Have you ever wondered about helpful tools for your online business? It’s a question I get asked repeatedly.
So here they are in no particular order. Why am I sharing them? Because it took me way too long to figure all this out, and I don’t want it to be a barrier for anyone else.
Depending on your stage in business, the tools I’m recommending may not be right for you. I’m trying to make this post as helpful as possible for those who are starting out and want low-cost and effective solutions.
This blog post contains some affiliate links (marked *) which means I may receive a commission if you purchase through a link. I only recommend products I have personally used and love! If you purchase through my link it won’t cost you any extra.
Website and Course/Membership Platform
If you are looking for a simple, professional, and affordable website or course and membership platform, I honestly can’t recommend Neta Talmor and her amazing Nohassle website highly enough.
Neta and her team are simply the most helpful, responsive website hosts I have ever come across. You won’t realise how important this point is until you’ve been in the position of trying to make contact with someone who can help you if your website ever goes down.
When you host your website with them, they make regular daily backups of your site as a matter of course. You also get access to her thriving Facebook community when you buy her product (and did I mention that a website is only 99 dollars?!).
If you’re a little further along and you feel the time is right to set up a course or membership platform, then I highly recommend checking out the No Hassle course and Membership platform.
You can use it to host unlimited courses, branded to match your company colours. It’s powered by Memberpress, a robust tool that allows you to get paid by PayPal or Stripe.
You can choose if you’d like to drip-feed your content, create a waitlist (so that you have a list of eager buyers), create coupons, or give access to bonus content to those who sign up for your Early Bird offer.
Canva
I have always been completely obsessed with resources and as a teacher I spent an awful lot of money on printer ink and laminating pouches!
The paid version of Canva is like a playground for me. I absolutely love that I can quickly and easily resize images for different social media platforms and there are so many templates available to make the process more painless.
On the Pro version, you can upload your logo, brand fonts and hex codes so that it’s easy to be consistent with your branding across all your content creation.
Designrr
Although I absolutely love and highly recommend Canva, Designrr is my preferred tool for creating professional-looking Ebooks because it is so easy to import content from Microsoft Word, Google Docs or even a blog post.
Use this link to purchase Designrr for only $27. Yes, there are upsells, but you don’t need to make that investment unless it’s right for you.
Squoosh app
The Squoosh app is just fantastic for compressing images so that they take up less space in your website media library, without compromising on quality.
Why is it so important to compress your images? If you regularly upload images without compressing them, they can start to slow your website down due to file size. It only takes a couple of seconds extra to compress your images and it’s so worth it, because it is a less frustrating experience for your visitors and it means that they won’t click away.
ScreenPal (formerly known as Screencast-o-matic)
There are many different screen recording tools available these days. ScreenPal is my tool of choice because you can make screen recordings for free.
On the paid version, you can host your videos to embed them on your website without slowing it down. This is so useful also for hosting videos for your online courses or memberships. I recommend the Solo Premier plan.
It’s a very affordable alternative to other ways of hosting videos when you’re just starting out. I’ve been using it for about seven years and plenty of storage space is still available to me on the plan I originally signed up with.
Otter.ai
This audio transcription tool is a time-saver for anyone who prefers to create audio rather than written content. There are free versions and paid versions available.
You may still need to edit the transcription, but it’s a quick win for content creation because you can simply talk about your key points, upload the audio, edit the transcription and create a blog post or simple ebook.
Here’s the link.
