On today's episode of the pot, I am sharing my marketing stack. This is the software tools I use in doing my marketing. If you don't know, and a lot of people don't know, I actually share all of this on my site, edwardsterm.com/software. I only share tools that I use or that I have used that I genuinely recommend. Some of them have affiliate programs. When they do, I share an affiliate code. When they don't, I still share the tools because I just wanna share the stuff that I get value from. And I'm constantly updating this page. And on today's episode of the podcast, I'm gonna share the tools that I use and give explanations for each of them. I have this page separated into sales, search engine optimization, press, graphic design, growth marketing podcast, video content, but I'm gonna start with sales. Again, if you wanna see this page, if you wanna click in any of these tools, it's edwardsterm.com/software and the link will be in the description for the show. The first tool that I share, it's my favorite networking tool. It's called Lunch Club. I use this during lockdowns when I was living in Kiev, Ukraine, to meet with tons of super high level business people around the world, especially in the United States. I'm from New York, I spent lockdowns living in Kiev, and there was this tool, Lunch Club, that used to be for in-person meetings, and then it went fully remote. And I love this tool. I adored this tool. I was using it so much, and I was meeting with such impressive sea level people, funded founders, so many investors. Oh my gosh, I was doing maybe five calls a week, sometimes more, sometimes several calls a day, just networking with people, trying to meet people. I just was so starved for having great conversations because it was lockdowns. And I did so many video chats with such great people through this tool, several people who I still keep in touch to this day. I met the head of global marketing at Ralph Lauren, we became friends. I met him through Lunch Club. I met so many people. Lunch Club is awesome, and that is my first tool on this list. I'm starting from the bottom, and I'm going up. I'm just trying to give as much value as I can on this show, on my podcast is my daily digital marketing podcast. I do this thing seven days a week, and this is episode 383. Of the podcast, 383 days in a row, I have done this show. The next tool, how I track cold email opens and forwards. I use a tool called Yesware, it puts a pixel into my emails. If you have a pixel blocker, this won't work, but a lot of people don't have that. So I can see who is opening my emails, when they are opening them, if they are opening them more than once. If they forward my emails, I can see that. Sometimes I'll send a really good email, and I'll see it being sent all around. I see where it's opened from too. It's crazy, crazy tool. Yesware is what I use for that. I remember when I discovered Yesware, it changed my life. I could actually see if my emails were being opened. I could see if people were getting my messages, crazy. Next tool, how I get anybody's email and phone numbers. Honestly, I could make in-depth shows on each one of these tools, but I'm just gonna try to share every single tool on this episode. So how I get anybody's email and phone numbers, I've shared this tool a time before, and I'm sharing it again, it's called lusia.com. By the way, I don't remember which of these tools have affiliate programs, where I'm using the affiliate program and where I'm not. But if you wanna support the podcast, click on the tools through edwardsterm.com/software, so I will get credited, thank you very much. This tool, lusia.com, it's a Chrome extension for LinkedIn. You go to somebody's profile on LinkedIn, you ask it for the email and phone number of that person, and then it will check its database to see if it has it. And it has a very impressive amount of people on LinkedIn. It has the email and phone numbers, multiple emails, multiple phone numbers of many people on LinkedIn. I am so surprised with this database. You could try it for a month to see if you like it. I actually use it by a month, by a month basis. I don't do that much outreach anymore, but when I do, I reactivate it for a month. I get all the people's contacts that I need, and then I stop the subscription. That's what I do with lusia.com. But it's crazy, it just has so many people. Another trick that I have is when I get people's phone numbers, I try to send people really hyper personalized messages, because I think that is least likely to set off people's spam flags. I don't think people hate you as much if you send a cold message that is hyper personalized. So I only send offers to people where I think they would be interested or partnership, questions where I think it would be relevant to them, and I show that I have done my research on that person. I get personally so many offers a day, from just people reaching out to me through Instagram and through TikTok. I have an audience now of 170,000 or 160,000 people across all my channels, closer to 170,000 people. So I get a lot of messages on Instagram and TikTok. So many of them are not personalized, not well researched at all, and they piss me off. But if I get a message that is actually super well researched, where the person actually looked into me and who I am, I'm polite, I don't hate the