Top Tools I love to run your thriving business

I’ve always had a WordPress website as it’s just the gold standard in my opinion. For the last five years I’ve been using Thrive Suite, which you can think of as your all-in-one toolbox to create a WordPress website that converts visitors into leads and customers, and the complete marketing and sales platform.

For just $19 a month you get access to their beautiful Thrive Architect -the visual page builder I personally use to design and build all my website landing and sales pages (like this one)! It’s so damn easy to use too.

You also get Thrive Leads for creating all sorts of awesome forms and pop-ups to build your email list, Thrive Quiz builder, Thrive Ultimatum for countdown timers and upsells and even Thrive Apprentice - for creating and hosting your own online courses. I mean you get everything!

ConvertKit perfect for content creators, bloggers, coaches and people like you and me who prefer just getting their message across in emails, minus the fancy templates. That means you get better deliverability and way more chance of your emails being seen and opened.

It’s what I personally have used for over 5 years now and it’s a long term love-affair, because of it’s advanced yet user-friendly functionality including tagging to segment your list into interest areas, and sexy autoresponders and sequences to ensure you can send subscribers on a specific journey for what they signed up for.

Plus you can create beautiful landing pages and even sell basic digital products now, so it can essentially be all you need to run your biz!

After years of trying a TON of online course and LMS platforms I’ve been using Podia to be able to sell not only my digital products, but courses and even basic memberships. Plus you can use it for free optins and create upsells to your products.

You can also integrate it with YouTube or Zoom to host free and paid webinars and automatically have the recording up as a course for sale. They now have easy to use and beautiful sales page templates to make your life even easier.

Even better, they don’t take any fees on your course sales and have super affordable plans starting at US$39 per month, or for US$79 you can sell all three and have an affiliate management system.

In fact you can use Podia to act as your website, your own shop, basic email list and even your blog!

If you want to learn more, check out my blog about why I use Podia :)

If you want to host your own online courses on WordPress and integrate them seamlessly into your WordPress website, then I highly recommend Thrive Apprentice - part of the Thrive Suite for $19 a month.

It’s now the most customizable WordPress course builder on the market. With full, drag-and-drop visual editing capabilities across every course page and element, you now have complete design freedom over your online courses and brand.

ThriveCart (not related to Thrive Themes by the way) is an awesome payment platform that allows you to create gorgeous + secure checkout pages that convert. I’m talking about the ability to add in descriptions of the offer, testimonials, a video message, payment plans and even countdown timers right on your checkout page.

You can use this as a standalone tool to direct website visitors right to payments or use a direct link in emails and social media. You can use it to sell and deliver an automatic digital product download, or join your membership or course hosted via another tool or platform. 

Why I have this in addition to Podia is that they do checkouts REALLY well. So much so that I’ve seen a massive increase in conversions, including the ability to email abandoned checkouts. 

I also chose them for their excellent affiliate program that allows me to invite partners to easily sign up and start sharing their own unique link to any page on your website - not just a sales page, as well as automatically pay them out!

Tidio is a super handy live chat, chat bot, messenger tool and email tool all in one place. I personally use it on my website to strike up conversations with people who land on any page and have a question.

This dramatically cuts down on the time that it takes to communicate with your customers, while also creating a boost in sales and satisfaction by engaging visitors in real-time, especially handy on sales pages for your products and services so you don’t lose visitors, and instead convert them to happy customers.

Namecheap is my go-to for buying great domain names at a really competitive price. With over 10 million domains under management, Namecheap is among the top domain registrars and web hosting providers in the world. 

I’ve been with SiteGround for around 3 years now and host all my websites through them as their uptime performance has been nearly perfect at 99.99% on average. This puts them among the most reliable hosts I’ve used. Uptime means your site is almost guaranteed to be working around the clock so you won’t miss out when your customers want to make a purchase.