CREATORS OF ALL TRADES

Newsletter #5

Productivity tool Taskade | Social Media LinkedIn Tools | WordPress Page builder Oxygen | Bonus Content Web History

Welcome to the fifth edition of Random List of Apps/Tools/Resources for Nerdy Marketers. I am turning this blog post series into an official thing now! What does official mean? I am publicly committing to continue this series throughout 2019.

Sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of this post. I am not creating these posts on a weekly schedule, only when I think I have enough interesting links together.

⚒️Tools & Apps & Services

Productivity

Taskade was a ToDo app that I tried a while back – it was initially launched as browser start page that functions as a task list (similar to Momentum but with focus on a task list). Since then it was developed in a far more advanced product that teams can use to organize work (including video calls). I am happy with Todoist, but if you are on the lookout for a new tool for managing your own or team tasks you might wanna take a look.

After watching the video (on their homepage) I would say it’s a mix of ToDoist, AirTable, and Slack – having features from all those in a lighter version (?)

Scroll their blog homepage, it’s full of screenshots, to get an impression of the product.

Social Media

Dux-Soup is a LinkedIn is a Chrome extension to reach out to people on LinkedIn at scale. A Fresh van Root client is heavily using LinkedIn for lead generation and tools like that are on the rise. My impression is that these tools are being closely watched by the LinkedIn team – not sure to what extent they are happy with tools that may lead to dissatisfaction at its users. (I, for example, don’t like being contacted by strangers to sell me something via automated messages – but it seems to work for a lot of marketers)

What is the best time to post on social media? A question asked often, and sprout social has some insights with 25K clients. Can you please all ignore that data so the times mentioned will continue to work for some of us? I usually don’t pay to much attention to this, I typically encourage people to avoid the obvious offline times (weekends, midnight,..).

WordPress

Oxygen is a page builder for WordPress I want to take a look at in the coming weeks. It seems less popular compared to Elementor. Besides that, it does not have a free version or trial version, you have to invest $99 initially to start using it (right now this includes lifetime updates). You can try Oxygen for 7 days on their demo server.

The Oxygen page builder editing screen

Autooptimize is a WordPress plugin to optimize your site performance, it does not replace your caching plugin but can be used in addition to it.

Like all popular caching plugins claim, Autooptimize also says its “really easy” to use. If you are a marketer without deep technical understanding, I recommend always hiring a developer with WordPress know how to optimize your page – things can go wrong with these plugins and a site is offline faster then thought. (Thanks for the tip to Thomas)

Branded short URLs are nothing new really. I am thinking about setting this up for freshvanroot.com, but all the good short domain names are taken, like fvr.co or frsh.co. Here’s a guide on how to set up short URLs with your domain in combination with bitly and WordPress.

Misc

Here is a thread on Facebook full of newsletter recommendations.

Bonus Content

The web is old enough to be nostalgic about it. Watch this video if you got online in the 90ies.

Earlier this year 30 years of the web was celebrated, I participated in a blog challenge to tell my own web story.

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