30 Day Blog Challenge, Day 20

 

This is an example of what I will put on my "About Me" page. The actual design might change, but I think this is the essence of what I will say. Any suggestions would be gratefully received (although not necessarily acted upon!)

Today, in the 30 Day Blog Challenge, Natalie named 7 of the resources she uses to build her business and asked us to choose just three that we would find most useful. Her question is, 

"State your top three tools that you will use (or already use) to save time and money 

and make your online world more seamless"

Here is Natalie's list:

1. Get Your Domain & Build Your Website on Hostgator

2. Build Your Audience List and Increase Your Sales With LeadPages

3. Sell Digital Products Online Quickly With e-Junkie

4. Start Selling Your Goods and Services Online with PayPal

5. Manage Your Social Media in One Place Easily With Hootsuite

6. Build Your Mailing List & Send Newsletters With MailChimp

7. Get Help From Professional Freelancers Online With Virtual Staff Finder

Numbers 1 and 4, I can dismiss straight away, as I already have a Hostgator account, a domain name, and I am in the middle of building my site. Added to which I already have a PayPal account, so a tick for all of these.

Number 5 is a little tricky, as I already have a Hootsuite account, and have had for some time. However, suddenly I was denied access and they claimed I didn't have an account. I decided to create a new account, and they said that I couldn't do that as I already had an account. However, I think I have managed to get back in again, but I don't know for how long!

That is already three of the seven out of they way, so I have four left to choose from. Probably I will use all four eventually, although perhaps getting help from professional freelancers is far in the future. So here is my list:

1 I have spent some time looking at the Leadpages site and I would definitely add some of their templates to my site eventually. I'm still in the middle of designing and building my new site, so  I will get to that when I can.

2 Another site I have investigated today is E-Junkie. This company helps with online sales. They offer some very useful tips, and I managed to download some interesting ebooks from their site, all to do with blogging. Once I have products to sell, I would definitely use this company to handle all my sales.

3 My third, must-have tool would be an email marketing service provider. I am torn between MailChimp and Aweber. MailChimp is tantalizing, as you can have a free account, although not with an autoresponder, which I think is essential if you want to automate the sending of a series of emails to your list. So that whenever people sign up, they always get the first email of the series. I need to look into this further before I commit.

Of course, all this in in the future. My first priority is to build my site, write content, and make it live. Watch this space, and I will let you know my launch date.