Last updated on December 13, 2019, 11:59 PM
Tools for online marketers, startups and web workers
Since I often search a little too long for my taste to find the tool that I used x months ago, I have put together this list. It serves as a small notepad and here I collect my tools for online marketers and everyone who works on and with the web.
I’ll try to keep the whole thing fairly up to date. Have fun with it. As of: December 2019
Table of Contents: Dashboard – Monitoring Tools Content Marketing Tools Social Media Tools Web & Online Marketing Analytics Tools Image Editing Tools & Infographic Tools Stock photos free for commercial use Cloud Services - Free Storage Online Email Marketing Tools Other things that don’t fit in anywhere - useful tools Search Engine Optimization SEO Tools Keyword Research Tools Team Communication Tools Project Management Tools Logo Creator Tools
Dashboard – monitoring tools
Google Data Studio (free): Available in Austria since the beginning of 2017, the Data Studio offers the possibility of connecting a variety of tools and extracting the data. Of course, Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Search Console (Webmaster Tools), etc. are preferred and work best. But the cool thing is that you can also build beautiful diagrams from the data using drag & drop, including date limits that can be adjusted on the fly.
Cyfe* – free & purchase version: A wonderful dashboard tool that connects to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram,… in 2 clicks and beautifully transforms the data into graphics like Google Data Studio. The advantage of Cyfe is that it is a lot simpler and faster than Data Studio. Other options for connection are all Google tools, and so many others like: Bitly, Klout, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Google Sheets, CSV files, SQL files, all kinds of email tools (Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.), Salesforce, Shopify,
As you can see, the tool is immensely powerful and can cover the monitoring of an entire online marketing campaign across all channels as well as SEO measures on the website to monitor success. So just test it out :)
Content marketing tools
Canva : The basic version of Canva is free and you can quickly create simple graphics with a large pool of templates that you can overlay. Many social media template image sizes are also already stored. So it’s a good and, above all, time-saving content marketing tool. In the Canva Pro Version* there is also the very practical resizing of images (simply adjust the size) to the respective social media channel format and the stored CI/CD colors, which can be easily accessed at any time, as well as multiple users who can also access the same pool of designs.
Evernote* could theoretically almost be counted as a content marketing tool, as you can easily access content with multiple devices and multiple users. So it’s probably more of an all-encompassing content idea collection and distribution tool.
Story Chief* relatively new and therefore super fresh in design, Story Chief offers an all-encompassing content marketing platform. Here content can be created, edited together and also shared across almost all channels you can imagine with scheduling.
Unbounce*, although almost a bit offtopic as they started with the A/B testing and website design topic, but now offer as many functions as a content marketing hub. The main focus is still on the functionality of building different versions of landing pages and also having A/B testing tracking with them, but since I don’t have my own A/B testing tool section, it probably fits best here :)
Influma: Influma is basically a blogger and influencer database where you can choose your key opinion leaders for specific content marketing campaigns and measures.
linkbird : linkbird is an SEO tool for link building, SEO, content marketing and online PR. There is a 14 day trial version with which you can do a little bit in the SEO area.
Rankingcoach: Similar to Linkbird, you can also lay the foundation for SEO in the 14 day trial version. A DIY SEO tool with good tips and a nice to-do list.
Blogatus (formerly Rankseller): Blogatus brings bloggers together with companies that want to do content marketing through them. So a mediation platform.
SeedingUp : SeedingUp offers content seeding in five languages via bloggers and their social media presences in various social media networks.
Basically, you have to say that these content seeding and influencer marketer platforms are springing up like mushrooms. Therefore, exercise a little caution here and google for reviews on the various platforms.
Social media tools
Here is our contribution on the topic of social media strategy.
20% text in the image checker tool: Who doesn’t know the annoying “Your ad could reach more people, blah blah blah” because the image of the Facebook ad contains more than 20% text. Therefore, it is better to use Facebook’s text overlay tool and check every image.
Brand24* offers a tool with which you can do online reputation management wonderfully. Ongoing monitoring of all social media channels, news, blogs, videos, forums for various keywords and brand mentions in order to always have an overview of everything and be able to react quickly.
Buffer (free version) : Buffer is a social media management tool to plan postings in advance or make team collaboration easier. Hootsuite and Swat.io are very similar. Here you also have to try it out and choose what you like best.
HootSuite (free version) : HootSuite also makes it possible to manage your social media channels and get a nice overview. Messages and postings can also be scheduled in advance. Instagram can also be accessed from the desktop and posts can be made. This probably also works with Buffer and Swat.io but I haven’t tried it with these two yet.
