Blogging and Business Resources

Mediavine Full Service Ad Management, this is a great way to earn money with your blog. I love working with Mediavine, they are a fantastic company!

Quickbooks offers bookkeeping tools for small businesses. 30% discount on QuickBooks Online for 6 months through our link. Quickbooks Self Employed online is a LIFESAVER! I love it (it connects to TurboTax too so it makes it easy to do your taxes).

Backing up your website is one thing (we use Updraft for that), but you still need to backup your computer and external harddrives so you don't lose your hard work. Backblaze is more affordable than using Google Drive, plus you can get a free month of service from Backblaze through our link (they also have a 15 day free trial).

Lumanu is an invoicing and payment platform built just for creators and brands that makes payments fast and easy (get paid instantly instead of waiting for the brand to pay). Get $50 on your first invoice by using my code THEFITCOOKIE. Justclick through the link below, download the Lumanu app, and enter my code. 

The Professional Photographers of America (PPA) offers membership perks for photographers, such as education, equipment protection, photography magazine subscription, and legal templates for contracts and copyright claims. I purchased a membership mostly for the equipment coverage since my small business insurance policy didn't cover my photography equipment and this was affordable. Their equipment coverage is up to $15K, but you can add more coverage for an additional fee.

Brand new members of PPA can get $35 off their membership through our link!

We recently switched from Mailchimp to SendFox for our email provider, and it's been great so far! It's pretty basic, very few bells and whistles, but it works great for us and instead of a monthly fee, we paid once on AppSumo! So if you're budget-conscious, this is a great option.

If you're looking for a way to set up a porfolio of your work or deliver client assets, Pixieset offers both free and paid options for both. I set up my porfolio on Pixieset and so far I'm using the free version and it's still great.

Food Blogger Pro is a comprehesive business resource for food bloggers who are running their website as a business or are interested in starting their food blog as a business. They offer education courses, forums, weekly chats and Q&As, and more.

I got a subscription to Artlist in February and it covers unlimited licensing for every song you want to download for 1 year. Pretty awesome! I've already downloaded a lot of great music for my blog and social videos and I can use them forever even if I don't renew my subscription.

UPDATE: Artlist changed their subscription policy and now the music you download under their new terms (as of November 2022) are not under a forever license. Meaning under the new terms you can only use the music you download during an active subscription but you can't continue to use that music once your subscription expires. I had originally signed up under their forever licensing terms and didn't renew under their new terms.

We have our small business insurance through BiBerk, which is a branch of Berkshire Hathaway. There are a few other small business companies out there that we priced (such as Thimble and Next), but BiBerk was the most affordable. They don't have an equipment add-on like Thimble does, but we went with the PPA for their equipment coverage.

Capital One Business Deals is a free and easy to use online marketplace that helps small businesses save on everyday products they need to keep their brand thriving. Save on things like gas, shipping, phones, office equipment, travel and more!

Creative Market is an awesome place to buy things like fonts, social templates, Lightroom presets, graphics, and more. They offer 6 free design assets every Monday.

AppSumo is a store for entrepreneurs, they run regular sales on blogging and business resources at deep discounts. Get $10 off your first purchase on AppSumo with our referral link!

Affluent.io is an affiliate dashboard where you can connect your various affiliate programs (like Share-A-Sale, Pepperjam, CJ, etc.) and it will track your performance in one simple dashboard. I've been using this for a while and its nice to see everything from all my affiliate networks together in one dashboard. I use the free version, but there are paid versions as well.

 Tasty Links automatically link keywords on your WordPress Blog to make it easier to add internal links or affiliate links to your posts.

We recently switched from Shopify to Etsy to sell our digital and hand printed products to reduce costs associated with a Shopify store. We didn't sell enough to justify the Shopify fees, so we switched to Etsy where the fees are minimal!

The Premier YouTube Channel Management and Optimization Toolkit.

The Grow plugin from Mediavine (formerly called Social Pug by DevPups) is a GDPR compliant social share plugin for websites. Grow also has capabilities for image pin descriptions so you don't have to have a separate plugin for that if you don't want

ShortPixel is an image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress. This helps to reduce image size on blog posts to improve pagespeed.  

We've tried a few desktop video editing programs, and have decided to go with Final Cut Pro (I couldn't get the hang of Adobe Premiere Pro). So far, this one has been my favorite and I can resize videos for social media pretty easily, which was the biggest selling point for me!

For iphone/smartphone video editing, I still like using Adobe Premiere Rush even though I'm not a fan of their desktop app. It works great except that I have found that there are glitches sometimes with my videos after exporting from Rush, but it still has the best functionality so far from video apps so I still use it.

I had problems with it moving videos from Rush to Premiere Pro, but since I no longer use Premiere Pro and just use Final Cut Pro now, it's not something I have to worry about.

Easy and free graphic design, with social media templates. I've been using Canva for several years now and really like that they are always improving things and adding more features. They do have a free account option, but I use the Pro account for access to stock images and premium elements.

Lately we've been using a Canva pro account for adding some fun elements to our social videos and we've been loving the animated elements and video options on Canva pro!

WPOPT offers web hosting and website management packages

I love the Adobe software! I regularly use Lightroom, Photoshop, InDesign, and I plan on learning Premier Pro. I highly recommend the photo editing apps!

SocialBee offers social media management scheduling and tools. I love using this tool because it has the ability to loop evergreen content and set content types.

BeFunky is a free online photo editing and collage maker. Once PicMonkey stopped making a free plan available, I started using BeFunky for quick collages

Planoly is a visual planner & scheduler for Instagram. I'm currently using Planoly and love it! I got a good deal on an annual plan on Black Friday.

Update: we are no longer using Planoly but just posting everything by hand to Instagram now or using our SocialBee or Tailwind account to schedule to Instagram. Planoly is still a great option, but if you have a business account on Facebook, they do offer post scheduling right in Facebook Business Manager for FB and IG both. I've found that our reach is better posting by hand in most cases.

Qwoted helps to connect writers with websites and journals/magazines, and expert sources with journalists.

Tasty Pins allows you to optimize your blog’s images for Pinterest, SEO, and screen readers. We no longer use TastyPins since Grow includes image descriptions for Pinterest that are separate from the image alt texts (which should be used for accessibility and readers).

Unsplash has free images with free licensing that you can use for blog posts, social graphics, etc. These days we try to use paid assets from places like DepositPhoto so we have full licensing for images we're using.