My Top Recommendation

For anybody doing marketing with Wordpress, Thrive Themes is absolutely my top recommendation on a variety of fronts.

• Thrive Architect allows you to build beautiful pages without knowing any code. I love this tool. In fact, this very page was made with it.
• Thrive Leads is my top recommended opt-in form builder for Wordpress.
• Thrive Comments is a replacement for the built-in comment system, but with real capability.
• Thrive Apprentice is a full-featured course management system.
• Thrive Ovation enables you to easily collect and manage testimonials and display on them on your site.
• Thrive Ultimatum is a powerful countdown timer for using urgency in your marketing.

This doesn't mention the powerful split-testing tools, their quiz builder, and all their various themes. I personally use and recommend their Thrive Membership as it gives you full access to every single tool they make. And given what most of these tools would cost you separately from other providers, I continue to believe that Thrive Themes is one of the smartest, no-brainer investments any blog marketer can possibly make.

MY TOP HOSTING RECOMMENDATION

Lots of "gurus" out there recommend Bluehost. And they're OK. But trust me when I say Siteground is better. I personally had a site hacked on Bluehost and their support was lackluster (read the full story).

Siteground is a better run operation and their support is stellar.  Their hosting speed is great - and your Wordpress site even comes with a plug-in specific to Siteground that gives many of the same optimization features of paid Wordpress optimization plug-ins.

In the end, I need to know that when I recommend hosting, I can stand behind it fully. For me... that's Siteground.

Email Marketing

Aweber is the service I recommend to my students who are first starting out. I personally used Aweber for YEARS. They are a solid company with a stellar reputation. Everything integrates with it. If you don't need a full marketing automation platform for your email marketing, then Aweber is where I recommend you go.

Email Marketing

Drip is an email marketing automation platform which doesn't make you go cross-eyed. The power and flexibility that Drip has is simply amazing. It integrates with everything, sports a beautiful graphical automation builder (called workflows), and forms the foundation of the email machine here at the Blog Marketing Academy.

Web Hosting

WPEngine is my primary web host and while they're not the cheapest game in town I find their feature set to be totally worth it for something as fundamental to my business as hosting. Simply put, WPEngine makes my life much easier and they've removed a lot of the technical hassles of dealing with Wordpress installs, performance and more.

Ecommerce & Product Delivery

The entire membership portion of Blog Marketing Academy is built on top of the MemberMouse platform. This is simply the most robust membership plug-in for Wordpress I've seen and used.

Webinars

I've been with EasyWebinar for a few years (after ditching GotoWebinar). And it has matured into quite the powerful platform. It does both live and evergreen webinars, integrates with everything, and has all the essential features needed for effective marketing.

Customer Support

After trying several different support desk solutions, Helpscout is where I landed. What I like about it is that it has all the powerful features of a help desk, but it feels as simple as using regular email.