MBA2120 Q&A Wednesday: How do I choose the right website builder tool for me?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that keeps on giving every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask Jo, just go ahead and email me over@omar00mba.net Today's question is from Brenda and Brenda asks, hey Omar, I want to build a new site for my business. I'm not super technical but I'm pretty good with computers and I'm a fast learner. My question is what is the best website builder for me? I sell digital products like books, courses and some coaching. Would love your recommendation and how I can get started. Thanks for this podcast. It's been a godsend. Brenda thanks Brenda for your question, your kind words, words. We're gonna get into website builders. If you are up to the challenge or you feel like hey, I can learn how to build my own website, especially if it's like a drag and drop kind of tool, then this episode's for you. Whether you have a website or you're looking to revamp your website or even if you want to kind of get somebody to build it for you and then you can maintain it later or add pages later. I'm gonna give you those options in today's episode. What tools? I recommend what tools specifically for Brenda's business as well as other types of businesses, whether it's E comm, blogging or even selling in person events, that type of stuff. Don't worry, whatever your business is, I got your back in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Brenda has a coaching business. She has digital products, books, courses, and she wants to build her own website with a website builder looking for the best option for her. Well, we're going to get into that. I'm going to give my recommendation for Brenda as well as other types of businesses, which website builders you should go for. So I'm going to first just talk about the other types of businesses and what kind of platforms I recommend to build the website. And then we're going to get into Brenda's example or type of business. So first of all, if you're selling any kind of ecommerce product, you're selling physical products online and you're delivering it to their door, I highly recommend you check out Shopify. I think that Shopify is one of the best tools out there. And I don't just say that because Shopify is a sponsor of this podcast. I'm a Shopify user myself. We run our swag store over at Webinar Ninja on Shopify. It's simple, it's easy. There's so many tools and plugins. It's such a huge ecosystem that you can use. It's affordable. It's just the best option for E commerce. If you want to check it out and get a free trial, we have a special code or link. Just go to shopify.com mba if you are blogging for a living. If your job is to write blog posts and you're in the Content game. You maybe offer a newsletter or even sell memberships to a newsletter. If that's the nature of your business, I highly recommend you check out ghostghost.org the best blogging platform out there right now. Again, affordable, simple, easy, reliable. Just trust me, Ghost is the best for blogging. If your business is a brick and mortar. If you have a physical business like a yoga studio or a pizzeria or physical shop and you want a presence online so people can find you on Google and you want to pull your services and where to find them and your contact details, basically what this is called is a brochure website where people can just find out about you so they can find your location and kind of just see that you're legit before they show up to your shop. I highly recommend you check out Squarespace. Squarespace is probably one of the best portfolio type of website builders. It's simple, it's easy. They do have blogging features and maybe even some E commerce, but it's not their strength. This is why I recommend it for physical brick and mortar businesses. Now, if you have a business that sells digital goods like Brenda, who asked today's question, she sells ebooks, she sells courses, she sells coaching, and she wants to make sure she displays and advertise and sells these products and services and who she's about on her website, she also may want a blog so she can gain some SEO traffic. She might even want a tool to be able to create landing pages for ads she's running. So squeeze pages. Maybe she wants separate pages for the different services she creates, an about page, all that kind of stuff. She's going to need a little bit more flexibility to do this type of work. And my recommendation, if you're willing to learn a little bit, pick up some skills, I highly recommend you check out WordPress. Now WordPress is an open source software like Ghost I mentioned, but it has a little bit more flexibility for sales and marketing. Now WordPress alone is not going to get you there. You're going to have to buy some plugins or themes and I'm going to give you my recommendations in a moment. But first let's just talk about if you have a WordPress site where you're going to need one, you're going to need hosting and then two, you're going to need a tool to be able to build out your pages on WordPress. So any hosting solution will be able to install WordPress. WordPress is kind of like your content management system, so it's kind of the basis of your site. And then the plugins or the tools are what enables you to be able to drag and drop elements and build pages and all that kind of stuff. So essentially you need three things really. You need hosting, you need WordPress itself, and then you need a tool to be able to build on WordPress. So let's put hosting and WordPress in one bucket because basically they go hand in hand. Any host will be able to install or help you install WordPress with a few clicks. Very easy. The host we recommend is WP Engine. Go to 1000nba.net our website. Go to the resources tab. There is probably a discount code you can use. I recommend WP Engine all the time. I've recommended them for years because I've been a user for years. We host all our WordPress websites on WP Engine. Why it's the best, period. It's high security, it's great hosting, meaning it's super fast and reliable. But best of all, their customer support, their technical support is amazing. Literally you can get on chat and it's like having your own tech team solving problems for you. If you have some problems or issues with your website helping you install things, this is a great little companion. It's like an added bonus to WP Engine and it's a reason why WP Engine is one of the most expensive options. But having said that, it's actually pretty affordable. Their plans start for less than $100 a I think check them out. I haven't looked at pricing recently but you should really, really use a great host. The hosting really matters. I highly recommend you check out WP Engine because it's going to make sure your site is fast and reliable and that support that you will be able to tap into at any time. You have any questions, if you need any help is like gold. Now what about the builder part? You're going to have to install a plugin to be able to build pages, to customize pages, to make a landing page, opt ins, all that kind of stuff so that you can be able to create that experience on website that is beautiful. Now you can use probably one of the more popular builders called Elementor. Elementor