20 Tools For Elite Webmasters A free eBook from CMS Critic

About this eBook

At CMS Critic, we work hard to make sure we offer one of the web’s best resources when it comes to finding the right products for your business.

This ebook is our way of highlighting some of the great products we’ve used and we see being used by businesses that operate online everywhere. The goal of this ebook is to showcase some of the less expensive alternatives for those with smaller budgets.

As a result, you will find a number of low cost or free options, perfect for SMBs. I hope you find it useful.

These products are listed in no particular order. This is not a ranking system but rather a list of ones we think rock. - Mike Johnston, Founder and Editor in Chief, CMS Critic

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#1: Edgar Let’s get started with one of our favorite new tools on the market. Edgar is a social media scheduling tool that handles things in a smarter way than the competing tools. Instead of publishing your updates just once and being done with them, it keeps them in a limitless library that you build up over time. All of your updates are sorted into categories that you create and published on a schedule that you choose, so Edgar publishes what you want, when you want it. No manual scheduling, no busywork, and no hassle. After Edgar publishes every update in a category, it begins to pull more from your library. You never run out of messages in your queue, and your handcrafted updates get the chance to be seen, shared, and loved by brand new people. It’s invite only right now but it didn’t take long for us to get an invite and at $49 per month it’s a low cost option that does its job exceedingly well. Check out Edgar.

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#2: Hellobar Hellobar used to be just a simple bar that sits on the top of your site and either collects email addresses or promotes a link. While it still has this capability, it has transitioned into a full fledged lead generation platform with free and low cost options available. You can now create modals, slide-in content or full page takeovers. Plus, the plans are well priced. Heck, the free option is great for most users. With the pro plan you get: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Unbranded content Unlimited bars 10 Improvement suggestions Custom targeted content behavior activated content Custom thank you message

The pro plan is very reasonably priced at just $15/ month Check out Hellobar

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#3: Freshbooks If there’s one thing that can be tough to stay on top of, and yet is also incredibly important, it’s your invoicing and billing system. Freshbooks offers an easy to use way to enter all of your customers, recurring invoices, track expenses from your bank account and organize them all in an easy to see way across all devices. Yes, there’s even a handy app for your smartphone that shows you outstanding balances and notifies you when you are paid. I’ve personally used quite a few tools out there and once I found Freshbooks, I was locked in. It’s very intuitive and easy to set things up and once you do, it’s almost like it’s automated. I highly recommend checking it out. Check out Freshbooks

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#4: Wishpond Wishpond, is a lead generation software capable of building landing pages, creating social media contests, and more. It aims to take the guesswork out of increasingly important lead generation gateways, and the analytical process that typically follows. It’s a platform that marketers can use to create landing pages and contests, track leads, send emails and more. It’s marketing automation made accessible to even the smallest startup – thanks to it’s totally free package.

Check out Wishpond

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#5: Hootsuite Social media is where it’s at, no matter how big or small your business is. Thus, you need a social media management tool to take care of the multiple accounts you need in order to stay on top in today’s digital age. This is where Hootsuite comes in. Hootsuite is the defacto standard for social media management tools, managing everything from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter while also tracking analytics and engagement. Plus, it allows your team to collaborate on ideas from one single interface. Hootsuite is powerful, inexpensive and an absolute necessity for all businesses with it’s mobile apps and desktop interface. Check out Hootsuite

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#6: Clicky Web Analytics I’ve never been a huge fan of Google Analytics from a day to day usage standpoint. It’s powerful, but lacks in key areas such as inaccurate bounce rate reporting (the way it’s tracked is actually a misnomer and not accurate with any other reporting tools). When it comes to realtime analytics with detailed reports, I’ve trusted only one tool for the last 5 years and that’s Clicky Web Analytics. Clicky has everything from heatmaps to real time user tracking and it’s incredibly intuitive. I wouldn’t use anything but. Check out Clicky

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#7: AddThis AddThis is the audience leader in social sharing and offers some incredible tools such as social sharing icons for your site but did you know they also offer profile following tools, audience targeting popups and recommended content tools to name a few? We actively use their social sharing and recommendation tools and have been very pleased with the results. The content recommendation engine offers more than one way to present your content and with the resulting analytics in their dashboard, you can easily see what’s working and what’s not. I highly recommend exploring their amazing set of tools. When it comes to deep audience insights and easy-to-use engagement tools, AddThis is a winner. Check out AddThis

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#8: AWeber AWeber is one of the best, if not the best, email marketing platforms that exists. The system is incredibly easy to use and offers easy drag and drop tools to make beautiful emails for your customers / readers. There are a few top notch email marketing platforms, but I find that AWeber stands out when it comes to performance, support and ease of use. Check out AWeber

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#9: Zapier Zapier is an amazing tool that lets you connect all kinds of different apps together. The list is so extensive that it’s verging on ridiculous. Here are some examples of things you can do, for instance: ● ● ● ●

Save Gmail emails to Evernote or Save email attachments to Dropbox automatically. Send Twitter mentions to Slack (team messaging system) Add EventBrite attendees to a MailChimp email list. Create Trello cards by sending an email

This is a just a small fraction of the things you can do. I’d highly recommend exploring their huge (and I do mean huge) directory of automation tasks to see how their tool can help reduce your workload. Check out Zapier