person, I might respond, but at the very least I don't hate the person, and that's important because if you are sending cold messages to people you don't wanna be reported for spam. So trick, get somebody's phone number, open the phone number in WhatsApp, most people just use WhatsApp for personal messages, and then send them a video message and be hyper, hyper personalized. You'll stand out and if you're hyper personalized, you won't be as annoying. Especially if you did your research and you can tell this is the type of thing where the person might go for it. All right, so now we're on to search engine optimization. How I review my SEO copy. I use Grammarly, a lot of people know Grammarly. Grammarly is a great tool for reviewing grammar and spelling and giving suggestions, especially if you're not a native English speaker. Something that I'm doing more now actually is, I'm not using Grammarly as much, what I'm doing is I am just writing out whatever I have to write, most of the time it's newsletters. If it's long, I'll turn it into a PDF, and then I will upload that PDF to ChachiBT and I will say tell me all the spelling and punctuation errors. I let the grammar errors go because I want my newsletters or whatever I'm writing to feel more authentic. And if there's a few pieces of poor grammar I think it actually makes it easier to read in a lot of situations and it makes it sound less like AI. I write everything myself. Perfect grammar sounds more like AI because AI always uses perfect grammar. So I'll upload these things to ChachiBT. I'll say just give me the spelling errors and the punctuation errors. Normally there aren't that much and I can correct them myself. But I also use Grammarly. The Grammarly Chrome extension is really useful. I'll say that the Grammarly Chrome extension is so useful for emails, for posts on social media, so many places I find immense value in the Grammarly Chrome extension. And then if it's something longer, if I'm writing something longer then typically I will use ChachiBT to review my copy. Next one, how to get SEO data directly from Google. This is Google Search Console, Google Search Console. If you don't know Google's proprietary tool for accessing their search index, it lets you submit your website and all of your URLs and your site maps to Google itself. If you've updated a page, you can tell Google immediately, hey, check out this page, I just updated it. And you get so much click data, page data, keyword data, how people are coming to your site for what keywords, what pages they're landing on, how many clicks those pages are getting, how many impressions your site is getting for certain keywords, so much great data. That's Google Search Console. And Google Search Console takes up several ones on my SEO list of my software stack on this page. It's how to submit your site to Google's index, how to get SEO data directly from Google. That's it. How to boost domain authority on a new site. I'm recommending back Leo here. Back Leo has a list of directories to submit your new site to. And these directories that takes a few hours of work, these directories can get your site up to 20. If you have a new site, 20 out of 100 domain authority. I've recommended back Leo a ton, a lot of people like it. I discovered it from product ton. I'm probably their biggest affiliate now. I talk to the founder, often he knows his stuff, and directories are very relevant for SEO. Another trick that you can do, find your niche and find all the directories for that niche and submit your brand to the directories in your niche. Back Leo is a list of general directories, but for new sites, it's very valuable for getting your domain authority up. And if you pay extra, then they will submit your site for you. That is how to boost domain authority on a new site and go from zero to 20 out of 100 domain authority. Next one, my SEO suite of choice. A lot of people love ARFs. I really like Moz. There are two reasons that I find Moz so valuable. Moz is on page greater, gives great suggestions. To tell you if your page or post is properly optimized for a keyword. It gives you a zero out of 100 score to tell you how well optimized you are and it gives you the exact things to change. It's not big, it's very direct. And if you don't know how to do on page optimization, it teaches you the things that matter the most. Moz's on page greater is great. I love the tool for that. I don't need it anymore because I know how to do on page SEO now. But when I was learning, I found it so valuable for that. But the thing that's super valuable is it shows the optimization scores of the SERPs for different keywords. SERP is an acronym for search engine results page. So let's say, what's a keyword? Lavalier microphone kit, that is a keyword. So someone searches Lavalier microphone kit and Moz will show you the search engine results page for Lavalier microphone kit. And then it will give you the scores for each page to show you how well optimized each page is for Lavalier microphone kit and it will give you the domain authority and the page authority of these ranking pages. And it makes it really easy to see gaps for keywords, to see opportunities where you can beat the other pages on a search engine results page. Or you can see keywords that are easier to rank for. I'm literally making a program about