Looking for the best online business tools in 2026, paired with your budget and the stage of your business? Then you will love this guide.
When choosing these online business tools, we have tried to get the right mix between budget & quality. These online tools are perfect for a small business.
I strongly urge you to stick with the tools we recommend. If you cut corners or start with the wrong software stack, your frustration trying to get it all to work together will never end. If you are a startup, these tools will help you grow your business.
You will also end up wasting more money and time than you originally intended to save.
Make sure that your business is at a stage where you will see a return on investment using a business tool. If you have a small business don’t burn your budget on tools that you don’t need at this stage of your business.
These are helpful tools I personally use or would recommend to a small business owner. If you grab anything mentioned using our referral links, we may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. You can read our disclaimer page to learn more.
You can filter through the list using the buttons below to find the best online business tools for your needs.
Domain & Hosting
Here are the best online business tools to use in your business:
Namecheap
- Category: Domain Registrar
- Price: $10.98/year for .com domains.
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Namecheap is one of the cheapest places to register a .com domain name. A domain name is a human-readable word (like amazon.com) used to access your website. Domains can be registered with domain name registrars like Namecheap & need to be renewed every year. Namecheap also provides a free WHOIS guard to protect your personal information like your phone number and address.
BlueHost
- Category: Hosting
- Price: From $2.95/month.
- Stage: Starting
- Recommendation: Recommended
BlueHost is a good host for beginners because it is cheap and they make it extremely easy to set up WordPress. Web hosting like BlueHost provides an account on a computer (aka web server) that can store and serve your website files through the internet. You need hosting to install WordPress and set up your website. BlueHost comes recommended by creators of WordPress. But as your website grows, you may want to move to some of the other hosting providers in this list that provide better performance.
Cloudways
- Category: Hosting
- Price: From $10/month.
- Stage: Growing
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Cloudways provides high-performance hosting for WordPress at a fraction of the cost. You can start using Cloudways if your business has started growing. Unlike other hosting providers Cloudways does not bill you annually. You pay as you go, so you have to put down less money upfront. Passive Book is built on WordPress, and hosted on Cloudways.
Use the coupon code PASSIVEBOOK while checking out and get 10% off on your first three invoices.
WP Engine
- Category: Hosting
- Price: From $25/month.
- Stage: Growing & Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
WP Engine takes care of security, backup, and everything technical. If you have a larger budget and want experts standing by to help you with pretty much anything you need in your WordPress website, WP Engine is right for you.
WordPress
WordPress.org
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows users to create a website or blog from scratch, or to improve an existing website. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, used by millions of websites. 70% of all blogs and 42% of all websites use WordPress.
GeneratePress
- Category: WP Theme
- Price: Free + Pro ($59/year)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use the GeneratePress theme. It’s lightweight, highly customizable, and loads fast. Support is outstanding and their pro addon gives you more customization options.
UpdraftPlus Backup
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
We used to use the UpdraftPlus backup plugin to create a daily backup in Google Drive. Even though web hosting like Cloudways may back up your website daily, it is still recommended to have an extra backup through UpdraftPlus.
WPVivid
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
WPVivid is a WordPress backup and migration plugin. It helps you create backups of your WordPress site and migrate it to another server or host. We use WPVivid instead of Updraft because they have a lifetime license for all the pro features.
Presto Player
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Presto Player is a powerful video player for WordPress that will let you embed videos from multiple sources, and add conversion elements like opt-in gates. You can use it to embed YouTube videos and remove all YouTube branding so that visitors stay on your website.
ShortPixel
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your images for faster loading times. It can compress your images without losing quality, and it also offers a CDN to help deliver your images faster.
FluentForms
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
FluentForms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create, manage, and track forms and submissions. With the free version, you can use it to create a simple contact form. It is easy to use and provides a lot of features and is a low-cost alternative to TypeForm.
Link Whisper
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that will provide internal linking recommendations. It will help improve your on-page SEO and improve your Search Engine Rankings.
WishList Member
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Premium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
WishList Member is a WordPress plugin that you can use to create, manage, and protect membership sites. It integrates with WooCommerce. If you just need an online course area, you can just use Thrive Apprentice.
GTM4WP
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
GTM4WP is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily integrate Google Tag Manager into your WordPress site. It provides a simple interface for adding and managing your tags and is compatible with all major WordPress themes and plugins.
Fluent SMTP
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Free + Amazon SES ($0.10 per 1,000 emails)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
If you use Cloudways or WP Engine, you need to use Fluent SMTP to send WordPress emails through Amazon SES or another SMTP service. Even if your web host supports sending emails, its recommended you use this plugin, so that your email doesn’t end up in the spam folder.
