Hosting
Often an overlooked part of your website’s health, hosting makes a big difference for your website’s speed and uptime. Site speed matters, but don’t take my word for it, listen to what Google has to say. Both of these companies offer rock solid hosting and customer support, and it’s often cheaper than what some of the big brands charge. You can’t go wrong with either choice:
Google analytics is the gold standard for measuring your websites performance. It is used around the world by marketing professionals to get insights around how people have found the website in addition to how they are using it. It’s a feature rich platform that allows businesses to begin asking better questions knowing they can get better answers.
One of the most popular, reliable and highly rated tools in the SEO world is Ahrefs. it provides valuable data into backlink profiles, anchor text ratios along with a host of competitor insights. it’s one of the more expensive tools in my SEO Arsenal but it’s worth every penny.
Your website loads pretty fast right? A common mistake people make is thinking that the site speed you experience is the same for everyone else. Not so! You have visited the business site many times and it is most likely cached (saved) on your computer, so it will load faster for YOU. A potential new customer visiting your site won’t experience this and will be forming an impression of your business for the first time. Gtmetrix will give you insights into what that actual load speed is and if there are problems.
Relying on your memory for passwords can be put yourself at a greater security risk than you realize. As we create new accounts online and reuse passwords, or even variants of our usual password, we make it easier for someone to hack us. Lastpass is one of the many online solutions to help us not have to rely on our memory and, therefore, make our passwords very strong.
My favorite CRM, Insightly, allows you to manage contacts, projects and tasks all organized in one place.
Communication can be much easier when you have a visual component to a message. This is a breeze with Jing. Jing allows you to take a screenshot, make notes, add arrows and share it with anyone in an email or through a link seamlessly.
Hotjar heat mapping services are a great way to continue to get insights similar to analytics. When you can visualize data it goes a long ways to helping you better understand it and hot jar is one such company that I use when I need to see that data map out in ways analytics doesn’t always provide.
Gmelius is hands-down one of my favorites productivity tools. I rely on Google apps for my e-mail and while I think it is one of the best e-mail platforms available it lacks features that do a tremendous amount to help productivity. I could rant and rave about Gmelius ( I don’t make a cent off promoting them but I wish I did) because it allows me to do things like schedule e-mails to send later create to-do lists within Gmail give me read receipts so I know when people have opened e-mails I have sent an schedule e-mail follow-ups so I can be sure not let a conversation die, just to name a few of the things it does.