this. It's so valuable. My program is called Compact Keywords. And you don't need this tool to do that. You can do it with ARF. So you can do it with lots of other tools. But it just makes it really easy to see which keywords are actually going to be hard to rank for and which ones will be easier. I don't use Moz's difficulty score. I really just look at the SERPs to tell if a keyword will be easy to rank for or if it will be difficult. And I look for ones where there aren't pages that have high optimization scores for that keyword and where the domain authority isn't too crazy. All right, now we're moving on to press. My press release tool of choice, it's PRLog. I use PRLog.org to send out press releases. Press releases are really only valuable in several scenarios. One, if you're in a hyper-hot trending niche, journalists will actually look for press releases in that niche to get information. Otherwise, they don't really care about press releases that much. Or if you're just a big, famous person, Taylor Swift sends out a press release, people are gonna take notice. If you're a big organization, Microsoft sends out a press release, people are gonna take notice. If you're a startup and you're not in a hot trending niche and you send out a press release, people aren't gonna notice. However, I pay for the most expensive tier. Last time I did this was 2022, I paid $615, got my press release syndicated in a lot of places. I got some do-follow backlinks, the most valuable type of SEO backlink from that. Lots of no-follow backlinks and lots of brand mentions, but that still boosts the performance of the keywords that I am trying to target with my SEO efforts. So I find press releases valuable for that. If you're not in a trending niche, I find it valuable for SEO. If you're not in a trending niche. And sometimes if you have your brand name in the heading of the press release, you will get a featured snippet for a day for your brand name on Google. Sometimes, not always, but I have used this before to email people and I would say, "Hey, I'm Edward from So and So, I'll say my company name and I'll just act like my company is already a big deal even though it's a startup." I would say something like, "Love what you're doing would be cool to chat." Something like, I don't know, something like that. Love your opinion on this would be cool to chat. But let me tell you who I have used this trick with. Because what people do is they go, "I've never heard of that brand, but this person is so confident. Let me just Google it to see if it's hot shit or something." And people will Google it and then they will see the brand name trending because of the press release that I just put out. So I have used this to start conversations with Mark Pincus, Novall Ravakot, Jason Calicanis, Tek and Selini Fred Wilson. It's a crazy trick when it works. Again, you don't always get the feature snippet, but when you do, it's an easy way to email people, to cold email people and you can get the emails using Lucio, which I just shared and give yourself a little bit of a boost in status because they will Google the brand name if you were confident enough and then see you trending. And I love that trick. My top tool for getting press. So I just shared press releases, but now my top tool for actually getting press, it's feature.com. Feature.com connects journalists looking for experts for their stories with those experts. And if you write a compelling enough excerpt, you can be included in these journalists articles. And I have a very high success rate on feature.com over 70%. When I respond to a journalist on feature.com, seven out of 10 times, I will be included in their article and a bunch of those times I get backlinks. So I find it very valuable for doing SEO or for getting press mentions and then you can leverage those logos, have appeared in these publications. Now we're moving to graphic design. My favorite image compression tool, I do a lot of stuff. I think if you're a really sophisticated, savvy digital marketer, you know a lot of great tools. So my favorite image compression tool, it's tiny PNG. It compresses all types of images and it gives, I think, the best compression compresses them the most while still retaining the most quality. And I use this all the time. I even have the plugin for WordPress. So whenever I upload an image onto my WordPress site, the image is just automatically compressed and then they have a website. I think it's tinypng.com. Yeah, that's it. And it's a great tool. Does it with JPEGs, WebP, it's all types of images, great tool. How I design my site, I use Figma. Figma is my favorite UI tool. I love Figma. Huge fan of Figma, I used to use Sketch and I switched to Figma, Figma is a great tool. A lot of people know Figma. They were almost acquired by Adobe and that deal fell through, but Figma is great. How I upscale images. Oh my gosh, let me tell you. So I recommend a tool there. It's an AI tool that upscales images. It's on replicate.com and it's called real dash E-S-GAN, G-A-N. And it has optional face correction with adjustable upscale. Okay, let me just tell you why I find this tool so freaking valuable. When I make the thumbnails for my videos or if I have a low res image that I wanna use in one of my videos, well, first of all, the thumbnails have different resolution because they're