The COVID-19 era has accelerated the great shift towards digital.
With lockdowns, restrictions and retail closures in place, companies are moving their business online where their consumers are – and you may well be among them.
In this article, we list 11 tools that set the healthy foundations for the growth of your online business.
As a bonus, we will also discuss several best practices that will give you a starting edge over your competitors.
Table of Contents
11 Tools And Platforms To Set Your Online Business On The Right Path
The platforms and websites in this list can supply the essential ingredients to your new online business – from acquiring a domain and a hosting plan to improving your content and automating emails.
1. Turnkey Internet
Turnkey Internet is a data center and cloud server hosting solutions provider that addresses concerns on hosting infrastructure.
Some of the company’s turnkey solutions include:
- Dedicated servers
- VPS Cloud servers
- Web hosting
- Enterprise Colocation
- Cloud Reseller
- Backup & Disaster Recovery
- And more
The company offers three pricing tiers each for the Dedicated and Cloud/VPS solutions, ranging from $45.99 to $99.99 for the former and from $14.99 to $34.99 for the latter.
2. Yoast SEO
Yoast is one of the world’s most popular SEO services, known exclusively for its WordPress plugins. The company is an authority on all things SEO and has a valuable blog with expert insights on topics critical to online success.
Yoast’s suite of products, features and integrations includes:
- Flagship Yoast SEO product
- Yoast SEO Premium
- SEMRush, Zapier, Ryte, Algolia and other integrations
- Yoast Duplicate Posts
- Plugins for local, video and news SEO
The brand also offers extensive SEO courses as well as professional support, technical documentation and other helpful materials.
3. Rev
Rev is the AI-based tool that converts audio and video files to text. It is suitable for businesses looking to increase their written content output and repurpose their multimedia content to blog articles.
The website provides three main types of speech-to-text solutions:
- Transcription: Convert audio and video to text
- English captions: Caption your videos
- Foreign subtitles: Translate videos with foreign subtitles
Another suite of products includes Automatic Live Captions for Zoom and Automated Transcriptions. No wonder Rev is used across different industries, from media and education to legal and marketing.
4. Domain.com
Domain.com is a domain marketplace website that lets users buy, sell or transfer their website domains. They can also shop for privacy programs, particular domain extensions and purchase premium domain experiences.
This website, which is one of the oldest in this business, also provides:
- eCommerce builder
- Website builder
- Professional emails
- Security certificates
- Website hosting solutions
- Besides an array of website-related services and products, the website is also an extensive knowledge base with video tutorials and a library of blog articles.
5. Contabo
Contabo is a one-stop shop for all your website hosting and domain purchasing needs. The company offers virtual private servers, virtual dedicated servers and extra powerful dedicated services. Other services include:
- Outlet servers
- Storage VPS
- Web hosting plans
- Domain selling and buying
- cPanel servers
The company is providing its services to 8 locations in 5 regions of the world. They offer multiple pricing tiers for every separate service, as well as customer support that is available 365 days a year.
6. Streams.live
Streams.live is a live eCommerce solution for “connecting with your audience and establishing trust.” It introduces an element of fun into the online shopping process by building a live community and hosting “shopping parties.”
Streams.live works in the following way:
- Start a live shopping party, share it with your audience and select the products that you want to present
- Go live and connect with your audience and embed your live session on your store’s online platforms
- Use the app’s analytics to learn about the engagement levels ahead of the next party
The website offers three pricing tiers – Personal, Pro and Enterprise – all offering different levels of features and access.
7. Instoried
Instoried is an AI-powered tool for analyzing the use of emotions in written content to help you enhance the reading experience for your audience. It is a great reinforcement to your storytelling strategies that “optimizes the required emotions in your content, making it more impactful.”
Ultimately, Instoried helps you:
- Boost your customer engagement
- Beautify your content while saving time
- Emotionally target your customers
The website also offers another flagship product, Developer Portal, that lets you analyze your content and integrate API into your system with the services you already use.
8. Time etc
Time etc is a company that pairs companies with virtual assistants that take care of the redundant tasks, saving their clients’ time and improving their overall work efficiency.
