Behold my epic list of business products and services I use and recommend:
** Last updated on August 13, 2016.
Domain Name Registration
NameCheap
I have been buying all my domain names from NameCheap for more than a decade. They are affordable, reliable and they provide excellent customer service. They also have an extensive, easy-to-follow knowledge base for searching information. See if your domain name is available now.
I also buy my SSL certificates from them as well. You may need your hosting company to install this for you for a fee. Setting up your own SSL certificate is complex. I recommend that beginners purchase a hosting plan that includes one.
What is an SSL certificate?
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate protects data through encryption. This is necessary if you collect personal information or credit card numbers, to prevent fraud or identity theft. An SSL is also used for site validation. This verifies the business behind the web site. An SSL certificate is essential to create public trust.
Web Site Hosting
I have been with HostGator for more than ten years (longer than the ages of a couple of my children haha). They must be doing something right if I’ve stayed this long. When I first started with HostGator I was a full-time web developer. I have set up and managed countless web sites for clients with them.
Why I choose HostGator:
- Super affordable with monthly and yearly options
- High response time with fast loading pages (visitors hate lag)
- They provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee (your site needs to be up and running when people visit)
- Top notch security and backups
- Unlimited space and bandwidth plans
- 45-day money back guarantee (how can you go wrong?)
- Quality customer service (24/7 support through live chat, ticket or phone – in my experience, the fastest is by phone)
Bonus Tip: If you’re just starting out, I recommend one of the starter hosting plans. You can always upgrade as your business or traffic grows. If you will be running an e-commerce site, the Business Plan comes with private SSL and dedicated IP. Otherwise, you will pay extra for these with the other plans.
The other top hosting company I recommend is BlueHost. Although I do not use BlueHost, I know many who do and highly recommend them. BlueHost is a sister company to HostGator. They are similar in price, customer service, and speed.
Bonus Tip: Again I recommend a starter hosting package if you are just starting out. BlueHost has a comparable e-commerce hosting plan with their WooCommerce Plan. As a current promotion, you will get a one-year domain name registration FREE if you buy a one-year hosting plan with BlueHost.
Check current prices and promotions here: BlueHost and HostGator
Web Site Platform
WordPress
I use the free, open-source platform from WordPress.org (not .com)
E-Commerce Platforms
As a web developer, I host my own e-commerce sites. I use WooCommerce on the WordPress platform.
Pros: It’s free. And no monthly fees. Your only costs are for a yearly SSL certificate (advised). You will also incur fees from your chosen payment gateway (PayPal, Stripe). You can find additional plugins to use to create a robust online store. Some of these plugins are free as well.
Cons: It’s not turn-key. Building your own e-commerce site takes time and expertise. You’re also responsible for your site security, including an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate encrypts web site data to prevent fraud and identity theft.
Before I set up my own e-commerce site I used Shopify. Even though I no longer host my store with Shopify, I’m still an avid follower of their blog and side products. They publish one of the best industry blogs for small business. You’ll find it full of tips, tutorials, and case studies.
Pros: Perfect for small business owners who have no tech experience or can’t hire a web designer. Since they have monthly plans as well, it’s perfect if you’re ready to set up your shop right away. Their platform is fast and easy to set up. You can check out some Shopify shops here. Another plus is that you don’t have to worry about site hosting, security and data protection. It’s all included. Shopify has great customer service as well.
Cons: Shopify is a subscription service, which you can pay monthly or annually. Extra features may require plugin apps (some are free, some are not). Although they have a few nice-looking basic store templates, most of them are an extra cost. However, a third party platform like Shopify replaces the need for hosting expenses.
Bonus Tip: The best part is that you can try Shopify FREE for a 14-day trial, no credit card is required.
Stock Images, Fonts & Themes
There are many free web sites offering free stock images, fonts and web site themes. For high-quality items I recommend the following sites:
CreativeMarket
CreativeMarket has many resources including graphics, photos, fonts, textures, and themes. They frequently have coupon codes and bundles to save you more money. This web site uses the Lady Boss theme. See, even web developers buy themes to save time.
Bonus Tip: Be sure to check out their weekly freebies section! And if you sign up to CreativeMarket’s email newsletter, every week you will receive six freebies sent directly to your inbox!
ThemeForest
ThemeForest has a huge selection of amazing, yet affordable, web site theme templates. With a large community of contributors, they also have stock video, audio, and images. I have purchased several themes and plugins from ThemeForest.
