MBA1836 My Top 3 Tools for New Businesses

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because no one builds a successful business on their own, we've got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you my top three tools for new businesses. If you're going to start a new online business, I'm going to tell you the three things you can start with. The things that you actually need to run your business to get it off the ground and start making some money. Yep, it's just three tools. And guess what? Altogether you only need about $100 to get started. In this lesson, I'll share with you what these tools are, how to use them, and how to get started. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Starting a new business can be overwhelming. You don't know what you need, what you don't need, what you need now, what you need later. That's why I wanted to create today's lesson. With these three tools, you can get your business up and running. You can actually cover a lot of ground and run every aspect of your business when you're getting started with these three tools. Now, the reason why I only chose three is because you don't need everything at once. This will get you off the ground. This will get you selling your products or services. This will get you started. It's important to get started to have momentum. Too many of us think about the next year when they just need to think about the next week, get the ball rolling. You will have new challenges and you'll need new tools. But think about those when you need them. Right now, you need to validate your business. You want to make sure people actually buy what you have. So let's get going. My first tool that I recommend is actually not a tool at all. Let me explain. I highly recommend anybody starting a business to buy a domain name. There's a lot of reasons for this, and in fact, this tool is a precursor. You know, all the other tools I'll mention today build upon this tool. A domain name is what you think it is. It's the URL, it's the name of your website. For example, our domain is 100mba.net. That's my domain. You want to secure a domain because this is like securing your land, securing your address for your business. You want to take ownership of that domain. And just as a side note, no one really owns a domain. You're actually like renting it because you have to renew your license to it every single year or every two years, whatever you choose. But you got to grab the name of your business in a domain. Now if you can't get the dot com, you can't get the net. You can't find a domain that has the name of your business. Try to get as close as possible. Different kinds of maybe options like shortening the name or adding something like try your business name, the word try in the beginning or app at the end. If it's an app, there's a great tool called Name Mesh that allows you to choose your domain or come up with fancy domain names if you can't find the one that you're looking for, if you don't have a name for your business yet or your product, no problem. Secure a domain name that is your name, your actual name. Like I have Omar zenhome.com as my personal website. It's where people go to find me, to book me, to speak or to go to events. But if you have your own domain, your own personal name, you can't go wrong because you can always just put products under that website. So the first thing you want to do is go to Google Domains. I recommend Google Domains as the place to buy all your domains. Why? It has a really easy way to manage your domains. It's easy to manage what's called the DNS. That's a little bit of tech speak, but we'll talk about that later. It also includes free privacy. You don't have to pay extra for privacy. So you can, you know, protect your identity for who owns this domain. And the prices are very competitive. Most domains start around $12 a year and go up if they're short domains or unique domains or domains in demand. So get yourself a domain, go to Google Domains. Get yourself a domain. That's tool number one. Tool number two, sign up for Google's business suite. It's called Google for Business. There's a different kinds of plans standard and some higher tiers. You can go with the lowest tier. I think it's about $5 a month. But this is super, super useful. This tool alone is going to give you Multiple tools for $5 a month. It's a joke. Now what Google Business gives you is one, it gives you an actual business email. So it hooks up your domain so you can actually have your name like omarebinarninja.com for example. And now I have my own business email. There's nothing worse for than, you know, your potential client you're trying to secure. Getting an email from your name@gmail.com that doesn't scream credibility. Coming from a domain, email looks a whole lot more professional. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. You get an email or and it's using the Gmail system with your domain name. With Google Business, what else do you get? Well, you get a whole bunch of tools. You might be familiar with these tools because you use Gmail, but you get them for business things like Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google presentations or slides, Google Chat, Google Meet, which is like A video conferencing software. You get Google Drive, which is your storage, to store files and those docs and sheets. We talked about a whole plethora of things. Now what really is awesome about all these tools is that you can actually manage your business with all these tools. You can do all your finances and projections and your P and L sheets. With Google Sheets, you can write and draft your blog posts and email copy and things like that inside of Google Docs. You can create your SOPs through Google Docs, your standard operating procedures for your business. You can collaborate with your team with, you know, Google