There are thousands upon thousands of tools available for solopreneurs and small business owners like you to choose from for every aspect of your business. But trying to choose the right tools to invest in when you're thinking about getting value for money, usability, features and other factors can make your head spin.
I've spent a lot of time and money searching for the right tools for my business. And in the following paragraphs I want to share with you what I consider to be the ultimate tech stack (set of tools) to build, maintain and grow your online business - they are a pleasure to use, will simplify your workflows, and slash your monthly expenses.
In the previous lessons in the Digital Business Growth Kit we identified the steps and strategies that increase revenue and grow your digital business. Now in this lesson you're going to discover the most cost-effective tools to implement these strategies.
This list is especially geared towards budget-conscious "DIY" solopreneurs and small business owners, so they had to meet the following criteria:
For context, before we get into the specific tools themselves, let’s quickly recap the 3 things you should focus on to increase revenue and grow your business, namely:
Let’s quickly outline some ways of achieving each…
Improving Your Conversions
- Improve the copy on your opt-in pages and sales pages.
- Continually track, test and improve your sales pages, email campaigns, ad campaigns, content, etc.
- Interact with your audience and build relationships on other platforms, such as social media.
- Establish your expertise in the niche
- Choose narrowly targeted audiences when generating traffic.
- Create offers that your audience really wants.
- Build relationships with your audience via a mailing list, as people like to do business with those they know, like and trust.
- Improve your website - ensure it’s fast-loading, user-friendly, responsive, accessible.
Generating more repeat sales from your buyers
- Create more products/services to offer your customers
- Create special offers, e.g. coupon sales, flash sales, referral discounts, etc.
- Improve customer retention by nurturing relationships with your customers and providing good customer service.
Increasing the average amount of money you make per sale transaction
- Create upsells (upgraded version of the product the customer is purchasing) or cross-sells (a related offer).
- Create OTOs (one-time offers) to increase urgency and conversions.
- Raise your prices and/or create higher-priced products
- Optimize your order forms and checkout process for maximum sales.
Now, let's get into the list of tools you should be using to effectively and efficiently implement these strategies...
The Essential Tech Stack
The first set of tools I want to introduce you to, which will form the main infrastructure for building, maintaining and growing your business, is from Thrive Themes.
They offer a comprehensive range of feature-filled, easy to use, intuitive, and affordably priced, conversion-optimized WordPress plugins and themes to give a real boost to your online business. They have tools for building websites, landing pages and funnels, membership sites, online courses, editing content, capturing leads, creating scarcity campaigns, split testing, creating online quizzes and more.
Here's a listing of the tools that they offer, collectively referred to as Thrive Suite:
Thrive Theme Builder - a full-fledged WordPress website builder
Thrive Architect - creates, edits and customizes landing pages and blog posts
Thrive Optimize - enables full A/B split testing and conversion tracking and optimization right within your own site
Thrive Leads - creates lead-capture forms to grow your list of email subscribers.
Thrive Ovation - captures, displays and manages social-proof customer testimonials on auto-pilot
Thrive Apprentice - allows you to create, manage and sell online courses, memberships, and other digital products.
Thrive Quiz Builder - creates online quizzes that allow you to gain valuable visitor insights and generate leads.
Thrive Ultimatum - creates scarcity campaigns with countdown timers to boost conversions.
Thrive Comments - gamifies your blog comments for more engagement.
Thrive Automator - automates processes and work flows between plugins and other online tools.
But, they’re not just about plugins and themes. With Thrive Themes you also have access to an extremely valuable bank of knowledge at Thrive University and on the Thrive Themes Blog.
Together they are an ever-growing library of actionable courses, guides, and tips about creating websites and funnels, growing your email list, increasing your conversions, and getting the most out of Thrive Themes products - everything you need to know about building, maintaining, and growing a successful online business.
I look at Thrive Themes not just as a collection of tools that I'm happy I investing in, but as a partner in business. They offer solutions for coaches, consultants, agencies, blogger and affiliate marketers, online course creators and ecommmerce businesses.
