What Tools Would I Recommend?

So I thought I'd just do an episode today based on the tools that I use almost every day , basically to get things done . So , in no particular order , let's go . So , first of all , mailchimp . I use MailChimp for all the email capture , collection and then management for all of our websites .

So that covers things like auto responder sequences for , say , people are newly signed up . It covers one-off campaigns and all the legalities and stuff around , you know , managing on subscribers and that kind of thing . So , yeah , we can use MailChimp for many , many years probably 12 more years and I find it really good .

I know there are other email systems out there . Mailchimp may no longer be the best , but that's the one that we use . So next , canva yeah , now Canva . I use for sort of any kind of image generation , doing infographics , that kind of thing .

I'm not a naturally talented person when it comes to sort of graphic design , and previously I used to have to basically pay people to do this for me or use specialist designers for even the most simplest things . But since Canva came out , I find it actually really easy to use and , yeah , I think we've got I've got a pro account which is not hugely expensive .

But it just means that now , when I want to create one-off designs or simple things like I , can now do that myself with those where I don't need to pay for expensive software or have to know how to use Adobe , which is how it used to be .

I still not said I still use professional designers in certain circumstances if I want to get something really polished and really professional , but a lot of the time for many cases , yeah , I can do it myself with Canva , so I really recommend that .

I should just add , by the way , that I will put links to all of these products in the show notes for the episode so that you don't have to try and Google around for them and make sure you get to the right place . So next up is analytics . I'm going to cover three products here .

Now we still use Google Analytics , although Google Analytics 4 is awful , and , to be fair , I barely even look at it anymore . For many , many years Google Analytics was what we used brilliant . And then , yeah , google got rid of the old Google Analytics and brought out GA4 , which is just so , so hard to use , so nonsensical and really hard to get an overview .

So we still keep Google Analytics on all of our sites , just so that we're collecting that data , so that you know if we ever do need to drill into it and work out to use it , at least it's there and collected . But what I actually shifted to for my day to day keeping an eye on stuff is some software called Clicky . Now , this is a paid software .

I think we pay about $20 a month . It depends on how many sites you need to cover . We've got our core sites and other ones that we want to get just that quick overview , and it looks like something that was written 20 years ago . It's not like the most up-to-date modern design , but it doesn't need to be .

It just gives you that very quick overview of how much traffic have you got in the past hour , how much traffic is on site now , how much you know where you actually are , and you can get that overview across multiple sites really quickly . I'm really impressed by it . It kind of it's not over complicated .

So if you're looking for a really simple overview of what's going on in your sites right now , I'd really strongly recommend Clicky Third analytics . One that I'd want to share with you is called Clarity by Microsoft . Now , this is free and it's slightly different .

It's not purely analytics in terms of you know how many people on the page right now , that kind of thing , but what it does do is it gives you an overview of how people are using your site and you can actually get heatmaps of where people are clicking on pages .

You can actually see recordings of people actually using the site so you can see where they're clicking the mouse around and what kind of input they're doing , and it's really good for seeing how people are interacting with your site and you can use it to see where problems occur .

So if people are not finding the right things , or if they're getting stuck on forms , or if they're getting raged they call them raged clicks where they look for people going click , click , click , click and they're trying to find something to click and they don't know where to click . And that's completely free . So you know , there's no reason not to use that .

So , yeah , so those are the three sites that we use for our analytics . So now we'll move to the tools I use to create this podcast , because obviously I create three podcasts a week and , yeah , it takes quite a bit of time and I've spent a lot of time looking for tools to help me do this quickly and efficiently .

So for recording the podcast , I use some software called Descript and that's got a really great way of editing all do the ones that look that's quite complicated to edit . What Descript does ?

It actually makes a transcript as you're speaking and then , when it comes to editing the podcast , you get like it's like a word document and you edit the words so you can , if you want to remove a sentence , you remove the , the words of the sentence and it automatically cuts the that bit of the podcast out for you .

So it's a really great tool for recording and editing . There's loads of other things to it , all short on word gaps , you can have it take out filler words and all sorts of other stuff , but it's yeah , it's really well , well done and it's really quick and easy to record on .

Then , obviously , to publish your podcast , you need a host for that and we use bussprap for that , simply because they are quite easy to work with . It's a dead simple process for uploading it . It provides you a website for that podcast so that if people want to just try it out , there's a website with them to try it . Yeah , and it's .

Those are the two things that we use to get this podcast put out every week . So for managing our projects so one where we're producing projects , where it's not just me involved , where I've got if we've got any stuff working on it or any contractors working on it we use Trello . Trello is a fantastic sort of project management tool .

Works on like a Kanban style card system . If you've never seen it , just I do recommend have a look at it . It's really great for asynchronous work , connections , basically , and keeping projects sort of on track .

All the ways in which you could use Trello to manage projects and people could be , you know entire episode in itself or even multiple episodes , so I won't go further into that one right now . Now for office type tools I use Google workspace , like many other people do , and Dropbox for file storage , as well as Google Drive .

And yeah , I mean I'm Mac based primarily , but yeah , for many , many years I've just been using Google workspace because I just love the fact that it's available everywhere . I can use it on my phone , I can use it on any laptop , any computer , it's all , it's all in the cloud and separate , and I love that .

Now for the all-important designing , building topical clusters and building topical authority . I use keywords , people use dot com .

I mean , that's the reason I founded it is because it was a tool that that I needed to build the sites that I run , and then obviously , we launched it so that everybody else could use it to build the site to do the same things for the sites they run . So obviously I'm going to recommend that one .

And then finally , yeah , an old-fashioned Moleskine notebook and HP pencil . Obviously , not every tool has to be , you know , a digital online tool . Yeah , I still use and rely strongly on and you know , an old-fashioned notebook and pencil because it's just really good to , I find , to jot things down and not reliant everything requiring a computer .

So that's a quick overview of some of the tools that I use , sort of day in , day out . Now , just because I use those tools doesn't mean that they're necessarily the best tools or the right tools for you .

They're just the ones that I use , and it reminds me of a Seth Goadding story that always talks about where Stephen King being interviewed or being asked questions by people in a seminar and people are saying to him what pencil do you use ? As if using the same pencil Stephen King uses will enable you to write stories as great as Stephen King can .

It's not the tools that necessarily are going to make you produce great content , but I just thought you know I'd share because there might be something useful in there . If you're looking to achieve a certain thing , it might help . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard .

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Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard .