Resources For Your Internet Business
One of the questions we are often asked is, “What products or services do you use to run a successful internet business?”
Disclosure:
We are Digital Marketers and some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that if you click one of these links, we may receive a small fee from the supplier of that service.
Two things to note.
- This will NOT increase the price that you pay for the service.
- We only recommend services or products that we are currently using or have used in the past.
Any opinions expressed here are our own. They are based on our experience. Does that guarantee that the experience YOU have with the company or product will be the same as ours?… NO.
Below are links to some of our favorite resources and why we like them.
It all starts with having a domain name that you are going to use for your business. I have tried a number of Registrars over the years and the one I like best, find the easiest to manage and offers great service and a low price is: Namecheap
Web Hosting
When you are starting out, getting a decent hosting package to build your websites on is critical to your success. Over the last 20 plus years, we have tried a number of different hosting packages and right now we are using Siteground for most of our websites. What I like about the account is that you can have multiple websites inside of a single account. You get access to a free SSL Certificate. They have some good caching tools to help speed your website up, and are easy to use.
As your business grows, you can then upgrade your account to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and if you get really big, you can move up to a Dedicated Server.
It’s important that when you are thinking about Hosting, that you keep in mind that this is just some “space” you are renting. Like renting an apartment in a big building. You are responsible for building your website AND for all security matters related to it. But if you keep that in mind and understand the implications of it, then Siteground is a great place to be:
Siteground.com
DIY Website Building
We build a lot of websites. We build them for our clients and we build them for ourselves. Almost every website we have built over the last couple of years has been built on WordPress.
If you are not a website developer, the name can be confusing as there are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com allows you to build a website without getting hosting. You use a pre-installed version, but it does have some limitations.
The second version is what we and most of the website developer world uses. It is available at WordPress.org.
When you have Hosting and inside of it they have “One-Click-Installation” of WordPress, you are getting the WordPress.org version. It is super powerful, FREE, has a huge user base, and can be expanded to do almost anything.
One of the Great Things about WordPress is once it is installed, you can set a “Theme” on top of it. Themes change the look at feel of how your content is displayed, but in the last couple of years, themes for WordPress have come a long way.
Over the last few years the Theme we have been using for most of our development work AND for all our websites is Divi by Elegant Themes. It has an incredible page builder inside so that anyone can use it to rapidly design nice-looking pages. AND if you are a developer like us, you can also have full access to writing custom code to do some truly awesome stuff.
Another thing we like is when you purchase it, you have a Life Time License to it and the other themes and plugins that Elegant Themes offer. Meaning you will NOT need to purchase another theme as each time a new upgrade comes out, you are covered! No Extra Cost for UNLIMITED WEBSITES!
For building your business online, a critical tool is a good quality autoresponder. When some people hear that word, Autoresponder, they think it is something you set when you are going on vacation and it will send an auto email to anyone that sends you one….. That is NOT what I am talking about.
In online marketing, an Autoresponder helps you build your business because it saves you so much time while keeping your audience engaged. You can do a number of things with it.
- You can set up a campaign that when someone signs up for a free report or anything else on your website, then they will start getting overtime a pre-designed set of emails you have put into the system. You can set the days between each of these so that you stay in the mind of your prospect.
You can do a “Broadcast” email to everyone or a segment of the people on your list. Maybe you have a special event coming up or some piece of news you want to share. Perfect. Enter the info into the system and then tell it when to send it. Now or whenever you want.
You can make a Newsletter and have it auto-delivered to everyone on your list each month (Day or week if you are really ambitious!). A quality autoresponder will have templates you can use and you just supply the content.
I have tried many different ones over the years and now I only use 2 of them… I say 2 for a reason. The first is Aweber. For most of my projects and lists, this is what I use. BUT, I also make membership sites and the membership software I use also has a built-in autoresponder (YES, it is a great piece of software). Only in those cases do I Not use my standard Autoresponder.
The prices are fair, the service is great, and they are the best I have seen at what they do.
Of course, I use other tools in my business. Over time, I plan to share more of them here with you. These are tools that I feel can benefit anyone that is building a business with an online market.
Stay tuned as the list will grow.
If you know of a tool or have a question about one that I may be able to answer, head on over to the contact page and send me an email about it.