Thirsty Affiliates
- Category: WP Plugin
- Price: Free + Paid ($49/year)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use Thirsty Affiliates in Passive Book to manage our affiliate links. The plugin converts ugly affiliate links into clean redirect links that are automatically no followed. The pro version automatically hyperlinks select keywords in your blog posts with your affiliate link.
GenerateBlocks
- Category: WP Plugin & Funnel
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by Passive Book
GenerateBlocks is a WordPress plugin that lets you create custom Gutenberg blocks for your website. It can be used to replace page builders like Elementor and Thrive Architect. Although not as user-friendly as traditional page builders, Generate Blocks is extremely lightweight helping you create fast pages that Google and users love.
Email Marketing
MailerLite
- Category: Email Marketing
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
MailerLite is an email marketing service provider that offers a wide range of features to help businesses grow their email list and send engaging newsletters. The best part of MailerLite is that it is free to get started for up to 1000 subscribers.
SendInBlue
- Category: Email Marketing
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
SendInBlue is an email marketing service that allows businesses to create and send newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional messages. It offers a wide range of features, including a drag-and-drop email builder, a wide variety of templates, real-time tracking, and more.
Active Campaign
- Category: Email Marketing
- Price: From $9/month
- Stage: Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Active Campaign is the gold standard when it comes to email marketing platforms. It is also a customer relationship management (CRM). It’s extremely powerful, easy to use, and super affordable, making it the best email marketing software even for new businesses just starting out. Active Campaign uses tags which is the best way to segment customers for an email marketing campaign. Other email marketing automation tools do not have half the features and integrations of Active Campaign.
Amazon SES
- Category: Email Marketing
- Price: $0.1 for 1000 emails
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Amazon SES is a cloud-based email-sending service designed to help digital marketers and website owners send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. Amazon SES is extremely cheap and you can send 1000 emails for $0.1. You can use SES with FluentSMTP to send your WordPress emails.
Gleam
- Category: Contest & Email Marketing
- Price: Premium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Gleam is a software that helps businesses run online competitions and giveaways. It is designed to build an email list, and increase engagement and loyalty among customers and followers. Gleam has a wide range of features, including social media integration, email capture, and entry management.
Social Media
Creator Studio
- Category: Social Media
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Digital marketers use Creator Studio to schedule & post social media campaigns across all their Facebook pages and Instagram profiles. If Facebook and Instagram are the only social media channels you use, then you won’t need another social media management platform.
Easy Social Share Buttons
- Category: WP Plugin & Social Media
- Price: $22 (Lifetime)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Easy Social Share Buttons plugin is what we use here in Passive Book to display social media buttons on our website. The plugin comes with a lifetime update and 6 months of free support. They have almost every social media account you can possibly want.
Socialbee
- Category: Social Media
- Price: From $19/month
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Socialbee is a set-and-forget system for posting and scheduling social media content. It automatically reposts your ever-green social media posts at periodic intervals to different social media platforms, so your social campaign calendar is always full.
ManyChat
- Category: Funnel & Social Media
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
ManyChat is a messenger marketing platform that works well with Facebook Ads. Use it to build a messenger bot for Facebook and Instagram. Create conversational funnels that grow your email list and drive sales.
Buffer
- Category: Social Media
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
Buffer is a social media management tool. It lets users schedule social media posts, track their performance, and analyze their audience. Buffer might be a good fit if you have a lot of social networks to manage.
Hootsuite
- Category: Social Media
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite is a social media management platform that enables users to track all their social media channels in one place. With Hootsuite, users can see what’s happening on all their social media accounts, post updates, and engage with their audience across all platforms.
Funnel
Cartflows
- Category: WP-Plugin & Funnel
- Price: $239/year or $999/lifetime
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use Cartflows to build funnels like Clickfunnels in Passive Book. The plugin works along with WooCommerce to add one-click upsells/downsells, order bumps, and replicates every other online marketing strategy used by ClickFunnels.
Webinarjam
- Category: Funnel
- Price: From $499/year
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Webinarjam lets you host unlimited live webinars at a very affordable yearly rate. It is feature packed with marketing tools and is great for selling high-ticket products. It seamlessly integrates with Click Funnels.
EverWebinar
- Category: Funnel
- Price: From $499/year
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
EverWebinar can be used as an add-on to WebinarJam or as a standalone tool to create automated pre-recorded webinars that look and feels like a live webinar.
ThriveCart
- Category: Funnel
- Price: $495 (lifetime)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
ThriveCart is an alternative to Woocommerce + Cartflows + Affiliate WP. It is a shopping cart software that will help you upsell, downsell and create order bumps like ClickFunnels. There is also a built-in affiliate program. You will however still need an LMS if you are selling online courses on your website. You can use Thrive Apprentice LMS from Thrive Suite for that.