Swat.io (test version): The Austrian version for social media management. A very sophisticated and cool tool. With very good user management for posting approval. Particularly important in agency-client collaboration.
Fanpage Karma (1 fan page free) : Help to analyze social media channels in more detail. It can be used free of charge for 1 fan page (or 1 channel).
TweetDeck : TweetDeck is a classic and makes it easier to manage multiple Twitter profiles at once (on the desktop).
User numbers for Austria on the social media platforms:
for Facebook you can either simply look in the Ads Manager. Or Statista (actually also a pretty useful statistics tool) has current figures ready. Things get more difficult when it comes to Twitter and Instagram because they don’t release any official numbers. My ex-colleague Tom once thought of a good method for the Social Media Radar to determine the Twitter users from Austria, but the numbers here are no longer up to date. As of October 2015, there were 140,000 users from Austria on Twitter.
The Instagram user number can now also be read out via the Facebook Ads Manager, Statista also shows the numbers here in a reasonably usable way. Status: September In 2016 there were 860,000. Snapchat is currently only wildly estimated as there are no numbers here. You might be able to read something out of the API, but no one has programmed it properly for Austria yet.
Web & Online Marketing Analytics Tools
Google Analytics (free version): the classic for website analysis and monitoring how well a campaign works and brings traffic to the website. But be careful if there are strict data protection guidelines in the company, as the analysis data goes to American servers. **Open Web Analytics (OWA) (free version: **is an open source web analytics solution. Advantage: very fast and can be self-hosted (so the data is in-house), but of course not as graphically beautiful as Google Analytics or other large commercial providers. **Kissmetrics (free trial): **Kissmetrics tries to better analyze and track users across all channels. The attempt here is to place the user’s activities on the Internet at the center of the analysis.
For B2B and quite advanced as these tools are springing up from the ground, Leadfeeder* is where the focus is on finding out which company the website visitor belongs to and often even to which department and what contact options are available. Ideal for transferring data to the sales team to contact leads. Leadfeeder can therefore draw conclusions based on the traffic to its own website and analyze where this traffic came from and who that person could be and then spies out the contact details for this person.
Social Media Analytics Tools
**Sprout Social(free trial): **Tools for analyzing social media channels, for scheduled publishing and monitoring and analyzing the competition.
**socialbakers (free trial): **Social media channel analysis and monitoring. Ads analysis and optimization.
**Klipfolio (free trial version 14 days): **Dashboard software with a focus on Adwords and Facebook (Ads) analysis. Very clearly laid out with good tips for optimization.
Image editing tools & infographic tools
GIMP : is freeware and can actually do everything that Photoshop can. But you just need some training time. But with YouTube tutorials, anything is possible.
**Pixlr: **With Pixlr you can do simple to moderate image editing online if Paint or the Mac preview isn’t your thing :)
Landscape: is a fantastic tool for automatically cropping images to the correct sizes for social media networks.
Stock photos free for commercial use
Pexels: very many, very high-quality photos for free commercial use (usually only with attribution or often nothing at all necessary)
Pixabay: same as Pexels, great photos for free commercial use (mentioning the photographer’s name is usually enough).
PngTree: many vector graphics and isolated PNG image files. Very useful for building infographics
Cloud Services – Free storage online
Dropbox (free version) : Dropbox is the most widely used provider and gives you up to 2 GB in the free version. Thanks to its sophisticated technology, Dropbox (in my opinion) works extremely well across multiple devices. I have also described a little trick with which you can get up to 22GB with around 15-25€ Adwords budget use.
iCloud : iCloud is okay, but I’m not sure how well it can be used for a company. Perfectly fine in private.
Google Drive: Google Drive is also a very good cloud storage solution, especially in combination with Google Docs, and the other Office applications. When you create a Gmail account, you automatically receive 15GB of Google Drive storage on top of that.
OneDrive : Onedrive is a cloud service from Microsoft. Where you can also get 5 GB of storage for free.
Email Marketing Tools
Mailchimp (free up to 2,000 recipients) : Mailchimp is the startup darling among email marketing services. Very sophisticated and usable on all devices. And the full range of functions is great and completely usable. The only sticking point is the German translation of all the content is a bit tricky and you have to invest a little more time here.
CleverReach (free for up to 250 recipients and 1,000 emails per month): Clever Reach is also a very sophisticated email marketing service and has the advantage of being able to offer German support.
AWeber (30 day trial) : Email marketing tool, especially well-known in English-speaking markets.
Newsletter2Go (free up to 1,000 emails per month) : Same as Mailchimp or CleverReach. Here it’s time to try again and take what you like more.