Printing & Fulfillment Services
I have been using Printful for almost three years and it is the best fulfillment service for my shop. Printful is a printing and fulfillment service for print-on-demand products. This is perfect for small business owners and artists who are just starting out. It’s also the perfect solution for testing out your designs without the expense and burden of inventory and fulfillment.
How it works: A customer orders a product from your store. The order is automatically sent to Printful. Printful prints, packs and ships your product to the customer.
Pros:
- Printful integrates with the most popular e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Storenvy, Gumroad, and more.)
- Great selection of products to print your designs on (not just tees). They also keep expanding their product lines to keep up with trends.
- You can set up shop now. Create your products, upload your design files and start selling.
- Fast and affordable shipping. They also offer a variety of shipping options for your customer to choose from.
- Affordable products that are great quality. Printful also has a wide selection of American made products. They also print and assemble within the USA.
- Great customer service and helpful staff.
- As with the Shopify blog, Printful is another one of my favourite blogs.
Cons:
- Some users find the base costs of the products a little higher than comparative services. I’ve tried several print-on-demand services. Printful was the only one to hit everything on my wish list. I feel the price is worth the quality, fast shipping, and customer service.
- The Printful interface is easy to use and fast to set up. However, if you have a lot of products, the initial setup can be time-consuming.
- Like all print-on-demand services, you have no way of overseeing the fulfillment process. But this is the trade-off for not having the burden of inventory. I haven’t experienced any quality issues with Printful. In fact, I find their quality control to be impressive. On one occasion, they contacted me about a possible printing issue with a file I submitted. I was thankful that they caught this before printing.
Get started selling your products today with Printful.
Social Media Management
I’ve used several different social media platforms extensively. However, for my blog, I’m only focusing on Pinterest and Instagram now. Staying on top of social media takes a LOT of time and effort. Using the right tools will streamline this process and save you tons of time. Sifting through all the options can be overwhelming. These are the tools that work the best for my needs.
I have tried BoardBooster and Tailwind and I like them both for different reasons. BoardBooster works best with group boards. It uses secret boards to pull pins from to post to group boards based on a schedule you select. The secret to Pinterest success is pinning frequently and consistently, but who has the time? BoardBooster’s scheduler is a great way to maximize your marketing efforts.
Looping revives older curated pins by re-pinning them to the same board. This brings life to older content that you may have forgotten. And it gives a chance to new followers to see it as well.
If you’re like me and have been using Pinterest for a long time, you may have a lot of clutter. Boards that need to be re-organized or separated into niche boards. For example, I created a board for entrepreneurs and business. At 300 pins later, I realized I needed to separate this board into sub-topics (e.g. Marketing and Blogging). The Pin Mover feature makes fast work of this by helping you clean up boards quickly and easily. BoardBooster will also help you to detect duplicate content and broken pin links.
You can try BoardBooster for free (for the first 100 pins) and monthly plans start at $5.
Tailwind
I LOVE using Tailwind to manage my Pinterest account. It is a huge time-saver for me.Tailwind is an all-in-one platform. You can schedule pins and find new content. Tailwind provides in-depth analytics so you can measure and monitor performance. It also tracks the performance of pins from your domain.
Bonus Tip: If you use this link you’ll get a free month of Tailwind Plus and I’ll get a $15 credit towards my account.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a must-have addition to your Instagram arsenal. I use it for Instagram but you can also use it for Twitter. An added feature for Twitter is that you can copy followers to grow your network. With Crowdfire, you will work faster to reach your target audience. It tracks your followers, unfollowers, inactive users, fans (people you don’t follow back). Crowdfire will also tell you if someone has recently unfollowed you. You can schedule posts and send direct messages on auto-pilot. As an example, you can send a “Thanks for following me!” message every time someone follows you.
Later
I use Later to schedule my Instagram posts. Being a visual person, I love the calendar view for scheduling so I can see the entire month at a glance. The grid view helps me to ensure cohesive content in my feed and with my branding. If you’re running an online store (like I do), the Linkin.bio is a sweet feature. It allows you to include links on your posts to drive traffic to your store. You can also create a media library to store your images and posts for future reference. Another bonus is being able to find and re-post related images.
If you’re just starting out, the Free Plan comes with 30 photo posts per month and up to two profiles.
KnowEm?
Want to check if your business name is available on the popular online platforms? This site will instantly check your brand name, username or personal name on over 500 social media sites.
