2021 Tech Round Up

I often get asked about the tools and hacks we use at Box Out Marketing and what I do personally to be super productive.

So, this year I’m sharing our 2021 Tech Round Up. Below are the tools we use, as well as how we use them and why.

I’ve tried to organize them into categories. But many of these tools would span many categories. So, feel free to ignore the categories.

Hopefully you’ll find some things that help you be more productive and save money.

Enjoy!

(P.S. Some of the links below are affiliate links. Thanks for supporting us. )

Marketing AUtomation

Keap

Here we'll start with the central tool of our entire business. Keap is our CRM, our sales & marketing automation tool, our e-commerce tool, our affiliate management tool, our workflow automation tool, and more. It's the to growing a successful business without going insane

Try It

PlusThis

PlusThis is one of our favorite add-ons for Keap. It's a suite of tools that extends the functionality of Keap in many ways. We use it for countdown timers, add to calendar links, feeding custom audiences into FB for advertising, and the email subscription manager.

Try It

Fix Your Funnel

FixYourFunnel is hands-down our favorite tool for text message marketing. The automated conversations and mobile app for live conversations are amazing. Plus, it integrated deeply with Keap and a bunch of other tools. And, you get a ton of extras with their Funnel Bots.

$1 Trial Here

EasyWebinar

We stopped using Zoom when we realized we could do BOTH our evergreen (automated) webinars AND live webinars with just one tool. EasyWebinar has a deep integration with Keap and can do just about anything you need.

Try It

VideoAsk

VideoAsk is awesome if you want to use video to create deep and meaningful connection with your audience. We've used it during our onboarding process to connect with clients and to collect testimonials, and there are still so many possiblities.

Try It Free

AppointmentCore

Although Keap now has scheduling links built into Lite, Pro, and Max, we love AppointmentCore for the additional flexibility and power that it offers us to be able to let our prospects and clients book meetings with us.

Try It

Zapier

Truthfully, we use Zapier extremely rarely. Why? Because we attempt to use tools that either have the functionality we want or they integrate natively with Keap. This reduced the chances taht things break and keeps costs down. In the event that we need a connector, Zapier is the go to.

Try It

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Website & Hosting

WordPress

WordPress is free, it's easy, and it's super powerful. Although it may require a bit more technical skill than some simple website builders, it's definitely the best for us. The plugins make the possibilities endless.

Try It

Elementor

Elementor is by far our favorite page builder for WordPress. It's easy, drag-and-drop, and it is VERY customizable. Another big benefit is that Memberium (one of our other favorite tools) has a sweet integration with Elementor.

Try It

Memberium

Memberium is by far. the most powerful membership platform that integrates seamlessly with Keap. We offer courses, digital products, courses and much more with ease by using Memberium.

Try It

Gravity Forms

Typically we use native Keap forms to capture leads and information because all the affiliate tracking and lead source tracking works well and they're easy to style in your WordPress theme. But, when we need e-signatures emailed as PDFs, Gravity Forms is our go to.

Try It

Muse.ai

Video hosting can be expensive if you're creating a lot of content. Muse.ai is super affordable and it has some killer features like: video search, automatic transcriptions, and subtitles. I'm super stoked with this product.

Try It

wpEngine

Website hosting can be a pain. Once you start getting enough traffic or you build complex functionality like membership sites, standard hosts start to really struggle with site speed issues. wpEngine offers scalable hosting optimized for WordPress sites.

Try It

Site5

When we're starting up a new site that doesn't need all the robust features that wpEngine has, we throw them up on Site5. Its very inexpensive hosting with really good support and decent uptime and site speed.

Try It

GamiPress

Keeping your members engaged in your membership site is the key to retention. GamiPress is a great WordPress plugin that also integrates with Memberium and allows us to gamify the membership experience insome fun and exciting ways.

Try It

BuddyBoss

BuddyBoss is another tool we use to increase engagement in our membership sites. BuddyBoss creates a social network feel with forums, personal profiles, private messaging, and more.

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LearnDash

This is a killer app for organizing and offering courses online. Complete with quizzes/tests, completion certificates, and more, LearnDash has it all. Highly Recommended.

