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Looking for online business resources and tools for online success?

Running an online business requires a vast amount of resources and tools in order to be successful.

After building my online business over the past 3 years, I compiled this list of online business tools I tested in my business. I also provide honest feedback on the resources you require for success. To ensure your online business runs smoothly and successfully, refer to this as your guide.

You might be familiar with the saying,

“a carpenter is only as good as the tools he uses“

well the same is true for an online business.

Whether you just started your online business or you are looking for easier ways to manage your existing online business, this list guides you to build and manage a successful online business.

To help you easily find the type of tool you are looking for, I categorized them as follows:

• Category One: Social Media Marketing & Management Tools & Resources
• Category Two: Blogging & Copy Writing Tools & Resources
• Category Three: Graphic & Content Design Tools & Resources
• Category Four: Landing Pages & Website Builder Tools & Resources
• Category Five: Email Marketing & CRM Tools & Resources
• Category Six: Project Management & Sharing Tools & Resources
• Category Seven: Market Research & Analytics Tools & Resources
• Category Eight: Online Course Creation & Hosting Tools & Resources
• Category Nine: Communicating & Calendar Scheduling Tools & Resources
• Category Ten: Finance & Payment Processing Tools & Resources

Category One: Social Media Marketing & Management

Your target audience is spending a lot of time on social media, which means that you should too. To grow your following, scheduling your social posts, managing your accounts and engagement can be time consuming if you are doing it all manually.

Here are some social media marketing tools I tested to help you with your social media strategy:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite makes it super easy to manage all of your social media accounts from a single dashboard. They also allow you to schedule posts to multiple accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They also provide real-time analytics to help you spot trends and see how your content is performing.

Later

Later is one of the favorite tools for planning and scheduled visual content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. 

CoSchedule

CoSchedule allows users to build out their entire marketing strategy from one master calendar, collaborate with their teams, and streamline their entire execution process in one place. It’s a complete marketing engine for your blog posts as well, allowing you to advance-schedule tweets and social posts promoting your content as you’re publishing your post. It’s also is a great tool when you have a team to collaborate over your entire content schedule.

Buffer

Buffer allows you to quickly and easily schedule posts for all of your social accounts. This app will publish them automatically, according to the posting schedule you put in place. You can customize your posts for each network, share posts to multiple profiles at once, and analyze the performance of your posts across all your social networks.

Plann

Plann is the #1 Instagram and Social Media Scheduler and my ultimate favorite. This is an all-in-one creation, scheduling and publishing tool for social media posts and stories! It uses a grid to help you visualize your posting, gives you access to sets of hashtags, enables you to schedule according to the best times when your audience are online and it integrates with Canva! And it is super cost-effective.

Category Two: Blogging & Copy Writing

Creating content for your online business, whether long form, evergreen or educational, you require certain copy writing tools and resources to help you get it right.

As a fierce blogger, I just had to include my favorite blogging resources and tools too!

Here are some of the great tools I use that helps me with writing my Blog articles and optimizing my sites:

WordPress

43% of the web is built on WordPress. More bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies use WordPress than all other options combined. I write my Blog Post Articles on WordPress and what I love about it, its completely FREE!

Yoast 

Yoast helps you with your website optimization, whether it be through our widely used SEO software or our online SEO courses yoast is here to help. What I love about Yoast, is the free plugin for WordPress to optimize blog posts for SEO purposes.

Lumen5

Lumen5 easily make videos for content marketing, thought leadership, and brand awareness in a snap. It integrates with your blog platform and automatically transforms blog posts into videos with A.I.

Coschedule Headline Analyzer

Coschedule Headline Analyzer is the #1 Free headline analyzer tool that helps you write headlines that drives traffic, shares and search results

Pomofocus

Pomofocus is a customizable pomodoro timer that works on desktop & mobile browsers. The aim of the app is to help you focus on any task you are working on, especially when you only have a limited time to get things done!

Semrush

Semrush is the largest keyword research database on the market and analyze everything you need to know about a keyword.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest helps you to create a project so you can track and improve your SEO traffic. Track and improve your rankings. Get daily updates and alerts on critical issues on your website while monitoring your SEO health.

Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool is using google autocomplete as the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner and Other Keyword Research Tools. Free version of Keyword Tool generates up to 750 long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term. You don’t even have to create an account!