The Difference Thrive Themes Made For Me
Thrive Themes has literally been a game-changer for my online business. Before Thrive Themes my online income stream was focused solely on affiliate marketing. I actually came across Thrive Architect while searching (for a long time) for a after a long search for a website builder that was intuitive and allowed me to customize my websites exactly how you wanted them to look.
And, through the skills, knowledge and resources I’ve gain by being part of the Thrive Themes ecosystem, I was able to add on other income streams such as creating and selling online courses, and providing services to solopreneurs and small business owners, essentially tripling my online income streams.
In order to run a fully functioning online business, once you have Thrive Suite you really only need email marketing software to build, nurture and monetize a list of subscribers, and a seamless way for customers to purchase your products/services.
There are many many email marketing platforms out there... the email marketing software I highly recommend MailerLite...
I have found MailerLite to offer the best combination of features, great customer support, affordability, and ease of use for solopreneurs and small business owners... and it has one of the most generous free plans (up to 1000 subscribers for free!).
For the checkout experience you’ll want to use ThriveCart.
It is simply one of the most elegant and most-loved online cart platforms. It integrates seamlessly with popular payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal, as well as many other online tools such as email marketing services and membership platforms.
The combination of Thrive Suite, MailerLite and ThriveCart allows you to truly unleash your potential for growing your business without breaking the bank.
Let's look at which tools within the tech stack facilitates each growth strategy:
Growth Strategy | Tools To Use |
|---|---|
Continually track, test and improve your sales pages, email campaigns, ad campaigns, content, etc. | |
Interact with your audience and build relationships on other platforms, such as social media. | |
Establish your expertise in the niche | |
Create offers that your audience really wants. | |
Build relationships with your audience via a mailing list, as people like to do business with those they know, like and trust. | |
Improve your website - ensure it’s fast-loading, user-friendly, responsive, accessible. |  |
Create special offers, e.g. coupon sales, flash sales, referral discounts, etc. | |
Improve customer retention by nurturing relationships with your customers and providing good customer service. | |
Create upsells (upgraded version of the product the customer is purchasing) or cross-sells (a related offer). | |
Create OTOs (one-time offers) to increase urgency and conversions. | |
Raise your prices and/or create higher-priced products | |
Optimize your order forms and checkout process for maximum sales. | |
It's also recommended that you use a tool like UserWay to make sure your website more accessible to persons with disabilities. Having an accessible website means that it’s more usable to more people, including persons with disabilities, as well as other segments of the population such as senior citizens, persons with low literacy levels, people with low internet bandwidth and non-techie people.
How Does This Tech Stack Hold Up Against Our Set of Criteria for Budget-Conscious "DIY" Entrepreneurs?
Let’s vet this tech stack against our list of criteria - features, ease of use, affordability and customer support.
Ease of Use
The user interface within Thrive Suite prodcuts, MailerLite and ThriveCart are very intuitive and a joy to use... absolutely no need for know or understand any coding. Thrive Architect, in particular, is the closest thing to true WYSIWYG I have ever experienced when it comes to building and editing websites.
If you're the type of person that doesn't want to have to pull out the manual / knowledge base every time you want do do something, then you'll love Thrive Suite and these other tools.
Customer Support
All these tools provide good customer support. There are lots of video tutorials, a large knowledge-base, as well as a very active and helpful community groups (Thrive Themes and ThriveCart on Facebook, and MailerLite on Circle) where you'll get your questions answered quickly and effectively.
I do believe that ThriveCart should try improve on their response time to emails though. But, that's something that they're actively working on.
With MailerLite you also get 24/7 continuous live chat support with their Advanced Plan. This is also available for the first 30 days with their Free Plan.
Features
The tools in this tech stack offer tons of features, and together allow you to do everything you need to grow your business - build conversion-focused websites, capture leads, grow and nurture your email list, create memberships, sell products and services, create scarcity campaigns, split test your pages and campaigns, create online courses and other products to sell online, and more.
They all come with pre-designed templates you can use for your webpages, emails and checkout pages, online quizzes, online courses and more. These templates are fully responsive - they will automatically adjust to whichever device they are being viewed on - desktops, tablets or mobile phones.