SEO
Rank Math
- Category: WP-Plugins & SEO
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress that makes it easier for you to optimize your website for search engines. It provides you with an intuitive interface and a range of features that can help you to improve your website’s ranking in search results. The free version will be good enough for you to get started and is much better than Yoast SEO. This is the plugin we now use.
Ahrefs
- Category: SEO
- Price: From $99/month
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use Ahrefs for content marketing and search engine optimization. It is a must-have tool to get organic search traffic from major search engines like Google & Bing. When starting out, get the Ahrefs lite plan for two months, do all your research, plan your SEO strategy and then cancel your subscription. You will easily get your return on investment.
UberSuggest
- Category: SEO
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
If Ahrefs is too pricey for you and you want a good long-term option, you can try UberSuggest. Its features are similar to Ahrefs but the data is not as rich. It has a keyword research tool that helps you generate new keywords and track your competitor’s keywords. It also provides data on keyword difficulty, search volume, and CPC.
Screaming Frog
- Category: SEO
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Screaming Frog is a web crawling and auditing tool that allows users to crawl websites and collect data on various elements of the site, including title tags, meta descriptions, links, and more. The tool can be used to audit your site for SEO purposes or to simply gather data about your competitors.
Google Search Console
- Category: SEO
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Google Search Console is a free service that helps you improve your site’s performance in Google Search. It provides tools and resources to help you submit your sitemap to Google and track its progress over time.
Google Web Dev
- Category: SEO
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Google Web Dev is a tool that allows you to measure the performance of your website on both mobile and desktop devices. It provides you with insights on how to improve your website speed, including recommendations on how to optimize your images, minify your HTML and CSS, and more. Some of the elements measured also known as Core Web Vitals is a SEO ranking factor. It also evaluates your website’s accessibility and SEO.
GTmetrix
- Category: SEO
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
GTMetrix is a website performance tool that lets you see how well your website loads and provides recommendations on how to improve its speed. It can help you improve your Core Web Vitals which helps SEO.
Pingdom
- Category: SEO
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
You can use Pingdom to see how fast your website loads in different parts of the world. The tool also measures your page size which you can try to reduce. It can help you improve your site speed which is an SEO metric.
Outreach
Woodpecker
- Category: Outreach & SEO
- Price: Premium
- Stage: Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
Woodpecker is a tool that helps automate your cold emailing process. It allows users to create and send personalized emails to large groups of people, track who opens and clicks on links in the emails, and schedule follow-up emails. You can use it to automate SEO or Sales outreach or to build relationships with other businesses.
Content Marketing
Jasper
- Category: Content Marketing
- Price: From $29/month
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use Jasper to speed up our content creation process saving us countless hours. The AI automatically writes surprisingly good blog post intros, emails, product descriptions, ad copy, YouTube video scripts & Quora Answers.
Buzzsumo
- Category: Content Marketing
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Buzzsumo helps you research content that will do well in social media, just like how Ahrefs helps you from an SEO perspective. You can easily customize your content so that it gets shares & engagement on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Reddit.
Grammarly
- Category: Content Marketing
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Use Grammarly to check your spelling and grammar as you write. The pro version also comes with a plagiarism checker. Good to have if you are outsourcing your content marketing to freelancer writers.
CoSchedule
- Category: Content Marketing
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
CoSchedule is a content marketing tool that helps you plan, publish, optimize, and measure your blog posts and social media updates. It’s designed to help you save time and drive better results from your content marketing efforts.
Courses & LMS
Thrive Apprentice
- Category: WP-Plugin & Course Creation
- Price: Included in Thrive Suite $19/month or $228/year
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Thrive Apprentice is the Learning Management System (LMS) we use in Passive Book to create online courses and host them on our website. It integrates with WooCommerce and Thrivecart.
Bunny Stream
- Category: Course Creation
- Price: From $0.01/GB
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Bunny Stream is the cheapest video hosting you will find to host your online courses behind your members area. You pay pennies, and if nobody sees your videos you pay nothing.
Vimeo
- Category: Course Creation
- Price: From $20/month
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
We used to host our videos on Vimeo before we moved to Bunny Stream. Vimeo allows you to set domain-level restrictions so your videos cannot be accessed outside your online course members area.
Video Marketing
TubeBuddy
- Category: YouTube
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
TubeBuddy helps manage your YouTube channel and videos. There are a ton of tools that make it easy to optimize your videos for SEO and even split test your thumbnails and automatically pick the one with the highest CTR.