Note: This does not secure or register your business name or domain name.
Education
E-Courses
Having a busy life, I appreciate the flexibility of online courses. E-courses are the perfect way to continue building your skills at your own pace and in your spare time.
Udemy
I’ve enrolled in several courses with Udemy and find them to be high quality as well as affordable. Udemy offers online courses on a wide variety of topics, from business to design. There is something for everyone for every interest. Their courses are not subscription based so you only pay for the courses you want. You’ll save even more because they often run promotions and discounts.
Skillshare
I have completed a LOT of courses on Skillshare and highly recommend them. I like that they are subscription based so I can try as many courses as I want. Monthly subscriptions are affordable and they often have a new customer promotion running. Again, the course offerings are on a wide range of topics. However, I like their creative courses the best.
Bonus Tip: New customers can try it out for free for 14 days. Use this link and get 3 months of Premium for $0.99.
Security
Want increased internet security for home, business or while traveling? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A VPN creates a private connection by encrypting your data to and from private servers. Since you are connecting to a private server, no one can detect your real IP address. This protects your privacy and prevents any malignant intruders from spying on you. This includes your internet service provider (ISP), the government or hackers and hijackers. Even using your phone’s Wi-Fi can put you at risk if you are not connected to a VPN. There are free and pay VPN services, but I use AirVPN.
AirVPN is affordable, they have higher speeds and I like that they don’t keep logs (even more secure). I’ll be writing a more detailed post about VPNs in the future. Until then, get hooked up and start protecting your online privacy today.
Writing & Editing
Hemingway
I run all my writing pieces through the Hemingway app. You can toggle between writing and editing modes. It has formatting buttons so you can write within the app screen. You can also paste your text in for editing. Hemingway will scan for readability, grammar, and unnecessary words. I almost forgot the best part, it’s FREE.
Grammarly
For a more robust editor, I use Grammarly. It has transformed my writing. Grammarly offers both free and premium plans. This service goes far beyond grammar and spelling. With the browser extension, Grammarly is always running. It checks my writing in real-time while I’m using Twitter or Facebook. It even runs within my blog editor in WordPress. The premium plan has many more features including a plagiarism detector. If you want your audience to see you as the professional you are, then you must have polished writing. If you want to engage your readers, you need writing that is not only powerful but readable.
Grammarly offers a FREE plan as well as free trials of their premium plans. You have no excuse to get started.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
Use this FREE online tool to help you write better headlines. Better headlines = better SEO, increased traffic. The analyzer looks at title length and usage of power and emotional words. Type in your headline and the analyzer will rate your headline. Keep tweaking your headline until you’ve reached a score that will optimize engagement. CoSchedule also provides tips and articles to help you improve your headline rating.
Bonus Tip: Grab CoSchedule’s free download: 500+ Powerful Words For Writing Emotional Headlines
Organization & Productivity
Trello
I could write an entire post on the many uses of Trello. In a nutshell, Trello is an organization and productivity app. Like a digital Kanban board. I have tried many apps and Trello works the best for me. I use it daily for both my personal and business life.
You can organize your projects into boards and create cards for tasks. It also has the feature to add checklists and attachments as well. You can set due dates, and even colour code your tasks. The cards are like digital sticky notes that you can move around as make progress. You can create private boards or collaborative ones. It’s visual and easy-to-use so you can get started with it right away. It’s also FREE.
Unroll.me
Tame your inbox with Unroll. If you’re like me, you may be signed up to a lot of newsletters. Go to their web site and put in your email address. Unroll detects all your email subscriptions and lists them for you. From there you can decide which ones to keep and which ones you want to unsubscribe from. The ones you choose to keep you can add to your “Rollup.” The Rollup list filters these emails to go into their own folder. You can even choose a digest format so that you only receive your list emails once a day. You can also choose the time of day you want to receive them. Maybe inbox zero isn’t a unicorn after all.
theSkimm
I read a LOT. I could spend an entire morning keeping up with the latest news. The Daily Skimm is my new favourite service. And it has helped to bump up my productivity. Like you, my life is busy and it gets harder to find spare time. But I still want to stay informed with what’s going on in the world. TheSkimm delivers the morning news in a concise format straight to my inbox. And with a humourous flair.
I hope this toolkit helps you hit the ground running in your business or blog. Be sure to check out my Toolkit for Creatives and Family Resource Guide.