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

Hubspot Blog Topic Generator is a free Blog Ideas Generator used like a search engine tool. Definitely a must in the Blogging industry!

Thesaurus

Thesaurus helps you find synonyms and antonyms of words for better copy. It also helps with grammar and provides writing tips.

Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway Editor App is probably the best tool for writing for SEO. This app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors to help you format your text, keep you in active voice and gives you a word count so you can track your wording. Copy and Paste directly into your Blog Post Platform and your copy is SEO friendly!

Grammarly

Grammarly is a cloud-based typing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes. It uses artificial intelligence to identify and search for an appropriate replacement for the error it locates. Take the Guesswork Out of Great Writing. Check Your Emails, Documents, Essays, and More. Get Corrections From Grammarly While You Write on all Your Favorite Sites. Eliminate grammar errors. Easily improve any text. Plagiarism Detection. Absolutely a must for any content creator!

Category Three: Graphic & Content Design

Creative entrepreneurs are most likely experienced designers but most online business entrepreneurs are not. Graphic Design is then not something you should try to do all by yourself. 

Here are some of my favorite apps for creating beautiful designs, social graphics, logos, templates, workbooks etc:

Canva

Canva is great for creating graphics that can be shared on social media – from Instagram images to Facebook or Twitter banners, and more. There are plenty of templates, styles, fonts and background images to choose from. For me, Canva is the bible of all tools and really helps me to create strategic content for my online business.

SmartMockups

SmartMockUps is the #1 product mockup generator. It helps you create stunning product mockups easily and online. You can start with samples and upload your own images. It can become pricey.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud gives you access to apps including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and Acrobat. You can design logo’s, warm up a cool image, edit a social video or blockbuster movie. Whatever you want to create, Adobe Creative Cloud have what you need to make it amazing.

Attract

Attract is a free tool that helps you find the right lead magnet idea and then create it in minutes. It helps to attract subscribers to grow your email list. 

PDF Escape

PDF Escape might not be categorized as a graphic design app but it helps you to edit your graphic designs or text in your content. You can annotate PDF documents, allow others to fill out your PDF forms without the need to print it, convert documents and you can share PDF documents online.

Category Four: Landing Pages & Website Builders

As an online business owner, you know the importance of a sales page for your product, service or offering, right? Some just need a simple landing page to capture the email address of potential customers and others require a complete website.

The following tools are what I started out with, implemented and finally stuck with:

Leadpages

Leadpages is a great tool for creating high-quality landing pages quickly and easily. You can create landing pages using any of the 70+ customizable templates and deploy them on any platform including WordPress and non-WordPress websites, and even Facebook. You can do your own testing with the A/B split-test feature and conversion rate stats and analytics. It just became too expensive for me to continue with.

Thrive Themes

If you’re using a WordPress website then using Thrive Themes is a great option. Thrive Themes are conversion focused WordPress themes and plugins to make your entire website convert more of your visitors into subscribers and customers.

Sumo

Sumo is a suite of free tools that can be used to grow your website’s traffic. They’re easy to install, work on any website, and great for creating popups and opt-in forms to collect email addresses from your website or blog. Definitely a great tool to add to your list.

Kajabi

Kajabi empowers you to create all kinds of content to showcase what you know best, including online courses, coaching programs, podcasts, memberships, and more. So if you decide to use this platform for any of your offers, you might as well use it for your website or landing page too. It is costly and I found it very difficult to manage.

Showit

Showit gives you complete creative control so you can finally build the website you’ve been dreaming of. It is a powerful website and landing page platform and really easy to learn! You can drag and drop with ease and integrate with most online apps. It is the website builder made for creatives. My websites, landing pages and blog is built on Showit. The greatest part is it is cost-effective and comes with awesome support!

Shopify

Shopify allows you to create an online store with beautiful themes, responsive and customizable designs without needing design skills.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is a website and a sales funnel builder for entrepreneurs. It gives you the tools and strategies you need in one convenient spot to market, sell and deliver your products online. It is a simple drag and drop web page editor to help build funnels.

Category Five: Email Marketing & CRM

You probably heard it before, the most valuable asset you have in your online business is your email list. Without exception, growing and building a relationship with your email list of potential and existing clients is vital to your online business success. 

Here are my most favorite email service providers and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms I tested and currently use:

MailChimp

MailChimp is a great starting point for building your email list. They’ve good some great marketing automation tools and aren’t too difficult to learn how to use either. They have enough powerful features to be used by Fortune 500 companies, at a price point that works for anyone. I started my online business with this chimp!