layered images. I get images from all over the internet and put them onto one thing for a thumbnail. And the resolution for each image in the thumbnail is different. Or again, I get a low res image and it fits my video perfectly or my subject matter, whatever I'm making perfectly, but it's low res. And you use this tool and it upscales it. And the thumbnails, it upscales so well and then everything in the thumbnail is high resolution and it all matches. It blends things together. It is great. I find this tool so valuable, especially for making YouTube thumbnails, but also just when I get a low res image, maybe it's an older image, whatever it is, and I can only get the low res version and then suddenly I can make it high res. And if there's a face in it, I can make the face really detailed and crispy. I find this tool so valuable. I really like this tool. And it does a very good job of this. Actually, I'm gonna include another one in this page. It's not included right now. Remove.bg is the best tool for removing the background from images. And it lets you adjust, 'cause sometimes it gets things wrong like any tool, but then it lets you adjust it. And so you can erase things out using a smart eraser and it's just really accurate. It is so good for removing the background from images. So if you need a PNG for something, it gives you the PNG. Another trick, I will use AI to generate objects. I will remove the background and then I have those objects to use in my media. Oh my gosh, remove.bg, it is so good at this. And okay, it charges if you wanna download the high resolution PNG, but if you just take that and then upload it to the upscale tool that I just shared, you don't even have to pay. Remove.bg, it is a freaking good tool. In some instances, like if it's a face and I really need that face. So for example, I have testimonials on my product that I'm making compact keywords and I use faces and I took the faces out of images and then I put a consistent background for each face so there's consistent branding. But when I removed the background from those faces, I downloaded them in high res and I paid for remove.bg in that one instance. But yeah, most of the time you can just use it for free and then upscale whatever PNG you download after. It's really a good tool, remove.bg. All right, we're moving on to the last three subjects. First one is growth marketing. What my companies use for putting in affiliate programs. I have affiliate programs in some of my software companies. I find them to be very valuable. I use tolt.io for that. So I recommend tolt.io for setting up an affiliate program for a software company. How I automate top of mind awareness. Actually, I think I share several tools in this. This is an article that I wrote a while ago, but I'm using Zapier, Excel and Stripe to send out notifications on social media. When I get new customers, this is something that I used to do, I might do it again. But it's great for like the build in public movement. It's great for when you want to show traction for whatever you're doing. And people love seeing you make sales. Believe it or not, a lot of people love seeing you make sales because it motivates them. That's one of the reasons why the build in public movement is so popular. And people like seeing that stuff and then I use spreadsheets to calculate total users, total revenue, revenue this month, MRR, churn, so many different things. And that will be shared in the posts that automatically go out. So that's an article that I wrote, how I automate top of mind awareness. And I share it in this marketing stack page. Next one is product ton. Product ton is my favorite tool. I should share beta lists on this too. Beta lists and product ton are great platforms for sharing technology products. Product ton is the top one. Beta list is great as well. Product ton, you can launch on every three months, assuming that you have something new, even like a little update, a little iteration. I think beta lists is the same. And these are great tools for getting awareness. And I wrote a whole article on product ton as well as sharing my product ton statistics. And that's what I share on this page. Oh my gosh, this is a mammoth episode. But we are almost done here podcast. How I automate the editing of my daily podcast, I use a tool called D script. I adore this tool D script. It automatically removes when I when I speak, when I make a video, when I make a podcast, it automatically removes all the gaps between words. So if I take a few minutes to think about something that gets shortened to whatever I wanted to be shortened to, maybe it's zero seconds, maybe it's a fourth of a second. I can specify any gap between words that is over this amount of time, shorten it to this amount of time. It automatically removes retakes. If I say the same thing over and over again, D script removes the first version of that and leaves you with the last one because usually the last one is the best one. It does the green screen effect. It isolates your voice if there's background noise so it makes your voice sound crispy and nice. It has eye tracking so you could be reading something but it will look like you are looking at the camera. Does so many other things, writes you show notes for descriptions, gives you timestamps. It gives you captions because it gives you a transcript. Whenever