Ever since BforBloggers moved to a new design and framework, I’ve got a lot of emails people asking what theme you’re using, what theme as that, what plugin does that and all.
To all my eager beavers and BforBloggers readers, This page consists of all the tools and services I use at BforBloggers every day. I believe in transparency and this ideology has given me a lot.
Let me give you a quick list and an introduction to some of the best tools I have come through and used here at BforBloggers.
Email Marketing
MailChimp
I use MailChimp as my Email marketing service.
It gives me everything, from making sequences, autoresponders to segmentation triggers. I love the dashboard and support I get from MailChimp and welcome emails that are fast to deploy.
Web Host
One of the best things I feel I did was moving BforBloggers to WPX.
WPX Hosting is a premium managed hosting service that is super affordable. Our uptime and speed had never been so great and consistent. You can read the whole review here.
P.S. You get 2 months free when you sign up for the annual plan.
For anyone looking for a more affordable, easy and quick way to start a blog I would recommend Bluehost.
Plugins
Some essential plugins we use:
- Akismet
- No self-pings
- Easy digital downloads
- Similar posts
- Syntax highlighter evolved
- Nginx helper
- Resmush.it (compresses images)
Other Important Plugins
Advanced Ads – I use this plugin for Ad management. Wp Advanced Ads has a special section for Adsense and whenever I make a custom banner for affiliate products promotion, I have many options to choose from and the image option is my favorite.
Thrive Plugins– Our comment section is powered by Thrive comments. It adds a beautiful layout, lazy loading module along with voting features and gives a quite unique look to BforBloggers cause its super customizable. Eventually, I also use Thrive headline optimizer.
Bloom– I use Bloom by elegant themes to make those attractive optin slide-ins you see at the bottom right corners of my posts. It is really worth it because it has various numbers of triggers that allow me to better target my visitors. and integrates with MailChimp.
Click To Tweet by Clicktotweet.com – To add that beautiful and attractive call to action tweetable text boxes across my posts and pages.
ThirstyAffiliates – To handle, cloak, track and manage all of my affiliate links in one place from one dashboard.
Yoast – Yoast handles everything related to on-site SEO and also helps me with my on page SEO. Its premium version is quite great just because of that internal link suggestion widget in the editor. The free version is better than any other SEO plugin out there.
Title and Nofollow links – To add a nofollow tag to certain links.
Author Hreview – To add schema markup in certain posts such as my reviews.
WP Review by Themeisle – To add the review box you see below some reviews such as this. It also adds appropriate schema markup to posts which I like the most. I’ll be shifting to this from Author Hreview soon.
WP Rocket – The cache plugin that makes BforBloggers load under 2 seconds. right from day one, it has been on stock settings but still its faster than other cache plugins out there.
Form Maker WD – The web dorado’s form maker is the one I use to create contact and other forms here on BforBloggers.
MaxButtons – The one plugin that helps me to create and handle every custom button here.
Elementor – To build some specific pages like the store. The only page builder plugin I’ll recommend you to use.
Monarch plugin – The one plugin I use at BforBloggers to add customized share buttons and follow us widget. Apart from this I once used social warfare.
BackupBuddy – I use this plugin to save a remote backup of BforBloggers automatically. It’s really a great backup plugin to have.
Enable Contributor Uploads – This plugin allows my contributors to upload and add images in their guest posts easily, something which WordPress doesn’t allow by default.
Custom Post types UI – This plugin allows me to take care of the deal section by creating a custom post type along with a custom taxonomy for it. Really helps in the management of multiple post types.
Thrive Leads – Recently, Thrive leads were added to our plugin list and this one plugin has increased our conversion rate better than any time before and to be frank, it’s really better than Bloom in every way. I highly recommend you to use this if you are serious about growing your email list.
WP User Avatar – This plugin allows our contributors to upload there custom avatar to display in their author box and comments across BforBloggers.
Auto SEO links – To automatically link some of the new posts to old posts using an anchor text. This plugin saves time.
Redirection & 404 solution– To keep an eye and fix the dead and broken links across the site.