ActiveCampaign

I often refer to ActiveCampaign as the middle ground between a standard email service provider (ESP) and a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Basically, it’s powerful AND easy to use (a rare combo!). You can use it for integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM. This is the King of email marketing and I stick with it.

Hubspot Email & CRM Tool

With HubSpot’s email marketing tools, everything you need is baked right in. Design and send professional emails independently, and optimize to improve performance. Since it’s powered by your HubSpot CRM, you know the data you’re using to customize your emails is accurate. It might be tricky to learn all the elements at first, but being a free tool, it is worth it!

OptinMonster

OptinMonster Instantly grow your email list, get more leads, and increase sales with the world’s most popular conversion toolkit.  

Category Six: Project Management & Sharing

Managing projects internally or externally with your team and clients, your business requires a great project management tool. 

I struggled to find the right project management tool for my business. As I am in the service industry, I needed a tool that can handle internal processes, tasks, time management and document sharing without me dropping balls or missing deadlines. 

Here are some great apps for managing projects, teams and sharing files with clients and collaborators:

Trello

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way. It’s incredibly easy to use and accessible on any device.

Asana

Asana is another popular project management software. With tasks, projects, conversations, and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish. Easily create tasks for yourself or assign one to a teammate. Organize your tasks into shared lists or boards for your initiatives, meetings, and programs. Sections and columns let you customize Asana to match your workflows and add structure to any project.

Evernote

Capture, organize and share notes from anywhere. With Evernote on your desktop and mobile devices, your notes are always with you and always in sync. Enhance your notes with links, checklists, tables, attachments, and audio recordings. Even handwritten notes are searchable.

ClickUP

ClickUp is one app to replace them all. It’s the future of work – where anyone can work on anything. More than just task management – ClickUp offers docs, reminders, goals, calendars, scheduling, and even an inbox. Fully customizable, ClickUp works for every type of team, so all teams can use the same app to plan, organize, and collaborate. I use this to manage my deadlines, brainstorm projects and the mind maps are a great add on to dive deep into sections of a project. The best thing for me, it integrates with my Google Calendar and it is affordable!

Airtable

Airtable is an easy-to-use online platform for creating and sharing relational databases. The user interface is simple, colorful, friendly, and allows anyone to spin up a database in minutes. Airtable is a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and achieve ambitious outcomes. To me, this app is spreadsheets on steroids! And the best part, you can integrate, automate and share your workspaces with others for free!

G Suite (formerly Google Apps)

If you like to keep it simple, you can’t go wrong with G Suite. With Gmail, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, and Google Drive, and a number of other helpful tools, Google pretty much has you covered. The absolute must for successfully keeping documents safely in the cloud, sharing documents carefully without the risk of corruption and managing your business from any device.

Dropbox

Dropbox not only allows you to safely and securely store your business files, but, if you’re working with other people, it makes it easy for you to collaborate on shared documents. They bring your files together, in one central place. They’re easy to find and safely synced across all your devices—so you can access them anytime, anywhere. No more wasting the day tracking down work. A great alternative if you are not using G Suite.

Category Seven: Market Research & Analytics

As an online business owner, the need to understand your audience, current trends in your market and what people want are extremely important for success. 

I am a numbers geek, and I love to geek out with tracking and measuring my efforts. 

Here are some of the great tools I discovered that helps with tracking, surveying and understanding industry trends:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is the most widely used web analytics service on the internet, and an invaluable resource for gaining insights about your website visitors and customers.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows you to discover the most shared links and key influencers for any topic. It’s great for analyzing what content is performing best for any topic or competitor. You can also use it to find key influencers to promote and share your content.

Google Trends

Google Trends is another great free service provided by Google that displays how often specific keywords, subjects, and phrases have been searched for on Google over a period of time. This is great for seeing if a particular topic is trending upwards or downwards in popularity. It also offers “Hot Trends” which is a snapshot of top 40 fastest-rising search queries in the United States.

Answerthepublic

Answerthepublic is a search listening tool for market, customer and content research. Get instant raw search insights direct from the minds of your customers.

Typeform

Typeform is a great tool for creating surveys, contact forms, and quizzes to share with your audience and customers. This will come in handy when you’re doing market research or creating online courses for your customers.

