I think if you work in digital marketing, there is a good chance you have your own little toolbox of trusted ‘go-to’ tools and resources that you use in your everyday working life. Depending on the scope of your role, this may cover things like:
- SEO tools
- CRO tools
- Social media tools
- PPC tools
- Email tools
- Research tools
- Content tools
- Free image resources
- Informative blog posts about different topics that you refer back to
- … the list could be endless!
One thing you will be all to familiar with however, is that the search for tools is never ending. The speed at which our industry changes, means that digital marketing tools and resources that are great today, could be obsolete tomorrow and replaced by something new entirely.
If I were to cover all the tools in all the categories, it would be an extremely long post with literally hundreds of links. I think this would make it hard for people to scroll around and find what they are looking for, so I’m going to split this up into a series. One post for each category of tools and resources.
I will then revisit these posts and update them on a periodic basis rather than create new posts with updated lists of digital marketing tools and resources. Hopefully this will prove more useful to people so you can bookmark the post and just refer back to it.
Please also feel free to share any tools and resources you have, either in the comments or direct to my email scott@reefdigital.com.au and I’ll add them to the list (as long as they are good!)
OK so here is Volume 1 and this post will cover:
Images, Graphics & Design Related Tools & Resources
If you don’t have access to a paid stock image account, are tired of the available images in there or the designers use up the daily quota leaving nothing for marketing, then you will need some ‘go-to’ image resources like the ones below:
- Stock Up – Searches 25 different image sites at the time of this writing. If you want to know what they are, I’ve listed them below:
- Unsplash
- Life of Pix
- Jay Mantri
- Startup Stock
- Splitshire
- MMT
- Public Domain Archive
- Refe
- Magdeleine
- Kaboom Pics
- Good Stock
- Skitter Photo
- New Old Stock
- Picography
- Cupcake
- Snapwire Snaps
- Free Nature Stock
- Free iMage Bank
- Don’t Erase
- Barn Images
- Negative Space
- Libreshot
- Krzysztof Puszczy?ski
- Bucketlistly Photos
- Good Free Photos
- MorgueFile – Well known free image site. Images covering a wide variety of topics.
- FreeImages (formerly sxy.hu) – free images covering a wide variety of topics.
- Flickr – Just make sure to change the license when you search and check the terms.
- Free Range Stock – A mixture of images from Free Range Stock themselves and their community of photographers contributing their work for you to use.
- IMCreator – Collections of free stock photos in different categories. More cityscape images than its other categories but some good ones for sport too at the time of this writing.
- Little Visuals – A bit like UnSplash in terms of image style and regularly updated packs of images that are free to use.
- Pic Jumbo – Tries very hard to get you on an email list (like many other sites!) but has some high quality pics that you might find useful.
- Gratisography – Free, high resolution images added weekly across various categories.
- Stock Vault – A collection of images in different categories as well as community photo contributions.
- Open Photo – Some high res photo collections in different categories.
- StockSnap – Free image curation site and no attribution required apparently at the time of this writing but do your due diligence.
- Moat – This one is not technically a free image search engine but you might find it useful all the same. It’s basically an ‘ad search engine’. So if you want to look at some ads for different brands, be it for inspiration and ideas or to see where you might be able to stand out, then this might prove useful.
- Image Raider – Let’s flip this around some… maybe you have created your own imagery and want to check if anyone is using it unlawfully. Image Raider searches the web and alerts you when it finds your image being used.
- ColorPix – Nifty little colour picker that grabs the pixel wherever your mouse hovers.
- Wordle – Upload text or a transcript and this tool creates a word cloud image of common words. Pro Tip: Input a live chat transcript in there to see if there are any common themes people keep talking about that are worth investigating from an SEO and conversion optimisation perspective.
- bubbl.us – Create flow/bubble diagrams quickly and easily.
- Canva – Create high quality graphics quickly and easily. Also has templates you can work from.
- Pixlr – Free web hosted image editor. If you don’t have access to Photoshop then this might be a free alternative for the time being.
Like I mentioned earlier, I plan to review and update this list (and the other lists yet to be published in this series) so give it a bookmark if you found it useful and please feel free to share any other great resources you may have and I’ll add them to the list with credit to you for sharing.