All Resources required to build your own website
This is the best resources after years of experience with lot of tries and errors
If you click on any of my affiliate links below and make a purchase, I may receive a commission for referring you and you will not be charged any extra money but the opposite, you may get cheaper price offered to my affiliate links
Please note that I only recommend resources I believe in and highly trust.
Free Tools and Training
Web Hosting and domain name
I am currently web hosting this website with Siteground
I was using before Hostgator, right now I don’t do any affiliate with them as I promote something that should be very beneficial to you and I really trust Siteground to be the best hosting for all starting their blogging journey
You should know that although BlueHost and Hostgator may pay higher commission but they cannot compete with Siteground in terms of page loading speed and many other features I mentioned in my post about why you should change your web hosting account
Participate in discussions that pay real money
Respondent is a real panel where you can participate in discussions that you can get paid from $100 to $250 or more in each discussion
Swagbucks is good to have on your list as you can participate in contents and surveys that pay you some cash, don’t compare it to Respondent but it is worth to know about
Survey Junkie is a survey site where you can redeem your points into PayPal or any other gift cards
Autoresponder (Email Marketing Tools)
Moosend I used to be a fan of MailerLite but I switched to Moosend when I heard about it
Because you can send unlimited emails to your first 1,000 subscribers
Also their interface is very light compared to MailerLite
Plus they have a very amazing feature where you can integrate with shopping card and send emails to buyers who did not complete their orders or removed an item from their cart
MailerLite offers the first 1000 subscribers for free with 12,000 emails as a limit
If you have less than 1000 subscribers you can still use the full features without paying any thing but you are limited to 12,000 emails (12 emails for every subscriber on your list)
WordPress Training
I have not tried buying these 2 courses as I don’t need the training but I only watched the sample they provide and I can tell you that they are really of great quality
I tried buying from a site like Udemy (no affiliate link) they offer courses for 5$ or 10$ and quality is really great
WordPress Themes
ElegantThemes is amazing if you plan to invest in one of their themes like DIVI but somehow expensive than other themes designers
Also there are few others like
ThemeForest I was using Phlox theme for my current blog but switched to different one
GeneratePress Very simple and flexible theme for bloggers looking for neat and straightforward design
WordPress Plugins
I currently use one plugin called UpdraftPlus which comes with PRO version but the free version can also work for you
CSS-Hero this is the best plugin I have ever seen, it will let you edit your WordPress theme’s CSS without learning how to code
What happens when you want to customize your blog more than what your WordPress theme allows, you will have to hire a developer
But with a plugin like CSS-Hero you can do whatever you want, look at the screenshot below for a sample of what I was able to modify
Graphic Design Tools
You can buy from well known sites but I fell in love with Canva also you can try
Venngage makes infographics that people love
Stock Images Websites offering free images
There are so many websites but I feel going through the below is enough for you and me
1. Pixabay
2. StockSnap.io
3. Unsplash
4. Pexels
5. Burst (by Shopify)
6. Reshot
7. FoodiesFeed
8. MMT Stock
9. Gratisography
10. Freestocks.org
11. Picography
12. Picjumbo
13. Kaboom Pics
14. SkitterPhoto
15. Life of Pix
16. StyledStock
17. Jay Mantri
18. New Old Stock
19. Death to the Stock Photo
20. Good Free Photos
21. Morgue File
22. Tookapic Stock
Guest Post Sites
Self help from SelfGrowth.com– -SelfGrowth.com is the most complete guide to information about Self Help on the Internet.
Internet Marketing Tools
AnyImage Allows you to make all your images clickable to your website or your desired post/article so it can be used in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or any other social media sites
IFTTT If This Then That, also known as IFTTT, is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets.
An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, or Pinterest.
Zapier very similar to IFTTT but you have to build the integration by yourself
Social Media Automation Sites
The top one and it is a must to use is Tailwind where you can manage to scheduled your own pins to all your boards (I combine it with pinning manually to satisfy Pinterest and conform with their algorithm which I believe they reward manual pinning)
I currently switched to SocialPilot after using Buffer as a paid account
I will tell you now why I listed these Social Media accounts below because they all offer free account with limited access
Now you can download a browser called Mozilla Firefox then sign up for all or most of these Social media automation sites, bookmark them under separate bookmarking folder (let’s call it Social Media Automation) and with this browser you can open all of these sites with one click as shown below
Commun.it Free account enables you to create one profile on either Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, I use it for Twitter because it offers very amazing features on Twitter account
ContentCal Free account includes 50 posts per month on 1 Facebook page, 1 Twitter profile, 1 Linkedin page or profile and 1 Intagram profile
Crowdfire Free account includes 10 scheduled posts per month on 1 Facebook page, 1 Twitter profile, 1 Linkedin page or profile and 1 Intagram profile
Dlvrit Free account connects to 3 social profile out of Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin Profile and Page, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, RSS and StockTwits with 10 daily posts per social
SocialPilot I consider this Social Media automation tool to be one of the best, I spent countless hours of research and reading lot of reviews, I tried them for 14 days and that made me switch to them from Buffer
You can connect to 10 different Social media accounts including Facebook Page and Group, Twitter, Linkedin Profile and Page, Google Profile, Page and Collection (never seen connecting Collection anywhere else), Pinterest, Google My Business (also never seen it anywhere else), Instagram, Tumblr, VK (UK Social media) and Xing (Russian Social media)