Your dedicated virtual assistant has the skill and experience to help you out with tasks such as:
- Composing and sending emails
- Scheduling content
- Admin duties
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Personal tasks
Since 2007, Time etc has provided virtual assistant services to over 22,000 companies and has offered articles, guides, books and more helpful resources.
9. Sopro
Sopro provides email marketing services to companies of all sizes, across all industries. With this platform, you can source your ideal buyers, send engaging, personalized emails to them and connect with them when they are ready to convert.
This email automation platform works like this:
- You tell Sopro’s team about your product, target audience and UVPs
- They verify a relevant audience for you and write an engaging, on-brand message
- Your email campaign goes live – each prospect gets a personalized message
- You receive sale inquiries directly
Sopro offers its platform solutions to businesses with a sales team, businesses without a sales team and enterprise businesses of all facets.
10. Sucuri
Sucuri is a cloud-based platform that ensures the protection and security of any website. Its suite of services includes a Website Security Platform, Website Firewall, Multi-Site Plans, Custom and Enterprise Plans and Partnerships.
These solutions feature:
- Website monitoring and alerts
- Protection from future hack attacks
- Website loading acceleration
- Help for hacked websites
- Backups and disaster recovery plan
Sucuri is available in four different tiers: Basic, Pro, Business and Custom.
11. HostGator
One of the world’s most popular website hosting companies, HostGator provides a massive array of hosting options, suitable for businesses of any size and with any technical requirements.
Its main set of services is divided into Hosting and PRO Hosting and covers:
- Shared hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- VPS
- Reseller
- WordPress hosting
- Website builder
HostGator also lets you register and transfer domains, use their vast knowledge base and get live chat support available 24/7, 365 days a year.
Once you collect all the right tools for establishing your business online, focus on these four steps to give you a head start over your competitors.
Get A Reliable Website Hosting Plan
There are various website hosting providers out there and they all supply different levels of server reliability, security measures and bandwidth.
Choosing your hosting service provider is an essential step because having an unstable hosting plan can hurt your Google rankings and lead to website slowness and bad user experience.
Pick a hosting provider for your business website based on these criteria:
- Security and technical support: Your chosen hosting plan should include regular backups and security checks. Ideally, it should also come with 24/7 live support in case of a hacker attack or any other online security breach.
- Scalability: Your business and your website will grow in time. Your hosting plan must be technically suited to follow this growth and adjust to your rising number of website visits.
- Integration of third-party software: You may decide to add an eCommerce store, an email automation tool or any other kind of third-party software. Make sure your provider has the capacity that will make this possible without compromising your website’s performance.
Produce Valuable & Relevant Content
Creating content that is relevant to your audience, well-researched and providing valuable information for your prospects not only raises your brand image but also contributes to better Google rankings.
The types of content you can include in your content calendar and produce regularly varies and may include:
- Blog articles
- Videos
- Newsletters
- Emails
- Digital PRs
- Case studies
- eBooks
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- And more
A well-defined content strategy can help you boost your brand awareness, gain the audience’s trust, increase lead generation and generate greater revenue.
Make sure your content is strategically applied to each stage of the conversion funnel for the best results.
Brush Up Your SEO
As much as 75% of users don’t go past the first page of search results when searching for something. This is why you must invest time and effort into properly optimizing your business website for search engines.
There are three different types of SEO that you can apply to your website:
- On-page SEO
- Finding and using relevant keywords in the content
- Naming images by using keywords
- Using alt tags
- Optimizing meta descriptions and title tags with keywords
- Using streamlined navigation
- Using internal and external links, etc.
- Off-page SEO
- Link building
- Guest blogging
- PPC Marketing
- Forum commenting, etc.
- Technical SEO
- Adding XML sitemaps
- Speeding up your website
- Avoiding duplicate content
- Making the website crawlable, etc.
Create An Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Omnichannel marketing provides a high level of messaging personalization and a seamless user experience at multiple platforms and touchpoints, like your website, social media channels, email marketing campaigns, chatbots, etc.
An omnichannel marketing strategy is suitable for most businesses today, as modern customers normally use multiple devices and online channels to interact with the brands they follow.
They expect a personalized approach at every point of interaction. An omnichannel strategy can provide this and deliver a specific message to different touchpoints and buyer journey stages.