has a free version and a Pro version. I highly recommend you buy the Pro version again. It's pretty inexpensive, starts at $49 a year and it is well worth it. You're gonna be able to do pretty much anything and build anything for your site with Elementor Pro. Now this is the setup I recommend. If you have a similar business as Brenda and you're a beginner and you are not that technical. You don't know HTML or CSS or maybe even are unfamiliar with WordPress. It's a really good place to start and you can do plenty with this. You can even hire a developer or designer on Upwork or Freelancer.com and be able to get them to design you a website using these tools. So that way you can edit them and change them and add pages later on. You can literally write a job post saying, I need someone to design a new website for me using WordPress and Elementor Pro. Now, if you are a little bit techy, you know a bit of HTML CSS and you want something in between a website builder and custom coding a website yourself, I recommend Oxygen. We run our site at Webinar Ninja on Oxygen. It's a tool built on WordPress. It's super powerful, it's very customizable, but it's fast, it's quick and you can build pages quickly. I don't recommend this option. If you don't know any development, you don't know any coding and you're looking for a very, very simple drag and drop tool, you might ask Omar, why do you go with Oxygen and not with like Elementor Pro? It's a good question. You might be thinking, and the short answer is that I have more customization because I can customize things. I don't have to choose from what Elementor Pro gives me. I can basically create anything that's in my head. On top of that, it's a little bit faster, meaning that the pages load faster because it's very light versus using a program or plugin like Elementor Pro. Now, if you don't have tons of traffic, you may not notice this. When I say tons, I mean if you have less than a million visitors a month and you have great hosting like on WP Engine, you're pretty much sorted. Even with Elementor, you're not even going to notice it. But because we're trying to optimize our site to the best speed possible for all the traffic we're getting, we use Oxygen. Now, if you're not technical and you're using WP Engine as your host and you're using Elementor Pro, you are sorted, you are good. You can create landing pages and blogs and about pages and anything you really want, any kind of pages you want. There are templates, there are ready made pages for you. There are drag and drop elements like testimonials and pricing columns and all that kind of stuff. So you can really make it your own. Now, if you want to sell your digital products on your website, that's different now because you're charging and you're probably going to have some sort of gated community, a membership of sorts. You may need to have another plugin for that or use a third party service that allows you to sell downloadables or access to your course. And if you're selling coaching, that's a whole different matter. Selling a combination of all these three things is hard really with one tool. So you may need to buy two or three different tools to sell these three different products, like a course platform or a coaching platform, or charging for live events or a platform to sell your books or downloadables. Now, having said that, I recommend you search what's best for you when it comes to selling the products themselves. You can link to those products on those platforms from your website.

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There you have it, Brenda. You have some really powerful tools at your disposal. Your challenge is not going to be a lack of resources. Your challenge really is going to be too many resources. You're going to spend too much time tinkering and playing around. This is why I recommend you put yourself on a deadline when you're building your own website. Meaning you might want to say, hey, in the next two weeks, I want to build my website and launch it, put it in the calendar and work towards that goal. Your job is to execute, right? You want to build your website. You have now the recommendation of tools you should use. Just go ahead, sign up for those tools, get started, give yourself a game plan. What pages you're going to create, what are the most important. Remember, creating and launching your website is just the beginning. You can add pages later on, add blog posts, all that kind of stuff, but get it out there in the world. Now, the last thing you're going to need for your website, of course, is a domain. Now, if you already have a domain and you're redesigning your website, that's cool if you don't. I highly recommend you check out Google Domains. If you go to domains.google.com 100mba, you're going to get the best price. I highly recommend Google Domains because we use them for all our domains. It's the best price possible on any domain. It's easy to register and most of all, their DNS is very, very easy to use. Meaning DNS is where you actually point your domain to the right servers. So when you buy domain, you need to make sure that that domain is connected to your hosting. So all you gotta do is either transfer your domain into Google Domains or buy a new domain in Google Domains. If you don't have one yet, then you're gonna go to the DNS tab inside your account and you're gonna point your domain to your server. What does that mean? All you got to do is contact WP engine's support and tell them, hey, my domain is in Google Domains. I'd like to set up the DNS so it points to my website with you. They're going to give you the instructions, they're going to tell you what to plug in to that DNS area in Google Domains. It's very simple. This is why the support really matters. Once you set that up, it might take up to 24 hours to propagate, meaning to see your domain go to your website and you are all set. Well, that wraps up today's Q and A Wednesday's episode. Thank you, Brenda for your question. If you have a question you want to ask, do what Brenda did. Email me over at Omar at 100 MBA NET and we'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you haven't subscribed to the show, go ahead and do that right now. So you get our next episode automatically and you have access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. Hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Also, if you want to give us love, if you want to support the show, if you've gotten value from the show and want to give back, the best way you could do that is to share the show on social media. Go ahead, get on your favorite social media app, whether it's Twitter or Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever it is and let people know they should subscribe to the $100 NBA Show. Just send them to 100nba.net so they can click on the subscribe buttons. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Launching your website is just the beginning. You don't want to start up, you want to stay up. You want a business that lasts. So get it out there and just make progress. Improve it, add to it, Improve the SEO, build as you go as you need, but get it out there and get started. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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