Are you thinking of starting your own blog? Do you have a blog that you’d like to make your career? These are — of the best blogging resources we use for our blog.
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Blogging Resources : Creating a solid framework
Hosting
We use Bluehost as our hosting company. They are an inexpensive and effective option for hosting – especially when you are first starting out.
Framework & Theme
We use the Genesis Framework as the backbone of our site, couple with our Brunch Pro Child Theme.
Protect your site by backing it up
BlogVault is a reliable service that backs up your site(s) so that you don’t lose all that hard work you put into your blog. We use it to back up all of our sites.
Blogging Resources : E-mail marketing
We use ConvertKit to manage our email list. We absolutely love using ConvertKit. One of the best things we did for our blog was starting to build an email list from day 1. They offer a free plan until you hit 1,000 subscribers as well so it’s zero risk which we love.
Recipe Plug-In
Tasty Recipes is the recipe plug-in we use on AHK. If you want your recipes to be found (and I’m guessing you do!), it is absolutely essential to be using a recipe plug-in that is SEO/Google friendly and that is updated regularly.
Selling Products
We use SendOwl to sell our digital products like our e-cookbooks.
We use Podia to sell all of our online courses and coaching. It’s a powerful and customizable platform that allows you to create and sell courses, coaching and more.
Social media management
Creating Images
We use Canva to create our images and pins on the blog.
Tailwind is our favorite scheduling tool for Pinterest and had helped us grow our account and traffic to our blog. Scheduling out our pins a week or a month at a time saves us so much time! (Get $15 for free when you sign up through our link.)
We learned so much about growing our Pinterest following and traffic to our site from Pinterest by reading the Making Pinterest Possible e-Book and implementing Ana’s professional Pinterest strategies.
Blogging Resources : Monetizing your blog
Affiliate marketing
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is the ultimate course to learn about affiliate marketing. Our friend Michelle walks you through everything you need to know to make your first affiliate sales or to increase affiliate sales on an existing website. Whether you are making $0 or $5000 per month (or more) from Affiliate Marketing, she will help you increase your affiliate income. She currently makes over $100,000 per month (yes, you read that correctly!) from affiliate marketing on her site, Making Sense of Cents.
Build community by joining a bloggers’ Membership Sites
Food Blogger Pro
Lindsay and Bjork, the founders of Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum, are awesome. Amazing food bloggers, informative teachers and such a cute and loving couple. They have created the most amazing community of food bloggers online. This is the spot to meet other food bloggers, learn about food photography and video, take courses on using Pinterest and food sharing sites to increase your traffic and more. You will start your membership to watch all of the amazing courses at your disposal and stay for the amazing community you will fall in love with. We have been members for the past 2 years and are planning to stay!