RECOMMENDATIONS: BLOGGING AND BUSINESS TOOLS

woman hiker with backpack sitting on rocks typing on a laptop at sunset

If you’re like me, you’re super curious about the tools other bloggers are using. So you love to see a page like this one!

The following is a list of blogging and business tools that I’ve found useful in my three-plus years running an outdoor fitness blog. I’ve also included some of my favorite courses, podcasts, and other resources.

A few things to keep in mind as you peruse my list:

  • When it comes to tech, I’m a hardcore minimalist. The simpler, the better! (And I know what is simple, because I have seriously tried ALL the things 😳.)

  • I believe you can’t succeed in business if your mind is a mess. So I invest a ton in personal development.

  • I don’t mind paying extra for great value. I’ll also pay extra for customer service excellence.

  • My website needs to be functional, but it doesn’t need to be a gorgeous work of art.

  • I’m big on building community and connection and less excited about complicated funnels.

  • I’m in a niche that lends itself to Pinterest and social marketing, while Google SEO is more difficult.

I’m always happy to chat about blogging, so drop me a line any time if you have questions. None of this stuff is top secret. 😂

Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links, and I may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. Please know that your trust is important to me. That’s why I only recommend products that I have verified or used personally.

Tech Tools

Squarespace (Website)

I recently switched my site from self-hosted Wordpress (recommended by many of the “experts”) to Squarespace. I’ll update this post soon to share the reasoning behind my decision. But suffice it to say, I am feeling like I’ve been set free, and I’m also saving money.

If you’re new to Squarespace, it’s a one-stop shop for website building, hosting, and ecommerce. The site and hosting are integrated. If you’ve ever had a problem with your Wordpress site, and had the developer blame the hosting company, you know what a win this is! By contrast, when your Squarespace site tanks, you can initiate a chat with their U.S.- and Ireland-based staff.

Squarespace sites aren't as wildly customizable as WordPress sites, but the platform offers plenty of templates and all the basic features you need to run an online business.

Squarespace integrates with a growing number of third-party services, but not nearly as many as Wordpress. To make it all work, you may need a little help from Zapier.

Active campaign (Email platform)

I fumbled along with MailChimp for a year before my coach turned me onto ActiveCampaign. AC is amazing for setting up automations and very intelligent when it comes to fixing your mistakes for you. At this point it may actually be a little more email client than I need. But since it’s similar in pricing to MailChimp with A LOT more functionality, I keep it around.

Downsides? Customer service is at best satisfactory and quite slow. It also integrates with fewer services than MailChimp. (I can’t use ActiveCampaign with certain features on SquareSpace, for example.)

Teachable (Courseware)

Teachable is helpful if you plan to create online courses. I used it a ton as a student before I put my own courses on it, and it’s always been a solid experience.

In addition to housing all of your course content, Teachable handles student payments and permissions, collects European VAT taxes (not US), and allows you to set up beautiful sales pages with just a few clicks.

Another cool feature is that you can use Teachable to manage your own affiliate program. (In other words, you can pay commissions to people who sell your course on their own sites. That's way cheaper than using ads!)

Downsides include hit-or-miss customer service and a confusing user interface. New students sometimes have a tough time finding the log-in page, so do them a solid and send them a start-up email with detailed directions and links.

Selz (digital product sales)

If you plan to create and sell ebooks and other downloads, Selz is an affordable, easy shopping cart platform that handles your credit card payments and product delivery.

If you are new to the game, you can actually add up to 5 products on a free account. (Selz will take a slightly larger cut of your sales in this case.)

Another feature I appreciate: Selz is also very good at calculating taxes. It handles our bizarre, multi-tiered tax structure in Colorado with ease!

You can upgrade to a paid plan in order to pay lower Selz commissions, accept Paypal payments, and customize your sales-related emails.

Downside: another somewhat confusing user interface. I’ve gotten a number of emails from people who made purchases but couldn’t figure out how to download. So again, be proactive and include instructions in your Thank You email.

Tailwind (Social scheduler)

This is a must-have for serious Pinterest marketers. Tailwind allows you to schedule weeks to months worth of pins quickly and easily. It's so nice to be off on a mountain in South America somewhere and know that Tailwind is doing the sharing for me! Tailwind also provides advanced analytics to help you understand what sort of content your audience wants to see (although Pinterest’s native analytics platform has improved dramatically in recent months).

