The barriers to starting your own business have never been lower. Today, it is incredibly easy to create your own creative business projects and then work hard toward turning them into profitable online businesses.
Even if you don’t succeed — which you certainly won’t right away — you need to first take the leap and make mistakes to start the real learning process. The people who succeed and earn a steady income from their creativity are the one’s who stick to it long enough.
In this Online Business Action Kit, I want give you some starting points for taking your creative ideas and building something out of them.
All of these cloud-based digital tools can help you start building your online audience and begin the journey toward creating a business in today’s digital economy.
1. WordPress
Create a professional website website and start building your audience.
I use the free content management system (CMS) WordPress for all my non-ecommerce websites. Powering over 20% of the world’s websites, WordPress allows for nearly unlimited functionality thanks to a massive community of third-party themes and plugins. Being an open source project, it is constantly being updated and improving, leaving the more slow moving competition in the dust.
You can download a self-hosted copy of WordPress from their website and upload it a web server using a free FTP client like Filezilla. If you’re not technical you can get WordPress pre-installed and ready-to-go with BlueHost’s WordPress Hosting.
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2. Shopify
Start selling your own products online in less than 48 hours.
If you want to sell products online then the ecommerce platform that is dominating today is Shopify. They have the most intuitive user interface in the ecommerce industry and it’s so easy that with no technical skills you can set everything up and start making your first sales within a couple days of signing up.
If you’re new to ecommerce, they offer extensive free training. You can learn valuable skills like dropshipping from massive marketplaces like Alibaba, the best digital marketing practices for promoting your products and how to optimize your product sales pages in the excellent Shopify Ecommerce University.
They are currently running an exciting Build A Business competition, which provides extensive mentorship for you to build, market and grow your first ecommerce business. The winners of the competition get to spend a week with Sir Richard Branson at his private Caribbean getaway Necker’s Island.
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3. Mailchimp
Build, engage and keep in touch with your audience using an email list builder.
The most important part of building an online audience is your email list. To send out regular emails you need a email marketing tool like Mailchimp. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend Mailchimp because they offer a beautifully designed user interface, an excellent selection email templates and it is by far the easiest email marketing tool to use.
It’s a good email marketing platform to start with because Mailchimp is completely free for your first 2000 email list subscribers.
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4. OptimizePress
Starting testing out the power of online advertising by creating and testing landing pages.
If you’re going to run paid advertising campaigns on Facebook Ads or Google Adwords then you need to send people to custom landing page. If you send them to your website you will waste most of your money because it’s difficult to test and optimize a website with so many different options to distract visitors from buying or opting in to your list.
If you have no experience with landing pages or conversion optimization, OptimizePress takes care of the grunt work for you with detailed landing pages, sales pages, webinar countdown pages and email opt-in templates that are designed and optimized to convert.
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5. Google Analytics
Dive deeper and gain actionable insights from website traffic data and learn highly valuable skills in web analytics.
To be successful in online business, you need to be able to look at your traffic analytics and gain actionable insights to improve your marketing campaigns and website user experience. Google Analytics gives you a powerful toolset to track the effectiveness of your website at converting visitors into engaged members of your online community and buying customers.
If you want to succeed in competitive niches, having an analytic mindset and a strong knowledge of how to use Google Analytics is absolutely essential. Fortunately, Google provides free training and recognized certification in their Google Analytics Academy.
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6. Hootsuite
Use a social media dashboard to streamline your social media and strategically engage and build an audience.
Hootsuite is a free social media dashboard that allows you to read and update your social networks simultaneously. I use Hootsuite to update my Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Pages and Google+ accounts at the same time.
Social media can be a huge distraction and waste of time but it can be an important element of building trust and credibility online if you do it right. If you want to learn how to use social media for building your online businesses, Hootsuite University provides an excellent industry-recognized certification program.
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7. SEMRush
If you’re creating content then you need an advanced keyword research tool otherwise you’ll waste your time.
The most important vehicle for getting qualified traffic to a website is through Search Engine Optimization. SEMRush allows me to track all my keyword rankings, check keyword difficulty for any Google search results page and discover the best “long tail” keywords I can realistically rank for without an insane amount of effort. It also allows me to plan out my advertising strategy for Google Adwords by analyzing successful competitors ad strategies and the ad copy and keywords gems that are making the money.
Without a tool like SEMRush (it’s the best tool I know of and I’ve tried most of them), you can’t tap into the massive power of targeting profitable keywords both organically and in ad campaigns.
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8. Canva
Create professional graphics to stand out online and advertise any event, service or product better.
If you’re like me and your design skills are fairly limited, then you’re going to fall in love with Canva. It’s a web-based design platform that has 1000s of templates ready to go so you can make professional looking flyers, posters, social media profiles, promotional graphics, Youtube video thumbnails and all kinds of other stunning images in mere minutes.
If you use your own background images it’s free and if you use their stock photos they charge you a $1 fee when you export the image. A lot cheaper and faster than trying to navigate the steep learning curve of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
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9. Bitrix24
Learn how to collaborate online with virtual teams and keep track of everything in your online business.
If you need to manage freelancers and remote workers, then Bitrix24 allows you to do it from your own cloud-based social collaboration Intranet. This platform over 200 incredible features and I’m always blown away by just how powerful this collaboration platform is for running an online business.
Bitrix24 is free for up to 12 employees and it’s a great tool for having a cloud-based office where nearly everything can be access from the web, iOS and Android devices. If you want a more basic task and project management tool, then I’d recommend using Asana.
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10. Udemy
Constantly be learning and upgrading your digital media skills in these practical courses from digital experts.
If you want to learn new digital media skills inexpensively then the place I usually go to is online course marketplace Udemy. They have 1000s of free and premium online courses that taught by experts in different fields like iOS and Android app development, web design and online business.
In the last 3 years, I have taken over 30 courses on Udemy and from these course I been able to constantly upgrade my knowledge and skills in digital marketing, mobile marketing, copywriting and developing online courses from the different instructors on Udemy.
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