operate a good business (or life), you need to have your finances in order. You need to make more than you spend and you need to spend less than you make. If you do that, you’ll win.

This book explains why in very real terms.

Buy on Amazon

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

If you’re a digital marketer, you might think that the rules are all new and always changing. The truth is that there are indeed rules and patterns that have held true across the different times of marketing, from print to digital and even what comes after digital.

This book was given to me by a VP at Zillow Group, and I can tell why. This book is a must-read for marketers.

Buy on Amazon

School of Greatness

Lewis Howes is a former professional athlete who has become an online personality teaching people how to build a bigger and deeper personal life that leaves a legacy.

I actually received this book for free a number of years ago and I don’t know who from. I recently went and read it through for the first time and it has changed the way I think about building my own life.

Buy on Amazon

Let My People Go Surfing

Yvon Chouinard is the founder of Patagonia and formerly founded Black Diamond Equipment (at the time, Chouinard Equipment) out of the back of his van in Yosemite Valley.

Chouinard is one of my heroes. He builds companies the way he wants to, driven by very strong values. This book has driven me to build a better company that stands for something real.

Buy on Amazon

The E-Myth Revisited

One of the hardest parts of building a business is going through the transition from solo founder to hiring a team and learning how to delegate. Before you reach that point, you’re going to want to give up.

The E-Myth Revisited is the best book I have read about building a business that is bigger than yourself. It’s a very actionable guide to doing so, and if you’re starting a business you need to read this as early on as possible.

Buy on Amazon

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries is known as Silicon Valley’s guru for quickly testing ideas so that you can find what works and what doesn’t quicker.

Published in 2011, The Lean Startup has changed the way we think about building businesses. From the “Minimum Viable Product” to rapid testing, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to build a company or change their company from one thing to another in a profitable way.

Buy on Amazon

Some links contained on this page are affiliate links, meaning if you buy a product using our link we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we have personally used and know that others will receive outstanding value from.

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