Later (social Scheduler)

Instagram marketers, this one is for you! Later allows you to schedule posts to your feed and your stories ahead of time so you can focus on other things. Cool features include saved captions (including your favorite hashtags), a hashtag suggestion tool (premium feature), and suggested posting times (premium feature). I find I get by just fine using the free plan, but if you're heavy into Instagram, the premium plan may be a good investment.

RecurPost (Social Scheduler)

If you're looking to automate your Facebook marketing, RecurPost is my number one recommendation. It's definitely given my Facebook page and group engagement a huge boost while allowing me to focus on other things.

RecurPost reposts content for you on a set schedule so that you don't need to constantly create new updates. For example, I have it set up to ask a question to my group on Monday, share a training article on Tuesday, a personal story on Wednesday, an older blog post on Thursday, and so on. All I do is add a few of each kind of post to the relevant libraries, and RecurPost does the rest.

I started out on the RecurPost free plan, but the paid plan has been a lifesaver since I started a Facebook group and post to multiple pages.

Mediavine (Ad Network)

Pay-per-click ads are still around, and while they probably won’t make you a millionaire, they can add a nice side income to your blogging business. The downsides are that they can slow down your site and make it look a bit spammy. If you have decent traffic (about 30,000 pageviews per month), check out the premium ad network MediaVine. They offer some tech support and work with a high quality of advertisers.

AVANTLINK (Affiliate network)

Do you love certain outdoor gear or travel services and write about them often? Consider becoming an affiliate for those companies. Affiliates receive a special tracking link that points to a product page on an advertiser's website. When someone clicks on your link and buys from the advertiser, you receive a commission. (There is no extra cost to the buyer.)

Some companies run their own affiliate programs. Others join affiliate networks that manage their programs for them. A key affiliate network for outdoor bloggers is AvantLink, which is the network for REI, Darn Tough, Backcountry.com, Moosejaw, and many other outdoor retailers.

Courses

Launch Your Blog and Biz (by Create N Go)

If you take only one course as a new blogger, I highly recommend Launch Your Blog and Biz. It helped me take my earnings from less than $100 a month to $1000 — which is exactly the goal of the course! Alex and Lauren do a great job of cutting through the noise and showing you where to focus your energy in order to raise your monthly earnings to $1000 a month.

Pinterest Traffic Avalanche (Create N Go)

Learning to market my blog on Pinterest was a game-changer for me in my first couple years of blogging. Focusing on Pinterest marketing not only increased my traffic by about 30 percent over a few months, it brought me very engaged readers who are serious about their hiking training.

Pinterest Traffic Avalanche is a short course packed with value that will help you get your Pinterest game going in as little as a couple of weeks. It's extremely affordable compared to many other Pinterest courses out there and offers just as much value, in my opinion. Highly recommended.

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

Michelle of Making Sense of Cents is one of my blogging heroes. In this informative, affordable, and easy-to-understand course, she breaks down the strategies she uses to make over $50,000 per month in affiliate sales through her blog. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing has helped me to grow my own affiliate sales to several hundred a month. What's more, I'm now confident that I'm doing it right — not breaking laws or coming across as too salesy to my audience. Definitely check this one out if you want to be an affiliate marketer.

Making Sense of Sponsored Posts

Bloggers and sisters Michelle (Making Sense of Cents) and Alexis (Fitnancials) show you how to collaborate with brands in ways that feel authentic and bring awesome value to your readers. Making Sense of Sponsored Posts shows you how to find brands interested in collaboration, pitch them, join influencer networks, and creating campaigns that delight your brand clients. I just took this course and can't wait to implement all their great ideas!

Angie Lee Niche Course

Have you seen Angie in action? If not, prepare to laugh your ass off while learning a ton along the way. Angie’s niche course will help you focus your business on content and products that make money. She’ll also show you how to courageously stand out from the crowd with polarizing marketing.

5K Funnel Formula (Kate McKibbin)

I took my first blogging course with Kate, and if you really want to learn how to leverage technology for your business, she will show you how. As I said above, I’m not a fan of funnels. What I did learn from 5K Funnel Formula was how to do a great webinar and follow up with an email sequence that nurtures and converts. So that alone was worth the price of admission.

Self-Coaching Scholars (The Life Coach School)

If you’re going to fix your business, why not fix the rest of you? (Because as you will learn at The Life Coach School, every result you create, good or bad, starts with your thoughts.) Self Coaching Scholars is a monthly subscription program that gives you access to a treasure trove of business and personal development courses. It also includes a 1:1 life coaching session once a week.

Podcasts