5 Best Upwork Alternatives for Local Businesses in 2026

Discover 5 alternatives to Upwork for local businesses seeking reliable web development, automation, and tech support.

Why Your Local Business Needs a Tech Partner (and How to Find One)

A tech partner gives you long-term support at a fraction of the cost of agencies and full-time developers. Here's how to find the right one.

9 Zapier Alternatives for Local Businesses in 2026

Zapier is incredibly powerful, until you hit its limitations. Maybe you've quickly realized you need more than the 2-steps offered on the free plan. Or you're frustrated that hosting a form on your own domain costs $700 per year. Or you've spent hours trying

How to Start a News Website: A Step-by-Step Guide

No matter what is going on in a community, if it's experiencing highs or lows, there are always events happening and things going on. This means that there's always going to be value for someone to connect the dots, inform people of events and tell the

How to Deploy WooCommerce on Railway

This guide demonstrates how to launch a fully-functional WooCommerce store using Railway, a cloud platform that simplifies e-commerce deployment. You'll have a production-ready online store running in just a few minutes. Here's what you'll need: * A GitHub account (Railway uses GitHub for authentication) * Basic

WordPress vs. Ghost: Which is Better in 2026?

It’s over 10 years now since Ghost launched on Kickstarter as an alternative to WordPress that would be “just a blogging platform.” For many years, Ghost lived up to that billing, as a more streamlined and modern version of WordPress that didn’t have the overwhelming number of plugins

Can AI-Powered Companions Help Local Media Drive Audience Engagement?

Local journalism is facing an identity crisis. Once seen as the most trusted source of information, many local outlets now struggle to win the attention of readers while navigating shrinking newsrooms and increasing skepticism of the media at large. Winning back readers will require more than just better headlines—it

Ghost and SEO: Everything You Need to Know

Ghost is one of the main technologies that we recommend to small publishers. It has a great balance of being free and easy to use, yet having lots of modern technology that creates a great reading experience for your users. At the same time, it offers out-of-the-box capabilities for monetization

How to Use Ghost as a Landing Page

Often we come across the question is it possible to use Ghost to launch a simple landing page. It seems to come up frequently in forums and various places around the web, but usually people have a similar reaction: Why would you want to use Ghost for a landing page?

Building a Funnel Report in Looker Studio with Plausible Analytics

❕Since the publication of this blog post, Plausible Analytics has released their own official Looker Studio connector that we recommend you use instead. You can find a guide on how to use it here. Funnel reports are very common when looking at website analytics. This is because they map very

Conduct a Content SEO Audit for Free with Plausible Analytics

❕Since the publication of this blog post, Plausible Analytics has released their own official Looker Studio connector that we recommend you use instead. You can find a guide on how to use it here. Whatever your business may be, content marketing without a doubt will play some role. And anyone

How to Get Member Data from Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing tool that people either love or hate. A big reason that people dislike Mailchimp is that it makes seemingly simple things much more difficult than they need to be. One of these things that should be simple, is getting data about all of your Mailchimp

Building a Mailchimp Integration for Google Sheets [Free Template]

Despite lots of new entrants in the email marketing platform space, Mailchimp is still a go-to tool for lots of small businesses and online publishers. One of the reasons we are still big fans of Mailchimp is its extensive API. This makes Mailchimp a great platform to build on top

Getting Started With the Mailchimp Marketing API

Mailchimp is one of the oldest, most reliable email marketing platforms out there. Even though there are newer, cheaper options for email marketing out there, Mailchimp still is the tool of choice for lots of online publishers and small businesses. One of the reasons that Mailchimp stands out from the

Creating Custom Charts for Plausible Analytics with Looker Studio

❕Since the publication of this blog post, Plausible Analytics has released their own official Looker Studio connector that we recommend you use instead. You can find a guide on how to use it here. We replaced our Google Analytics with the more privacy-focused Plausible Analytics almost a year ago. For

