I oftentimes get asked “Chad – what powers YOUR business?”
These are the tools and services I use in my own business. I’m adding to this list, too, so you’ll see more free tools added soon. Bookmark this page and come back often.
Getting & Keeping My Sites Online:
I have several hosting accounts just to protect myself with a little bit of diversity. I don’t like to have all of my eggs in any one basket.
Rack Space is where I refer people who are totally new to the online business experience. I’ve been a customer for years. They offer a full front-end (Blog, E-Commerce Store, Helpdesk, E-mail) and back-end (Dashboard, CRM, ERP) in the most professional way. They are a bit upscale, but it’s totally worth it.
Edge Web Solution is another managed hosting provider, near and dear to me. They’ll host your website and manage your software, they have their own suit of builtin apps that come as part of their hosting plan. They’re used to handling support from scared new online business owners. Highly recommend.
You can’t go wrong with either choice.
Creating My Website
Some of you have been asking how I built my new site. I’ll share more about that soon but the basics are that I bought a theme at Theme Forest and edited certain pages (Home, About, and Testimonial pages) with Elementor. Yes, I chose the Pro version as I wanted more templates and features like saving global elements.
List Building
Bloom – I recently left the service I used since 2005 to manage all my newsletters, ecourses, and ezines. (If you get any emails from me, they now come through this safe list managing service.) They are marketing-friendly, easy to use, and I’m getting a lot of flexibility that I’ve always wanted.
Thrive Leads – I used to get really frustrated if I wanted to put an optin for in the middle of a blog post. Or I’d see all these other site with cool drop downs with freebies to get people to optin. Thrive Leads is how a lot of them are doing it. PLUS split testing is built in. (I use this WITH Bloom, rather than using the forms Bloom provides.). Note that if you plan to have a full featured funnel (not just an optin page) you’ll need to consider either Click Funnels or Done For You Funnels. Read more below…
Click Funnels – I love Click Funnels. Starting at $97 per month for the basic package, and $297 for the etison package. Depending on your goals, if it’s only optin pages you seek, look at Thrive instead. You get a lot more for less cost, with tons of added flexibility.
Done For You Funnels – This service is offered as a Done For You, it’ll take care of the designing & building of the funnel, hosting it and porting parts of the funnel pages as HTML (a Great Advantage), once you have a winning offer and want to scale your traffic campaign to hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, calling your server’s database every time to load the pages becomes server intensive, and might crash your server and your website. Having your funnel ported as HTML provides a great advantage. They are a bit upscale, starting at $499 per month, but they will save you a lot of time if you don’t want to do all the design,build and testing work by yourself.
Selling your Own Products
If you have a physical product(s) or you create your own ebooks or audios/videos and want to sell them, you need a way to take payments.
One Shopping Cart – Since they’ve been around for years, they have had ups and downs. There were periods where their autoresponders couldn’t get delivered and other points where they didn’t integrate well with recurring billing on membership software. For me at least these problems have been solved and have been running well for the past 12 months+.
Click Bank – Mainly used for digital products I release in other markets other than my main one. I’ve found if you’re in niches you can often recruit additional affiliates just by getting into their system and getting a few affiliates selling for you.
Pay & Invoice – This payment gateway is not sold separately but comes as part of their managed hosting package, pretty useful if you are not based in the US or you don’t have a US established business.
Running Additional Back-end Services
Glew IO – Once your E-commerce store(s) are selling high volume (1,000 transactions per month and more), you’ll want to find a way to effectively report on whats going in the store, and keep an eye on your stock, profit margins and other metrics, Glew comes at $199 per month for annual revenues under $1M.
Store Man – Another service provided for free, as part of the Edge Web Solutions Managed E-Commerce Hosting Package. It comes free with their managed hosting plan, I find it good enough, I didn’t have to continue using Glew IO.
Helpdesk Software
Once your business operations takes over, email will not be the best way to serve customers as email trails will start falling between the cracks. A Helpdesk software will help serve your customers better, by offering a way to organize your support tickets, assigning them a number, sorting them by priority and retain a full history log.
