If you want to follow your passion, become an entrepreneur and work online, there are quite a lot of tools to start an online business without causing you to break the bank. The first thing you should do is study the market, look at online forums and comment sections of your competitor sites and then, think about launching a product or a service. Next, you should focus on having a presence on social media, on establishing an expert status for yourself and even on outsourcing tasks you don’t have the time or the inclination for. And there are some tools to start an online business that will come in really handy during these initial stages.
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Hostt
Since an online business needs a website domain and since hosting can be pretty expensive, Hostt.com can be one of the most important tools to start an online business that you can use and you won’t have to spend a fortune on it. It actually offers free hosting for all your websites, 24/7 tech support and a cpanel (that makes website management quick). There’s no catch, they only ask you to have one domain name with them (which costs $13,95 a year).
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Wave Accounting
Wave Accounting is actually a free app that will help you manage your business finances from any place you can get online. It allows you to separate and track your personal finances too. Its features include unlimited invoices, unlimited expense tracking and basically all you need to start a small online business.
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Wordpress/ Shopify
Once your website is set up and hosted, you will need a platform on which your web pages will sit. For this you could choose Wordpress, since it’s a very popular solution now days and most bloggers use and recommend it. If you think that you’ll have a large product catalog, you could try another service such as Shopify since this is a more suitable option for an online store.
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BuzzSumo
The next thing to do is to work on the content for your website, one that your readers will find interesting, educative and engaging. BuzzSumo is actually a little tool that analyzes what works best for your customers and it will help you find content and topics that will keep your readers interested.
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MailChimp
Once you have the website and the content, you’ll need to promote your products and one of the best ways to do it is email marketing. MailChimp is actually an email newsletter service that it’s used by over 7 million people worldwide. You can choose their “free forever” plan if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers and you send less than 12,000 emails per month.
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Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.
Buffer
Next, you should use social media to share your new posts and to make your online business more popular. Buffer is a neat little tool that will allow you to schedule all your posts across different social media. It’s very easy to use and very helpful at the same time.
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Xoom
Xoom is actually a very good alternative to PayPal because while PayPal is notorious for charging hefty transaction fees, Xoom only charges a flat fee of $4.99 for up to $2,999. They also offer 24/7 customer support and faster money transfers so this makes it one of the easiest ways to send money all around the world.
There are a lot of tools you can use if you want to start an online business. I just mentioned a few but I’m sure that there are many more I could add to this list. Do you know any other tools to start an online business you'd recommend? Please tell us about them in the comments section!
Sources:
lifehack.org
todaymade.com
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