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey Enterprise empowers organizations to gain insights from customers, employees, and the market—securely and at scale. Everything you need to create great surveys – start for free.

Interact

Interact is a platform where you can create interactive quizzes that generate leads & sell products. Harness the power of quizzes to grow your email list, segment your leads and recommend products to increase sales.

Category Eight: Online Course Creation & Hosting 

As an online course creator and educator, finding the right platform to create your course is not an easy task. Just over the last 5 years, the online education industry exploded and with so many platform options to choose from, you might just get overwhelmed.

I was completely overwhelmed and dived deep into testing to find the right platform to create my courses, coaching and membership programs for the best experience possible.

Here I share what I tested, why I did not continue using them and what I have found to be the ultimate solution to this problem:

Thinkific

Thinkific is where you turn your expertise into revenue with online courses. Create, market and sell your expertise with a single platform that gives you total control of your brand and business. I chose this course creation platform mainly because of the affordability. If you are not a web designer, it can be tricky to get all the elements to work well but for the price, you might just stick around. I love their free resources but support is not that great.

Membershipworks

MembershipWorks is your all-in-one membership software solution to manage members, have a member directory, event calendar & registrations page, online payments portal and more! It integrates with most websites. As I am fairly graphic orientated, I found this platform tricky and difficult to use but I am sure if I had more patience I would be able to implement it and use it.

Kajabi

Kajabi empowers you to create all kinds of content to showcase what you know best, including online courses, coaching programs, podcasts, memberships and more. I did use this platform for about 3 months and it just did not give me that “awe” feeling. Yes, its the most comprehensive tool out there, but I did not like their email marketing platform, the way the membership area is managed or the sales pages. So I ended up using it together with other platforms which made this option a really expensive one. But, I would definitely recommend you try it!

Searchie

Searchie for content creators to create, manage and sell your content ALL in one place. A course and membership platform designed by content creators for content creators. Take control of your content and turn what you know, love and do into revenue. I love this platform so much and I host my business membership here as well as all courses and my signature coaching program. It is my go-to tool for running a successful online business. The Searchie Academy is a great benefit and support is just out of this world!

Category Nine: Communicating & Calendar Scheduling

As an online business, you, your team and clients communicate virtually. Having regular team meetings and communication are essentials to the success of any business. You need a reliable program to facilitate these meetings and giving your team or clients the ability to schedule calls.

During the pandemic, most of us were introduced to various mediums of online meetings. I had to stay in touch with my team, collaborators and with my clients. Running a successful online business requires top of the chart apps that enables you to keep the communication flowing.

Here are my top choices when it comes to conducting and scheduling online meetings:

Calendly

Calendly is a simple, easy-to-use, yet powerful scheduling software. It eliminates the old-school way of using email and phone tags for scheduling appointments, calls, interviews, demos, and more. Create different appointment types and availability on your calendar, then share the link to your calendar with whoever asks to book a call with you.

AddEvent

AddEvent makes it easy to share your events and calendars using a powerful add-to-calendar button, beautiful embeddable widgets, RSVP and subscriber tools.

Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is another great tool for staying in touch with others. Message contacts, start free video or voice calls, and hop on a conversation with one person or a group. Sync your chats from device to device and keep the conversation going wherever you are.

Slack

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool, used by millions of people and companies to manage internal communication among teams. This app brings all your team’s communication together, giving everyone a shared workspace where conversations are organized and accessible. A great way to avoid using email!

Crisp

Crisp is a messenger app that lets you chat with your customers. The all-in-one multichannel messaging platform that connects customers and companies.

Many Chat

ManyChat helps you to engage with your customers instantly. It allows you to automate interactive conversations in Instagram Direct Messaging, Facebook messenger, and SMS to grow your brand.

Here are my top platforms when it comes to hosting events like an online meeting, webinar or presentation:

Zoom

Zoom offers remote conferencing services including video conferencing, web conferencing, webinars, and screen sharing. Offering both meeting and webinar software, Zoom combines video conferencing, online meetings, and mobile collaboration.

Demio

Demio is great for webinars, live Q&A sessions, interviews, web summits, and live training or product demos. With advanced segmentation, automation, real-time engagement, in-depth tracking, actionable analytics, in-webinar features such as Call-To-Actions, Handouts, Featured Chat and more, their features help to make your webinars even more powerful. Plus, it’s 100% browser-based and focused on making a better experience for your attendee.

GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is one of the more expensive webinar platforms out there, but it’s extremely reliable and robust. With built-in reports, analytics and full-service registration, GoToWebinar helps you generate a list of your most engaged attendees, so your sales team can turn qualified leads into customers

LiveStorm

LiveStorm is Video Conferencing Software to manage meetings, webinars, virtual events from start to finish. Experience an end-to-end platform.

WebinarKit

WebinarKit is the first all in one auto-webinar solution that combines building your entire high converting marketing funnel, running your simulated live webinar, selling, and re-marketing to your leads all inside one powerful tool.. Without insane hefty fees or the problems that existing, older auto-webinar software have out there. I vouch for this one as the best tool for any online business!

Category Ten: Finance & Payment Processing

Building an online business means you need to be able to send, receive and track payments online. 

Here are some reliable tools I use for payment processing, bookkeeping and budgeting to help you manage your finances:

PayPal

PayPal is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account. You can securely link your bank accounts, Visa Debit cards, credit cards, and send money to or accept money from almost anyone in the world.

Stripe

Operating in over 25 countries, Stripe allows both private individuals and businesses to accept payments over the internet. Stripe is particularly popular among entrepreneurs that sell digital products online, including online courses.

Wise

Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, is a cheap way to send money abroad. No subscriptions fees and little as possible transaction fees with no hidden fees.

ThriveCart

ThriveCart allows you to create high converting checkout pages, upsells, sales funnels & more with ThriveCart. Boost your revenue with the world’s easiest and most powerful cart platform. Easy To Use. Coupons. Affiliate Center. Funnel Builder. 1-Click Upsell. The easiest way to set up a shopping cart platform enabling your business to boost revenue with high converting cart pages.

Mint

Mint is a web-based personal financial management service. This free, easy to use software helps you manage your money, create budgets, pay your bills, categorize your expenses, receive alerts for unusual account charges, and even track your credit score.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online is widely regarded as the top accounting software solution for small businesses. Whether it’s the affordable pricing, the various pricing plans or the elite features, QuickBooks is a dream accounting software application for small businesses.With automation, integrations, built-in reports, automatic backups, electronic invoicing and the use of a mobile app, your business finances are in the best hands! As a QuickBooks Pro Advisor since 2006, I firmly recommend this user-friendly, cost-effective, all comprehensive accounting solution for any business.

BetterProposals

BetterProposals helps you close more deals and get paid faster. Modern, on-brand proposals that streamline your sales process. Sent, tracked and signed in minutes. This is my go-to tool for creating all my client proposals and get them signed online! Really not an expensive solution.

There you have it! My complete list of online business resources and tools for the success of your online business. To help you find the best combination for your own online business, I created a checklist of all the essential tools and resources for an online business.

You can get this checklist here.

Since 2019, I have been testing, implementing, switching and trying out online applications to suit my business needs best. I can confidently say, running an online business is an ever evolving business. You will have to continually try new things, test new apps and see what works well for where your business is at the time. 

As technology evolves, so will your online business requirements change.

In conclusion to this comprehensive list, I share with you the combination of tools and resources that really works well for my own online business:

• For Social Media Content Scheduling, I use PLANN
• For Blogging & Copy writing, I use the
  • Hemingway Editor,
  • Grammarly and
  • YoastSEO plugin on WordPress
• For Content & Graphic Design, I use Canva and PDFEscape
• For my web platform and all my sales pages, I use Showit
• For email marketing I use ActiveCampaign and OptinMonster
• For project management I use ClickUp.
• For collaborations and outlining and sharing my projects I use Airtable.
• For sharing my documents and managing my business I use G Suite
• For market research I use AnswerthePublic
• For analytics I use Google Analytics
• For surveys and online applications I use Typeform
• For my online courses and membership platform I use Searchie
• For scheduling meetings I use Calendly
• For hosting my events I use Zoom
• For hosting webinars I use WebinarKit
• For receiving payments I use PayPal or Wise
• For running my business bookkeeping and financials I use QuickBooks Online
• For providing proposals to clients I use BetterProposals.

Disclaimer: This Site may contain links to affiliate websites, and we receive an affiliate commission for any purchases made by you on the affiliate website using such links.

If you want to learn how to use these software applications, tools and resources to automate processes in your business, come join me inside B.O.S.S Society, my business membership created for creatives, entrepreneurs and online business owners.

See you online!