They all have native integrations with tons of other online tools and apps, including email marketing systems, ecommerce platforms, webinar platforms, and more. Additionally, Thrive Automator is like Zapier but for WordPress.
Affordability
This where this tech stack really shines compared to other similar tools.
Let's start with Thrive Suite... it's $600/year for the full suite of 10 plugins. That equates to $50/month, which is very cost-effective when you consider that many other similar platforms cost significantly much more.
For example, Thrive Apprentice, which allows you to create online courses and run memberships sites is part of Thrive Suite. Other similar membership platforms such as MemberPress, Kajabi, Membermouse, etc. cost just as much as the entire Thrive Suite, and in some cases significantly more!
Effectively, with Thrive Suite you’re getting a set of 10 awesome tools (that actually grow your business) for the price 1 tool.
Also many of the other platforms offer advanced features and "add-ons", which you only get access to on higher priced plans... features that come standard with Apprentice.
As mentioned before, MailerLite has one of the most generous Free Plans, allowing you to have up to 1000 subscribers for free. The free plans on other email marketing services only go up to 500 subscribers, and are often very limited in terms of features.
Once you've gotten to beyond 1000, then MailerLite's Growing Business Plan (aptly named) is just $25/month for up to 2500 subscribers, which is still more reasonable that comparable email marketing platforms.
ThriveCart currently offers a lifetime account, for a one-time payment of $495, where other similar cart platforms such as SamCart, CartFlows, ClickFunnels and SureCart cost upwards of $269 per year, and in some cases that much per month!
So, with this tech stack it means that you can effectively build, maintain and grow your business online at just $75 per month ($50 + $25) plus a one-time investment of $495 for ThriveCart.
One tech stack that's a little higher priced is HighLevel, which is an all-in-one platform that will give you all the tools, support and resources you need to build, manage, market and grow your business, and has a Starter Package priced at $97 per month.
When looking at profit, one often neglected variable is that reducing your expenses means increased profits.
One area where solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs can easily reduce expenses is on the tools you use to run your business.
But, many entrepreneurs don’t realize that they’re spending more than they need to, and aren’t aware that there are other more cost-effective (sometimes even better) solutions than what they are currently using.
And if they do become aware, often times they choose not to change because they’ve "grown accustomed" to what they currently use and are worried about how to migrate over to the new platform. So, they to continue paying the unnecessary money month after month, eating into their profits.
ActiveCampaign is a very telling example of this. It seems that ActiveCampaign has managed to capture a large portion of the small business entrepreneurs market. Now, it's a robust platform and really shines when it comes to complex automations. But, the truth is many of the features it has, aren't even used by their customers, and they really don't need to use it either. Plus ActiveCampaign is expensive. But people are hesitant to move from ActiveCampaign to other platforms.
As a quick comparison, let's look at MailerLite's Advanced Plan (their highest tier) versus ActiveCampaign's Professional Plan, both of which offer similar features.
For up to 2500 subscribers, with MailerLite it's $432 per year, and with ActiveCampaign is $1,788.00.
So, ActiveCampaign customers are paying 4x more for similar features!
How to Quickly Learn More These Tools
MailerLite - Check out MailerLite's quick onboarding overview for new customers.
Thrive Suite - Check out their free Get Started With Thrive Suite: Master the Entire Toolkit with These Short Lessons course which shows you how to get started, build your business website from scratch, and expand your website's functionality with Thrive Suite.
ThriveCart - Check out the short explainer video on ThriveCart's website.
Conclusion
You just discovered the ultimate tech stack to effectively and efficiently grow your digital business, while slashing your monthly expenses - Thrive Suite, MailerLite and ThriveCart.
I highly recommend that you learn more about these tools, and give them a try out as soon as possible... the sooner you do, the sooner you can actually realize growth in your business. If you're currently using other tools, don't be afraid to explore more cost-effective solutions (migrating may actually be a lot less headache than you imagine).
If you find yourself struggling to grow your online business, and tired of juggling multiple tools, while trying to keep your expenses down, then I encourage you to enroll in the Digital Business. Growth Kit.
You’ll learn proven growth strategies that produce higher conversions, more repeat sales and more money per transaction for your business.