Chat and Google Meet, they even have rooms inside of Google Chat. I noticed that. So you can actually come up with different groups inside your business if you want, if you have a few teammates. So basically you can run all the operations in your business. Team, collaboration, projects, documentation, all with this Google for Business tool. It's actually really, really a great value and I think Google does a great service by offering it at such a low price point. This will allow you to start emailing clients, securing deals, run your finances with sheets like I mentioned, create presentations and decks that you can pitch to investors or pitch to potential clients, meet with clients with Google Meet, all kinds of things like that. So a great, great tool that you can use as you're getting your business started. Third tool I recommend. Now this tool will depend on what kind of business you run. Do you run an e commerce store where you sell physical goods? Do you run a coaching business where you're getting paid for your time? Do you run a online course or sort of content business? Depending on the business, you need to secure some sort of website platform that will allow you to run that business. So your domain is like the address. The website platform is where you host your website, the actual house itself. Think of the domain like the land and your house. Your actual physical house is the website. You can move your house if you'd like, to a different address, theoretically. So if you have an ecommerce store, I highly recommend you check out Shopify. You can charge for your goods, you can do inventory. It's the A to Z E commerce platform. You can hook up the domain you just bought on Google Domains with Shopify and you're ready to rock and roll. This will allow you to start building your website, building your business really, and start selling your products and services. If you're on a content business or you're an affiliate marketer, where basically all your money's made by creating great content, whether that's a blog or a video show and you make money on affiliate links or affiliate sales, then really you need a blog. And if that's the case, I highly recommend you check out WordPress. In particular, I would host your WordPress site with WP Engine. We're partners with WP Engine, full disclosure. But they do give us a discount because we are partners. So you can get a discount on WP Engine if you go to 100- MBA-NET resources. That's our resources page. You'll see WP Engine there with our coupon code there. But the reason why I recommend WP Engine is because it's super, super reliable. It's not the cheapest one in the market. It's a for good reason. It's actually great value. Why? Because you're not only buying, hosting and a place to build your WordPress website, but you're also getting the best, and I mean the best technical support. Your customer support that you get with WP engine is literally equivalent to having a WordPress administrator full time. You can just chat with them anytime. I have a problem with my website, I want to plug in something, I want to install something, I want to, you know, install a pixel for Google Ads or for Facebook ads or for Google Analytics. They'll literally do it for you. I've been working with WP Engine and using WP Engine for our websites for, for years for this service. Their plans start around $25 a month and it's what's called manage WordPress hosting. So WordPress has a whole bunch of free themes you can use to customize your website and your blog. You can get started with that and rock and roll. This can work as well for a business that is doing coaching or consulting. But all in all, you need a place to build the business and start promoting online. Start showing what you can offer on your website, your home.

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So there you have it. Those are my three tools when starting a new business. Grab a domain name from Google domains. Sign up for Google for Business. You're going to get a suite of tools that are going to help you really, really get up and running. And number three, your actual website, your website hosting, whether you shopify, Whether you use WordPress with WP Engine, you need somewhere to build your site. With these three tools you can rock and roll, you can launch, you can start selling your products and services. You can reach out to your customers because they can look you up on your website and see what you're all about. This actually makes your business real. It's like what Squarespace says on their advertisements. A website makes it real and it's true. And Squarespace is another option if you want to build your own website. There you have it guys. That wraps up today's lesson. If you love today's podcast and want to get more insightful business lessons, just hit subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. We are daily so we keep bringing you great value and by hitting subscribe you get access immediately to the next episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if you're a consultant, if you're a coach, if you're selling online courses and you're going to be invoicing people, things like that, One tool I recommend for charging credit cards is Stripe. Stripe has a built in invoice system. It's very easy for you to use. You can use links and buttons to charge people where you can embed buttons right on your website to charge somebody for something that you're selling. The rates are very competitive and they've gone a long way since being a tech focused, software business focused tool to being able to offer a great amount of credit card processing tools and options to sell your products and services. You can check them out on stripe.com thanks so much for listening guys. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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