Get Better Mailchimp Campaign Reports Using Data Studio [Free Template]

Email marketing is one of the most essential tools in the toolbox of small publishers. Unlike other platforms, with email, you can reach your audience with messages directly in their inbox. And one of the most popular email marketing tools continues to be Mailchimp. Mailchimp has its pros and cons

How to Send a Welcome Email with Ghost and Mailgun

We’ve written before about how the Ghost CMS platform has a lot to offer out of the box when it comes to email newsletters, but it also has its drawbacks. The good news is that with a little bit of extra effort you can work around these issues. Today,

Setting Up Private Email Newsletters with Ghost

It’s no big secret that we’re big fans of the Ghost publishing platform around here. One of the biggest advantages that Ghost offers over other content management systems (like WordPress, for example) is that it couples web publishing together with email newsletters in one easy to use package.

Building a Mailchimp Dashboard in Looker Studio

We’re big fans of Google Looker Studio as a free tool that makes it easy for small businesses to centralize all of their analytics and reporting. The ability to create intuitive dashboards gives it a big advantage over more fixed options like the reporting capabilities that come with Google

Looker Studio Templates for Online Publishers

We’ve written before about how you can take your Google Analytics reports to the next level by using Google Looker Studio dashboards. Finding a great dashboard template for Looker Studio can be difficult for online publishers, however, as most templates are geared towards eCommerce shops. For online publishers, it’

Create a Membership Site for Free

One of the main driving forces behind the Epilocal project is to get great open-source technology tools into the hands of more small publishers and small businesses that can take advantage of them. As membership models continue to become more and more popular in online publishing, you may be wondering,

Setting Up Google Analytics Events and Goals [Step-by-Step Guide]

Google Analytics is a go-to tool for tracking and analyzing readers who visit your website. It’s free and it offers a lot of powerful analytics features, which makes it no wonder that it is used by a large majority of independent publishers. But unlocking the full power of Google

The Best Membership Software for Online Publishers

We talk a lot here about how online publishers can build a sustainable business around their content. With advertising revenue fading fast, it is up to publishers to build a cycle that converts readers into email subscribers and then eventually converts email subscribers into paying members. It goes without saying

Google Analytics Dashboards vs. Data Studio: Which is Better for You?

We recently developed a dashboard for online publishers to quickly get insights from their data using Google’s Data Studio. If you haven’t heard of Google Data Studio, you are probably wondering, why should you use a separate tool to look at information that is already available in Google

Best Free Ghost Themes for Newsletter Sign Ups

Are you looking for a free theme that makes the most of Ghost’s new email sign up and membership features? This is the perfect place to start. In this article, we have pulled together the best Free Ghost Themes that put email newsletter sign ups front and center. And

5 Ways to Spice Up Your Email Newsletter Content

We write quite a bit here about making your email newsletter the foundation of your publication's business strategy. As you start to put more attention on your email newsletter, you will want it to stand-out and have a unique voice that reflects the editorial vision of your wider

Organize Your Newsletter Schedule with Trello [Free Template]

We talk a lot here about how email newsletters are the key to building a community around your publication. But once you get started with a daily newsletter to share the latest news, then add in a weekly email or two with in-depth content, and then segment some free and

What Business Models Work for News Sites?

One of the reasons that Epilocal exists is that increasingly it is up to the editors and publishers of local newspapers and digital news sites to figure out a new business model on their own. The traditional newspaper business model is a thing of the past and it isn'

The Top Email Platforms for News Sites

Email is the way that you can connect directly with your readers without relying on Facebook or other social media tools. It is through this direct email connection that you are able to create loyal readers that come to you consistently, no matter what some algorithm or search engine thinks

How Much Does it Cost to Run a News Website?

So you’ve read all about how we need local and independent news more than ever and you’re convinced that we need more local news sites. Even better, you want to be a news entrepreneur and start a business around your own news website. Great! But how do you