That is the complete list of plugins I use here. I’m really selective when it comes to choose or shift to a new plugin trust them without any issue at all because they power BforBloggers every day.
Also note that I don’t really change plugins too often because that might cause compatibility issues but I’ll make sure whenever I change something, I update this page as well.
These were the stuff I use. Let me also share some of the resources I trust and recommend to anyone willing to start and manage a blog, grow and build its authority and make more money from it. This will help you choose better tools that you can trust upon. without oo much of confusion.
WordPress Theme
I use Genesis Framework here. It’s highly customizable and robust at the same time that really something I definitely look for in a WordPress theme. Additionally, a few lines of code can reshape the whole site structure the way you want something, I don’t think any other theme can.
My theme is a custom made child theme and unfortunately, you can not download it.
Recommended Resources
SiteGround – I really love Siteground for one single reason: Maintaining quality. When you’re starting out, that’s what you expect apart from being user-friendly. SiteGround has it all. it gives you free SSL, free DDOS protection, low rates, unlimited bandwidth and storage space with a great support. If you’re starting a WordPress blog and plan to grow steadily, they are the one I’ll recommend to host your WordPress blog with.
ConvertKit – If ever I would want to switch to another email marketing service, It would be ConvertKit. That’s because they make email marketing as simple as possible with exceptional features that are great to target and engage any sort of email list. They also let you go beyond that by providing actionable guides and optimization tips through support.
Grammarly – One thing you would never like to see in my blog posts is typo and grammar mistakes. Grammarly is a chrome extension that solves this problem for free. It helps me to write error-free articles all the time and its premium version also helps me write advanced paragraphs. (Pro tip- open the Grammarly editor and double click on a word to find its synonyms).
Kapa99 – I recently came across Kapa99 graphic designers. Whether you have to get awesome blog images, professional logos, book covers, posters, flyers and almost any visual you want, the Kapa99 team will do the job. You can send them as many tasks you might have and as many revisions as you need, which means unlimited everything.
Agora Pulse – Agora Pulse is something you would fall in love because it is a utility-focused tool that helps you build your social brand faster. It lets you automate multiple social accounts, schedules your posts, re-target unengaged visitors, test different posts, track their performance and more.
IFTTT – This amazing online tool can save you a lot of time and headaches. IFTTT lets you automate social media, email accounts, office products, notes and almost everything that’s the on the internet with a set of rules and actions you want and when you want. Above all its really free to use.
SEMrush – The one SEO tool that does it all. SEMrush handles site audit, backlink analysis, domain analysis, competition analysis, keyword research, local SEO, cross-domain comparison and so on. In fact, with SEMrush, you will not need any other SEO tool ever.
Stencil – The tool I use to create beautiful custom images here. I really like their interface and flexibility to use any icon, image and template.
Themify – Apart from Genesis, this is the one WordPress theme shop I mostly recommend to anyone. Themify is one of the easiest to customize theme and page builder that works great for anyone, either beginner or pro.
Gsuite – If you are using a host that doesn’t allow you to have an email address with your domain, you should definitely choose Gsuite for that. It makes handling emails and managing them easier and moreover its very neat and organized begin so powerful in features because it lets you manage all of the Google apps single-handedly
Social Warfare – This is probably the best free social share module plugin you can ever get. It has a beautiful floating module, an inline module and it’s highly responsive making sure the share buttons look great on any screen.
LongTailPro – This one tool really outranks most of the keyword research tool when it comes to finding long tail keywords. Using LongTailpro, you can target high volume but long tail keywords that are easier to rank. It makes keyword research convenient and easy.
Leadpages – At the end of the day, if you are willing to get more leads and probably more sales, you should have a look at leadpages. It is a full-featured landing page builder that makes it easy to create any type of landing page be it a sales page, squeeze page, webinar subscription or simple blog landing pages.
You should check out the extra list I created here.
That’s all. I hope you have found something that you can utilize to further take your blogging success to another level. These are tools I trust and these resources help me in my daily blogging life.