you put in video of you speaking, it automatically transcribes that and then you edit in the transcript and not the timeline, D script is just such a hack for editing and making great content. It was an inflection point for when I started to really grow fast was when I started to use D script for my content. It makes making great videos and podcasts very easy. The only limiting factor becomes a subject matter and your delivery and your hooks. The editing you barely have to think about. I love D script. How to go on podcasts as a guest? I once went on 30 podcasts in three months and I had this thought, you know, like, this was in 2022 and I had this thought, it's 2022. I feel like podcasts are so huge that I shouldn't have to send cold emails or cold DMs or cold texts to get on podcasts. There should be tools for this and so I Google like podcast matching platforms and I found these two tools, matchmaker and pod match. I used matchmaker for I think 10% of my podcast appearances, pod match for 80%. I'm probably one of pod matches biggest affiliates and I was their biggest power user at the time. I went on so many podcasts through pod match and then the other 10% came from word of mouth because podcast hosts know lots of other podcast hosts. They also know a lot of people. If you like networking, going on podcasts is great for that because the hosts know a lot of people and they will introduce you to people after. And for getting backlinks. I wanted to do this in the first place because I wanted to get backlinks. I wanted to get SEO backlinks and I figured that going on podcasts would be an easy way to do that and it was right. I got so many backlinks from going on podcasts. So on the software page, I say how to get on podcasts as a guest and this actually links to this long article that I wrote on all the strategies that I use to go on 30 podcasts in three months. Finally, we are at video content. This is the last section in my software stack page. I think I'm gonna call this episode of the podcast my marketing stack, maybe my marketing software stack because that's what I'm sharing. I'm sharing all the tools that I use for marketing on this episode. All right, here are the last ones. How I embed my Instagram Reels Feed and TikTok Feed on my websites. I actually just put this in today but I use a tool called Sociable Kit and it embeds my Instagram feed for all of my Reels on my website. If you're making videos and you have a website where you just share all of your stuff, you have links to all of your stuff, which is what I have, then you can use this tool to embed your social feeds on your site. Actually, I think all of your social feeds it does it but I use this specifically for Instagram Reels and TikTok. So I have my feed for Instagram Reels and my feed for TikTok embedded on my website through this tool. Then I share how I automate the editing of my videos. Again, that is Descript which I just shared. I use Descript for the podcast. I use Descript for my daily short form vertical videos. And finally, I have my short form vertical videos syndicated everywhere. When I make a video and it comes out on TikTok, it simultaneously comes out on Snapchat and grows my Snapchat following. Also comes out on LinkedIn simultaneously. On YouTube short simultaneously. I use a tool called reusevideo.com for that. The actual name for the tool is repurpose.io but I bought reusevideo.com and I 301 redirect reusevideo.com to my affiliate link for repurpose.io. I am maybe their biggest power user if not one of them. And I think they're biggest affiliate. I love this tool so much. I've talked to the CEO often, to the founder and CEO often over text, super responsive team. They're constantly improving the product and they actually care about the product. And I care about the tool. I really like this tool. Repurpose.io but please use reusevideo.com and that just makes me grow on every platform by posting only on one platform. And actually, you know what? I'm gonna put in my exact, I wrote my exact social media posting strategy, how I use a bunch of these tools together. When I make my videos, I'm going to put this on this page too. I'm gonna add that to this page because I literally give a step-by-step of how I make and post my videos every single day. So anybody can steal this and copy me. And it's just an article on my site. You don't need to log in or anything. You don't need to give an email address to get it. You don't need to pay. It's just an article on my site. I just give this away and I just share my exact steps for putting up my videos every day. I'm gonna add that to this software stack page. That is my entire marketing software stack. What an episode. I think I gave some value away on this show. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this. I feel great having done this. I'm super happy I made this episode. I thought I'd be able to make it a lot faster but I have a lot of tools that I love and use. Thank you so much for watching. And you know what? It was raining so hard before I started this episode and now the sun is out a little bit. It's actually drizzling a little bit. The sun is out. It's a great day. I don't care that it's raining. I don't care that the skies are gray. I'm feeling good. Hope you're feeling good too. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