Fresh Desk – Fresh Desk is an all round helpdek and a good start, you can start with them free, however if you want to have your own Helpdesk sub domain (Example: helpdesk.domain.com or support.domain.com), then their service is priced at $59 per agent per month.
Zen Desk – Probably the most advanced Helpdesk software out there, Zen Desk offers everything you need to be everywhere your customers are, wrapped up in one pretty package—at a special price. Suitable for call centers and growing teams. Their pricing model is different, but the most basic support plan starts at $109 per agent per month.
Swift Desk – Another Intuitive, feature-rich, affordable customer support software, offered by Edge Web Solutions. It’s not as full featured as Zen Desk. But I have used Swift Desk for years on my E-Commerce Sites. It runs under my own sub domain, and it’s priced at $49 per agent per month.
Incident Tracking and Site Monitoring
Status IO – This service is aimed towards monitoring your website infrastructure by employing Status pages, incident tracking, and subscriber notifications thru Email, SMS, and Webhook Notifications. The main goal of this service is to keep your users in the loop during outages and planned maintenance service. It’s priced at $149 per month for 20 metrics, including the SMS notification option (a big plus when you don’t have Internet).
Status 13 – Another native solution from Edge Web Solutions. Starting plan is 30 metrics, including the SMS notification option (a big plus when you don’t have Internet) and priced as per customer’s design needs. It’s worth mentioning that it comes free once you have a managed hosting E-Commerce plan with them.
Status Page – It’s very similar to Status IO, priced at $99 per month for 10 metrics and $399 per month for 25 metrics, including the SMS notification option (a big plus when you don’t have Internet).
Communicating with my Helpers and My Coaching Clients
Basecamp – Allows me to track projects and who is working on each one.
Box Easy Safe File Sharing – Allows me to work with writers and editors and keeps all my files safe and secure.
Skype – I use Skype’s screen share function often. If I’m working with a coaching client or even one of my Virtual Assistants, it’s oftentimes easier to say “Show me, please” when I don’t quite understand something. It’s a great way to connect with the people who I work with regularly.
Keeping my Business Safe and Protected
Last Password – Keeps track of all of my logins, usernames and passwords, so I don’t have to. (Try it free.)
Audio & Video Tools
Loom – Video recorder that is super easy to use!
Camtasia – I use this quite a bit for recording quick screenshot videos.
Zoom– I use this and love it. Get started for free. The pro plan you get extra features.
Link & Lead Building for a Boost in Traffic Generation
Social Warfare – I don’t love the name of this service but I DO love the results. I recently switched over to this plugin to get more social love. It’s lightning fast and they track shares better than other services I’ve used. PLUS, they don’t sneak ads into my site like ONE other one was. Yikes
Jarvis Live Chat – This software is the perfect combination of live human chat and chat robots (bots) asking users to engage in conversation when you’re not online to gain insights on the most sales objections your leads are having.
Content Marketing – Without content, your potential customers will not fully understand exactly what you’re offering and why it’s different from others, I’ve used many services in the past; such as ghost writers and offshore freelancers but nothing came close, you can actually start with 5 optimized posts for just $300, that’s like $60 per content piece.
Brainstorming & Productivity Tools
Mind Maps – Free Mind Maps to help with your brain storming
Confluence – This helps organize all your files and notes from multiple locations into one single location for collaboration and sharing
Graphics Editing
PicMonkey – A free program to use to edit graphics quickly.
More Helpful Tools
Word or Open Office – for writing my books
PowerPoint or Keynote – for drafting presentations for speaking engagements
I’ll add more to the list as I think of them. 🙂
If after reading that, you can’t make a decision, feel free to leave me a question and I’ll be glad to help.
Chad
PS. Yes, some of these are affiliate links. But, they’re only on this list if I use them – and many of the links point to blog posts where you can learn more before buying.