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#10: Slack Slack is a team collaboration tool that is making big waves at the moment. It is incredibly powerful and makes team collaboration extremely easy and far more efficient than it has been in the past. Not just that, but when combined with Zapier (#9 on this list) it becomes extremely useful when you add in the many Zapier integrations you can link to Slack. It keeps everything in one place, is instantly searchable, and hosts an unlimited number of people. Oh, and did I also mention that it’s totally free? Check out Slack

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#11: Trello Trello is a popular and handy project collaboration tool that can be used for a myriad of purposes. Trello is simple on the surface, but Trello Cards have everything you need to get stuff done. Post comments for instant feedback, upload files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive, add checklists, labels, due dates, and more. Notifications make sure you always know when important stuff happens. For those who want more out of their Trello boards, there are Power-Ups like calendar, card aging, and voting, that you can turn on. It’s a way to offer more without cluttering things for everyone. Check out Trello

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#12: Disqus Disqus is one of the most powerful commenting systems on the web and as a result, most people have grown accustomed to using it. The nice part is that Disqus allows you to integrate a platform people are familiar with that entices them to leave comments. Further to this, Disqus offers monetization options to publishers allowing some extra revenue to be earned through display advertising and content promotion using their tool so it’s a win-win situation for everyone (you can, of course, opt not to use the monetization aspect if you choose). Check out Disqus

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#13: SumoMe AppSumo is a company that provides a suite of tools on a platform called SumoMe. What’s nice about the products are that they are very reasonably priced and most of them can be used for free if you don’t mind some slight limitations (branding, etc). SumoMe offers tools such as popups for email subscribers, scroll bars, heat maps for your site, content analyzer to tell you how much of your content is being read, image sharing apps and a whole lot more. Installation is simple, simply add a bit of javascript to your website, visit it for the first time and you’ll find a blue badge on your site. Click it to log in and choose your apps. Everything is configured directly from there. Check out SumoMe

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#14: Strikingly Strikingly offers a powerful drag & drop landing page builder lets you create responsive pages without any help from a technical team. Click anything to edit, and publish instantly. Absolutely no code or design experience needed. You can even sell products on your site with full e-commerce functionality! Strikingly never charges a transaction fee. Check out Strikingly

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#15: Buzzsumo Buzzsumo is an incredibly useful tool that lets you quickly find out who the major influencers are for any topic you desire. Simply go to Buzzsumo and do a search and a full list of the top influencers will be identified. Further to this, you can set it to alert you if specific content is mentioned or starts to show up on the web or through social media channels. This is incredibly useful if you are monitoring social media for brand mentions, for instance. You can even track your competitor’s content performance and do detailed comparisons. Check out Buzzsumo

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#16: OptinMonster OptinMonster's powerful drag & drop builder allows you to create visually stunning optin forms that are optimized for the highest conversion rates. You can create various types of optin forms such as lightbox popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and more. It also has exit-intent technology that detects user behavior and prompts them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave. Check out OptinMonster

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#17: Ecwid Ecwid (pronounced as “eck-wid”, short for “e-commerce widgets”), is a shopping cart that seamlessly integrates with your existing website. It can also be added to your page on social media networks, such as Facebook. Although it’s packed with high-value features, Ecwid is absolutely free. You’ll pay no setup charges and no transaction fees, making it a no-cost, high-return solution for today’s e-commerce businesses.

Check out Ecwid

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#18: Big Stock Photo Stock photos and images are essential for content creation and will save you a ton of time trying to find just the right picture or illustration to go with your post. High quality images make your posts look professional and draw more interest, driving up engagement and the desire to share your content. BigStock is a very reasonably priced stock imagery platform that we use on CMS Critic regularly and is a great deal for under $100 / month. You can get a free trial for 14 days that lets you download 5 images per day just by signing up. I highly recommend you check it out and see if it suits your needs. Check out Bigstock

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#19: Pingdom Tools Website optimization and speed testing is important. While there are quite a few tools out there that accomplish this task and give back solid feedback, I personally trust Pingdom’s tools when it comes to testing any of mine. Pingdom will run a full page test and give you a detailed breakdown of things to improve as well as grade your site, giving you a firm number that you can try to beat when you’ve made your improvements following their instructions. You can also test from various locations (geographies) to see how well your site performs from somewhere outside your home country. The best part? It’s 100% free. Check out Pingdom Tools

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

#20: Wufoo Wufoo provides an online form builder that integrates with almost everything. There is a huge list of CMS and external services that can make use of Wufoo forms and the form builder is extremely easy to use. There are over 300 templates, in depth reporting capabilities, custom rules and you can even accept payments through their forms. Not all CMS form builders are as extensive so when your CMS can’t provide the types of forms you need, turn to Wufoo and you won’t be disappointed. Check out Wufoo

20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS

Conclusion I hope you’ve found some new tools for your business from the selection above. If you have any others that you’d personally recommend, I’d love to hear about them.

Please do share this eBook with anybody who might find it beneficial.

Thanks for being part of CMS Critic.

- Mike Johnston, Founder and Editor in Chief.

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20 Free or Inexpensive Tools to Complement your CMS