My Tech Stack
Every Marketing Technology enthusiast has a list of their favourite tools so I decided to curate my own list for everyone to see. Whether you’re looking to add new tools to your stack or wondering about alternatives for what you currently use, I’m hoping this list will make you discover new companies that are doing great work.
I personally have enjoyed or am currently enjoying all of the tools mentioned in this page. Some of the “Learn More” links can be affiliate ones but know that this potential kickback does not cloud my judgment in terms of recommendations. I also organised the tools by category as I realised I have been using so many different services over the years so that you can easily navigate to the sections you are the most interested in.
If you have any questions on how to use a specific mention here, don’t hesitate to drop me an email and I will try to help you with that :).
Categories
Work/General Tools
Python
Python is the biggest tool of them all in my toolset. Learning Python has allowed me to grow into a much more advanced technologist and has what seems like limitless opportunities. I can’t stress enough how Python has changed my way of tackling problems and has offered me way to solve them like never before.
Google Sheets
You probably had an idea about this one, but Google Sheets is one of my two most-loved tools that I use on an absolute daily basis. It’s just so much more intuitive to use than Excel and is powerful enough for my needs. There is absolutely nothing that I dislike about Google Sheets.
n8n
n8n is a recent addition to my workflow but is already looking extremely promising. It is basically a free, self-hosted and open-source alternative to the more popular tool Zapier. Nonetheless, n8n is extremely powerful and can truly revolutionise and automate many of your processes. Highly recommend you give it a look.
Email Marketing
Mautic
Mautic is an open-source and self-hosted Marketing Automation solution. I use it to send thousands of emails every week and store the information of tens of thousands of contacts for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Highly recommended provided you have an IT department to set it up.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a very famous beginner friendly Email Marketing solution. I use it for projects that can fit within the free plan of the product such as the newsletter of this website. When I don’t need any fancy workflow or have a list with less than 2000 contacts, it’s very likely that I will use Mailchimp instead of Mautic.
Elastic Email
Elastic Email is my Email API of choice. I use their API with our Mautic instance to benefit from their detailed analytics and good deliverability as well as being a reasonably priced compared to other solutions in the Email API marketplace. Definitely recommended if you’re looking for a reliable Email API.
Analytics
Google Analytics
Nothing surprising here. I’ve been using Google Analytics on my website properties since 2011 and I never found myself unable to find what I was looking for. It has a steep learning curve but the community of users is absolutely massive and every problem has an easy solution somewhere online.
Redash
Redash is an open-source and self-hosted dashboard platform. It can integrate with JIRA, Google Sheets, Analytics and any other database software to help visualise the data that goes through it. I use it to create professional looking dashboards for clients. It has a steep learning curve but I found it worth the time investment.
Google Search Console
When the share of all of the organic traffic from Google you’re getting surpasses 95%, knowing which pages rank for which queries within this search engine is extremely important. Google Search Console is easy to set up, easy to read and yeap, very paramount to track your SEO progress.
Yandex Metrica
Yandex Metrica is a free alternative to Google Analytics. Whether you are looking to not use any Google products or for a secondary source of data, Yandex Metrica is a very solid solution to track your websites’ visitors and best performing pages.
Bing Webmasters Tools
Used as a complementary tool to GSC, Bing Webmasters Tools helps me figure my position in the rankings of Microsoft’s own search engine. While only accounting for less than 3% of my organic traffic, I thought it’d be worth mentioning here as your audience may differ from mine and be keen to use Bing to find you.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a session recording/heatmaps generator for your website. It’s completely free to use and allow you to see how visitors interact with your website pages. I use it a lot to make tweaks to my pages’ designs and see how visitors read my articles.
Web-Design & Hosting
Namecheap
Namecheap has been my hosting company of choice for over 90% of my web-hosted projects. It’s not the fastest, but it’s a really cheap way for me to get projects off the idea farm and into the real world. On top of that, their support has always been extremely helpful and reliable. And it’s really cheap.
WordPress
WordPress has been my absolute go-to solution to create websites since 2011. I know it all too well and am happy to recommend it to anyone trying to launch their first web property. It has more promising alternatives at the moment than a few years ago but I’m still sticking with it.
Elementor
Elementor has revolutionised the way I make websites and allow me to really transfer any vision I have for a website to a working platform. Super sweet web-design tool. As an FYI, this whole website is hosted on Namecheap and built with WordPress and Elementor so you can be the judge of that.
APIs
DataForSEO
DataForSEO is my API of choice for every application I’ve been making recently. It offers endpoints for a multitude of SEO related and Google SERP data points. Also, their pricing model is a pay-as-you-go where you buy credits that do not expire which is perfect for the development of tools for us hobbyists.
CoinGecko
As I’m branching into developing applications that uses Cryptocurrency current and historical data, I found that the API CoinGecko is offering is one of the most comprehensive and accessible on the market. I definitely recommend it if you’re keen on creating applications that rely on providing cryptocurrency data points.
Moz
While very pricy, Moz’s API has a throttled free plan that allows for 2500 free requests per month. I’ve built a few applications around it, namely the DA Bulk Checker and I found that this was an easy API to work with as well as very decent for internal-use tools. If you can spare the money though I would definitely consider looking into Ahrefs’ API.
Blogs & Newsletters
Not everything is about tools and APIs. While I spend a lot of time experimenting by myself, I also dedicate a significant chunk of my resources to reading blogs and newsletters that I believe bring value to my work and have the potential to bring value to yours. Topics varies wildly but I’m sure you will find something interesting in this list.
The Content Odyssey
The Content Odyssey is a Content Marketing related bi-monthly newsletter which I’ve been an avid reader of for a while now. In every issue, Alexandra Cote writes a case study on how specific elements are used to enhance people’s websites. From table of contents to videos in articles, every email I receive gives me ideas to act upon for my own blog and websites.