Try It

Astra Pro

WordPress themes can be cool because they help you set up a nice looking site really quickly. But, sometimes they come with all their own junk that clutters things up or gets in the way. Astra is a powerful theme that lets you design from the ground up or use Elementor-based template sites. 100% worth the money to go Pro.

Try It

Redirection

Redirection is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to set up redirects on your website easily and quickly. It'll also track your 404s and allow you to easily redirect those.

Try It

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Money

CommissionBuddies

Most people have no idea how much they're spending on merchant processing fees. That 2.9% + $0.35 per transaction adds up. A LOT! Commission Buddies allows you to keep the same rate you have now, but then they cut you a check each month for 1/2 of the commission. These guys rock! (U.S. only)

Try It

PayPal

Although we use CommissionBuddies as our main credit card processor, we offer PayPal as an option for those who want it. We also use PayPal to pay our partners for affiliate commissions.

Try It

QuickBooks

Truthfully, this is the boring stuff. We use Quickbooks for bookkeeping and payroll. Fun. 😉

Try It

Keap

We also use Keap for our e-commerce transactions. Although we don't use the Shopping Cart functionality, we do use the Keap Order Forms extensively.

Try It

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Communications

Loom

Honestly, Loom has changed how we interact with our customers more than anything else. It's a phenomenal tool for quickly and easily creating videos on the fly to communicate things that are more easily shown or talked through.

Try It

Slack

Slack rocks! Not much else to say here. Slack powers all of our internal communications in such a clean and organized way, it's amazing. We also use it to communicate with partners.

Try It

OBS

OBS is open source broadcasting software. It's killer. Set up scenes for various different situations and live edit your livestreams, virtual events, and more.

Try It

Restream

We're just barely dabbling in Restream. It's a super cool platform for live streaming to multiple platforms at once. We're planning on using it for livestreams and podcast recordings.

Try It

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Admin, Project Management, and Hacks

Google Workspaces

We use Google Workspaces for email, calendars, file storage, virtual meetings, and more. See the following slides.

Try IT

Google Meet

We don't use Zoom anymore since Google Meet handles all of our virtual meeting needs and EasyWebinar handles all of our webinar needs. Saves money. Plus, Google Meet is automatically integrated into our Google Calendars.

Try It

Mailplane / Gmail

I don't like commonly used apps like email to be another one of the many tabs in my browser. So, I use Mailplane as an app to load Gmail, plus it's got some other cool features. BTW, turn on your Gmail shortcuts. 🙂

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Google Calendar

Again, I don't like my calendar being stuck in a browser tab. So, create a Chrome "app" by clicking the three dots at the upper right of Chrome, then clicking More Tools, and choose "Create Shortcut". Now you can open your Calendar as its own app.

Try It

Google Drive

Be sure and use the Google Drive desktop app to sync and backup your local files. I don't lug my laptop around with me anymore because my laptop at home and my desktop at the office are synced via Google Drive.

Try Ity It

Asana

We've used various different project management tools over the years. They're all great. Since we manage all of our client work in The Factory, we don't need extensive project menagement. Asana is great for managing simple projects.

Try It

Pastebox

Pastebox is a clipboard manager for Mac (there are similar tools for PCs). A clipboard manager allows you to retrieve all the things you've recently copied and any of your saved snippets. It's a huge timesaver.

Try It

Evernote

Evernote is certainly the ultimate note-taking app. I love it. But, there can be some confusion about whether a doc is in Google Docs or Evernote. Need to create some rules around that.

Try It

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Extra Techy Stuff

Woody Ad Snippets

Woody Ad Snippets is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to inject code (HTML, CSS, JS, or even PHP) anywhere you can insert a shortcode. We love it for creating custom functionality.

Try It

WP OAuth Server

When you have multiple sites and services that your customers need to log into, WP Oauth Server is a great, WordPress-based way, to create single signon functionality. We installed it when we created The Factory, our custom platform for our customers.

Try It

CVS

CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is a very old command-line app for programming in teams. We use it on our web servers to track and merge changes from different developers into The Factory.

Try It

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Marketing AUtomation

Website & Hosting

Money

Communications

Admin, Project Management, and Hacks

Extra Techy Stuff

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