Other things that don’t fit anywhere - useful tools
Visualping : An incredibly cool web tool with which you can mark parts of a website and receive notifications by email if something changes there. E.g. cool for apartment advertisement sites or other sites where you don’t want to constantly look at whether something new has been posted but would actually like to know :) https://visualping.io/
Scanbot: Scanbot is a great APP for your smartphone that has very good image recognition and allows you to quickly scan business cards and documents and automatically save them as PDFs and upload them to the cloud (e.g. Dropbox folder).
Music for commercial use: There is a nice overview here in this blog post that I linked.
FileZilla : FileZilla is a very well-functioning FTP client for easy data exchange to and from servers.
Todoist (free version): To do list management that is very clever and works well across devices.
MindMeister (free version) : Mind maps can sometimes be quite useful for visualizing projects and tasks. MindMeister is an easy-to-use tool for creating mind maps.
Persona creation: Personas are becoming increasingly important for web design projects, target group definition and campaign conception. Hubspot has developed a good template that you can use as a template and also good instructions in the blog post about this written.
Search engine optimization tools (SEO)
**SEMrush: **(free trial): An all-encompassing SEO tool that you can connect to Search Console, GA and Google Ads. Making strong progress internationally and possibly already on a par with Sistrix in German-speaking countries
OnPage.org (free version): Very good help with SEO measures is offered here and you get a nice to-do list of what you can (and should) do.
Keyword-Tools.org : Free tools for keyword monitoring, keyword research and Google Ranking Live Check. Shows the position in the search results for your keywords (and keyword groups) from the website including search volume, CPC price and how much competition there is.
Backlink-Tool.org : This allows you to easily monitor your own backlinks and those of your competitors. The number of links, backlink sources or anchor texts can be analyzed.
Textanalyse-Tool.de: An interesting tool that analyzes the text for readability. Although not mentioned that often, it is certainly a ranking factor for Google that is becoming increasingly important.
WDF*IDF-Tool.com : An on-page tool that analyzes how frequently a word or combination of words occurs on your website. This makes so-called “term weighting” possible.
W-fragen-tool.com: Helps to find out what or how the user is actually looking for. So what questions do you often enter about certain keywords in the search mask? You can then optimize your content on the website.
Keyword research tools
Google Keyword Planner: If you have an Adwords account, you can also access the Google Keyword Planner. There is valuable information here about which keywords you should perhaps keep an eye on and which ones you should focus on.
Keyword Pro: Also a nice tool to find keywords or whole groups of words that you should use for your SEO optimization. Shows the keywords and their context in mind maps, tree diagrams and tag clouds.
KW Finder (free version) : allows an analysis of the keywords (especially long tail keywords) that are relevant to the website and can even display the search volume, the CPC of the keywords and the competition.
SECockpit (a free keyword analysis or 30 day test) : also allows you to search for new keywords using website analysis.
Answerthepublic (free): Delivers great analyzes and all the W questions too. Visually also beautifully prepared with quasi mind map visualization
Team communication tools
Slack (free version) : Slack is also a big favorite of the start-up scene. Thanks to good usability and useful functions, you can quickly find your way around and create teams for collaboration and channels for topics that are being worked on in order to make communication easier and have a storage facility.
Circuit (free version) : offers team communication via voice, video, screen sharing, chat and file sharing
Flowdock (30 day trial version) : also a team chat
Google Hangout: If you don’t know it, Google Hangout enables video calls, as well as group video chats and text chats.
Skype: Everyone probably knows Skype. Also for video calls and chat. Simple VoIP telephony is also an interesting option. You can buy credit and then call foreign phone numbers very cheaply.
Project management tools
Pivotal Tracker (30 day free trial) : Project management tool. Very powerful and a bit difficult to understand at the beginning. But you then have a very nice project overview including timelines.
Asana (free version) : Good tool for project and task management
Trello (free version) : Trello also offers the same thing as Asana, it’s more a matter of taste what you use.
Jira (free trial phase) : Also a project management tool. You often hear that it is used in software projects.
Redmine : Also project management software. A little more powerful with discussion forums, wikis, ticket management or document storage.
Teamwork (free version) : Project management and workgroups.
##Logo Creator Tools:
Logojoy (from $20): Online logo creator tool
Instant Logo Search (free): A search engine where you can quickly find all possible company logos in .png and .svg format. Very practical :)
Logo Dust (free logo templates): A collection of free logos that you can use straight away or use as a source of inspiration for your logo design
Hipster Logo Generator (free logo creator): Still in development mode, but you can easily build some fun hipster style logos with it.
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