Coders get to have a stack, but why not bloggers too? - it sounds cooler than saying “a collection of tools.” So here’s a visual representation of me serving up my delicious resource cake for you guys.
I’m totally calling it “My Blogging Stack” and you sir or madam, are in the front row seat to witness this collection before yee.
But before I get into it, for the people that are here for the link dump, I’ve got some cool finds for you.
🔗 Link Dump
The theme for this weeks link dump, of course, is blogging.
🔥 Hot off the press: The 7 lessons I’ve learned from Tim Urban on reaching 1,500,000+ views a month. The perfect small business concept for any of you solopreneurs. And My 8 Ways to Sift Through Fake News.
📊 I found a neat list of the Top 100 Economics Blogs for 2020.
🚀 Groove’s list of Startup Blogs that got them from $0 to $100k a month in revenue.
☯️ Kevin Kelly’s 68 bits of advice; extremely valuable.
📰 My Current Blogging Stack
This stack is what I personally use, so don’t burn me alive if there’s something pivotal for you that’s not on my list, in fact, comment it down on the Substack post so I can add it in.
Just for you to get an idea of what I prioritise with my stack, I’ll let you know what I’m trying to do.
Tell fantastic stories, aka. get better at storytelling.
Grow my readership.
Open up other avenues/mediums for storytelling.
This means I’m not prioritising freelance work, so you won’t see invoicing tools or a massive amount of job platforms - but I realise a lot of bloggers rely on these for the bulk of their revenue.
So I’ll scatter some of them around too.
Content Platforms
I’ve done a big breakdown on the pros and cons for each, but here’s the quick list.
✍ Medium for my personal blog - Let’s me reach a ton of people organically.
👻 Ghost for my travel blog - Opensource and self-hosted. It lets me have some internet property where I own the domain and have full control.
📧 Substack for my email newsletter - Let’s me have a direct line to my readership for free - that’s you. 😘
Writing + Media Tools
These are what I use for the craft, it’s a long list, but it’ll be worth your time.
👩🏫 Grammarly Pro - Fantastic editing tool with a free and pro version, I use pro because I am a pro… at making mistakes. But the free version is excellent too.
🅰 capitalizemytitle.com - Much like you, I can definitely title… Although, it’s worth having that second look, also they have an excellent Headline analyser.
📄 Google Docs - Self-explanatory right? Free, continuous backups, all the tools you need and many integrations.
📷 Unsplash - For high-quality royalty-free photos.
🖌️ The Noun Project - For high-quality royalty-free vectors and icons.
✂️ Canva - Fantastic and free online photo editing.
🖼️ Photopea - A barebones replica of photoshop, but in the browser and free - did I mention it takes .PSD files too?
👨🎨 Adobe Illustrator - Fantastic and definitely not free illustration/design software where I’ll do all my terrible drawings.
🎥 Tenor or GIPHY - For all my animated GIF needs, and oh yes, I use them all the time.
Utilities
👻 Ghostery - I was tired of my analytics picking up my activity and counting it as views, reads, and session time. This chrome extension is super useful for blocking those trackers and ads.
📈 Google Analytics - All my analytics and tracking needs.
💧 Digital Ocean - For cloud infrastructure, I host my websites here. Also, that’s a referral link that’ll give you $100 in credit. You’re welcome 😘
🏷️ Namecheap - For all my domain registration needs.
📦 Dropbox - I use the free version as a part of my illustrating and graphics stack, i.e. all saves are synced immediately. Referral link for free space on this link too.
💾 Google Drive - Hard storage, all of my files are backed up with terabytes of storage here, and I’ll also use it as my office suite.
Payment + Monetisation
🦓 Stripe - Go-to payment API used by all the platforms that matter.
👩🏭 Upwork - Great marketplace for freelancing, I have an account there, I never use it…
💸 Adsense - Google’s ad program aka. The most common monetisation for new or even established blogs.
📚 Amazon Affiliates - Amazon affiliate program for commissions on goods sold aka. The most common affiliate program.
Here are some other types of affiliate programs: VPNs, insurance, cloud storage, and other products/services - a lot of brands will have their own affiliate programs.
Ad networks for when you’re getting those 50k-100k hits a month: Adthrive and Ezoic.
Promotion
These are the ones that have worked the best for me, I’ll mention some of the other heavy hitters below the list, but they’ll be no surprise - that’s for sure.
🐣 Twitter - Anything from coming up with story ideas, to networking.
🧙♂️ Reddit - The right community can be a powerful driver for your content.
👨🏫 Quora - Answering relevant questions in detail will catapult you to the top.
👩🎓 LinkedIn - Even with its massive growth, it’s still seen as a professional networking or job platform, but the content on here can spread like wildfire.
Of course, there are other massive platforms that people have a lot of success with - Pinterest is great for blogs related to pretty things like travel, food, beauty, architecture etc. Facebook ads are Superman if you’re marketing a product.
This was a quick run-through of my stack, but there’s much more out there. I haven’t covered other content like video or audio, which I also dabble in. But let me know if you want to read about some cool tools for those as well.
I know a lot of the resources are popular, and you’ve likely heard of them, but if you got a few in there you didn’t know about, my work here is done 😎
Have fun and see you next week,
Sah