What You Need to Build and Sell Online
There are hundreds of products and services for making a successful website business. Below is a short list of some of the best tools for building and marketing a website. They are all used by professionals, easy to use and ready to scale as you grow.
Tools for Building a Website
Web Hosting
WP Engine is the best value in premium WordPress hosting. Their platform delivers enterprise grade speed, security, and customer service at an affordable price. They have great features like auto backup, staging and site clone.
SiteGrounds is one of the cheapest reliable hosting solutions. They're a great choice for early stage projects with a low budget and want to host several websites.
WordPress Website Design
ThemeForest offers hundreds of good looking themes that are very affordable. However many of the themes are bloated with too many features and poorly coded.
StudioPress themes are always a great choice. They are well coded and very professional looking. They are built on the Genesis framework which adds speed and security but can make finding a knowledgeable developer a little harder to find.
Dynamic Website Builder simplifies website development with the intuitive no-coding options.Customize your content and site functionality in seconds. No need to know code to develop a professional website.
Beaver Builder is a complete drag and drop system for creating and maintaining responsive wordpress websites. Multiple themes and templates make is easy to generate a website that fits your business.
Content Creation
UpWork is a resource that connects businesses with freelancers. Businesses can search for support staff such as develpers and customer service representatives. Freelancers can bid for single projects and lead to long term positions.
WriterAccess makes it easy to find freelancer writers. Writers are screened to provide the best qualified individual. Placing orders and managing workflow is made easy.
Graphic Design
99Designs is a market place for crowdsource graphic designs. Customers request a design and graphic designers compete to offer design ideas. Customers can provide feedback to get the design that will meet their needs.
Crowdspring brings thousands of designers to present designs for anything from logos to websites. Constant interaction and a free legal contract guarantee satisfaction and ownership of chosen design.
Video
Vime is a video service featuring short films that can be shared and purchased. Great platform to show your films and a great way to support creators.
Wistia is a video hosting service with analytical and marketing tools. Use a SEO tools and customizable players to increase appeal. Ability to collaborate with a team using the service, will improve final result.
Tools to Sell Online
E-commerce
WooComerce is an e-commerce platform to manage your own store or develop a store to meet your client needs. With your own store you can design the look of your store, manage payment, and track inventory. As a developer, you can use free WordPress themes and the open-sourced communities to develop your projects.
Shopify is adds ecommerce to any website in minutes. Showcase your product in facebook, pinrest, twitter. Setup an online store suitable for of Point of Sale and online shopping cart transactions.
Digital Product Fulfillment
Gumroad is a one stop site to sell electronic and physical products. Build an audience, control pricing options, and analytical sales tools optimize your profit. Special features include being able to offer streaming service , generate software license keys, and customizing SKUs.
E-Junkie is a community of artists, crafters and DIYers. Sell, buy and learn from other member blogs. Drop-in code snippets add ecommerce support for payments and shipping.
Affiliate Platforms
Commision Junction is an affiliate marketing provider. They manage a network of advertisers with ads to sell and publishers with website to promote products and services. Contents must center around Style, Lifestyle, Home, Technology, or Business.
ShareASale is an affiliate marketing service with focus on customer support. Webminars and training ensures clients can put more quaility content or can promote their product to the correct target audience.
Online Course Creation
Zippy Courses is a an online course builder. Create modules and the module lesson in a matter of seconds. Easy to use editors allow users to create ebooks, video courses, or an 8-week training course with scheduled release of modules.
WP courses is a WordPress Plugin that lets you ad creates lessons. Set user access, certifications of completion, and course content. Manage progress with quizes and gradebook feature.
Tools for Internet Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Yoast SEO Plugin is a search engine optimizing plugin for wordpress. Feautures include meta descriptions, multiple laguage support, robot meta configuration, page clean up options, and canonical link element.
Moz is a an SEO site geared toworard local SEO to increase visibility and and frive more foot traffic. It is the sponsor of Mozcon, a marketing conference, where professionals are given the opportunity for like minded individuals to share stratergy and proven tactics of increase business.
Email Marketing
MailChimp is an email service where businesses can create custm emails to promoted product awareness. Marketing automation makes sure you target the right audience and with the advance analytics, you are able to see how your business growing. Manage your subcribers list to prvide better campaigns and promotions.
ConvertKit offers opt-in forms and a "gift for signing up" system. Choose from three landing page template to provide the best user experience. Automate email content to be sent in a timed manner and in a personalized fashion.
Email List Builder
OptinMonster converts visitors into subscribers. Well time pop-ups with exit intent technology read visitor behavior and target them with a campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave.
SumoMe is a service that helps you see where your customers are clicking on your site for the purpose of improving your content. The List Builder smart mode detects when visitor is about to leave and generates a lightbox pop up for the visitors email.
Social Media
HootSuite is a social media management system. With the ability to tap into news sites, blogs, forums, and other public places, you can get a real account about how customer feel about your brand. Monitor serveral social media threads at once.
Edgar is a social media scheduling tool that automatically posts messages through facebook, twitter and linked in. Control when and how often you post photos and texts.
Analytics
Goggle Analytics is a marketing analytics program designed to provide insight into pre-purchase shopping behavior.It reports and tracks web traffic. In conjunction with AdWords, users can track landing page quality and conversions such as sales, leads, views, geographical locations and downloads.
MixPanel is an analytics tool that analyze the actions people take in your application instead of page views. Using segmentation technology, users can filter by specific parameters. Understand who plays a video, uploads a picture, or shares a post.
Goggle Webmaster Tools is a no charge web service to check indexing and optimize visibility of their website. Tools include robot.txt check, crawl rate, keyword search, and google search elements.
Hotjar is conversion rate optimization solution designed to report heatmaps, and recording of vistors mouse movements. Target questions to specific visitors to uncover concerns with polls and surveys.
Other Notable Tools
All-in-one Platfroms
RainMaker Platform helps to build content driven websites. The simple development tools include themes, landing pages and traffic tools. Speed, uptime ands security are an bonus from the hosting services.
HubSpot is a marketing service that collects user profile information to understand your clients. SEO, social media, marketing automation, analytics and CRM sync are a few of driving factors to have a sales force better prepared to close deals..
LeadPages is a marketing service centered around collecting leads and driving sales. It uses webpages, emails, social media, and text message to develop leads. Confirmation pages that upsell and promotional texts that request user emails are a few of the services that increase sales.