Camtasia
- Category: YouTube, Course Creation
- Price: $249 (Lifetime)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Camtasia allows you to record your screen while you present your screen or power point. Camtasia also comes with a good video editor that makes editing your videos simple. We create all our video courses and YouTube videos using Camtasia.
Streamyard
- Category: Social Media, YouTube
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Streamyard helps you live stream to multiple social media platforms at the same time. You can stream to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and interact with your audience and feature their comments on the screen, during your live stream.
Ecommerce
Woocommerce
- Category: WP Plugin, Ecommerce, Course Creation
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Woocommerce is a free plugin that converts WordPress into an ecommerce store. In Passive Book we sell our courses and information products using Woocommerce. Almost every other online marketing tool on this page integrates with Woocommerce.
Shopify
- Category: Ecommerce
- Price: Paid
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Shopify is a ecommerce platform that allows users to create an online store similar to Woocommerce. But the solution is hosted for you, so you can focus on building your ecommerce brand instead of worrying about all the technical details. It offers users a customizable platform, an easy-to-use checkout process, and a wide range of features. It is very popular among drop shippers.
Printful
- Category: Ecommerce
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Printful is a company that offers print-on-demand, fulfillment, and shipping services for businesses of all sizes. You will be able to upload your designs and sell t-shirts and other merchandise items without investing any money in buying and storing inventory. They provide an easy-to-use online platform that gives businesses the ability to create and customize products with their own designs. Printful also offers a wide range of products to choose from, including t-shirts, posters, mugs, and more.
Jungle Scout
- Category: Ecommerce
- Price: Paid
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Jungle Scout is used to spying on your competition and identify products that are selling well on Amazon. If you are selling on Amazon instead of running a traditional ecommerce store, this tool is a must-have.
Graphic Creation
Canva
- Category: Graphic Creation & Stock Photos
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Canva is a graphic design tool for non-designers. We use it to create social media graphics, Facebook Ads, and other visual content for our blog. You choose a template and customize it to your liking. We use it to create all our marketing materials. If you upgrade to their paid plan, you also get access to a large library of stock photos and graphics.
Analytics
Google Tag Manager
- Category: Analytics
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy tags on your website. This includes tracking codes from Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook Pixel, and other third-party services. Google Tag Manager makes it easy to add or remove tags from your site without having to edit the code directly.
Google Analytics
- Category: Analytics
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Google Analytics is a free web analytics software to track your website traffic to get valuable insight about your potential customers. If you are using the Rank Math plugin, you just need to add your Google Analytics tracking code in the menu option. You can also use it to create custom segments for Google Adwords.
Microsoft Clarity
- Category: Analytics
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Microsoft Clarity allows you to record user sessions and heatmaps for free. You can use it to dive deep into your website user behavior and fix user experience & UI issues with ease. This is a free alternative to Hotjar and can be used in conjunction with Google Analytics.
HotJar
- Category: Analytics, Funnel
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: Growing & Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
HotJar is a web analytics tool that allows you to see how visitors interact with your website. You can see what pages they visit, how long they stay on each page, and what links they click on. HotJar also lets you record visitor sessions so you can see exactly what they do on your site.
Outsourcing
Fiverr
- Category: Outsourcing
- Price: From $5/project
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Fiverr is an online freelance service marketplace, great for outsourcing small tasks and short-term projects. If you want to quickly get a job done like getting a logo designed, you will find hundreds of freelancers on Fiverr who will finish the task quickly and cheaply.
Upwork
- Category: Outsourcing
- Price: Project Specific
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Upwork is the place to find more experienced freelancer with specific skills for long term projects. You can pay them by the hour or per project. We have used Upwork for voice over artists and writing in the past. You will also find many digital marketing agencies on Upwork.
OnlineJobs.ph
- Category: Outsourcing
- Price: From $2 per hour
- Stage: Growing, Scaling
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
You should post a job in OnlineJobs.ph, if you want to hire a full time virtual assistant from the Phillipines. The candidates will speak good english and can be trained to do most tasks in a small business.
Email & Team Management
Google Workspace
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: From $6/month in US (price vary by country)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
We use Google Workspace for our business email in Passive Book. We also use Google Drive & Google Docs to collaborate internally within our team, create and store our documentation and manage our business processes. This is a great alternative to Microsoft office.
To get 10% OFF, use the coupon N37P69KJ967Q6GW for Business Starter and the coupon J7E3KTL79Y4YJJE for Business Standard
Microsoft Office 365
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: From $6/month in US (price vary by country)
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
You can create your business email with Microsoft Office 365. Apart from your email it also gives users access to the latest versions of Microsoft Office products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Unlike Google Workspace, Office 365 also includes 1TB cloud storage even in their base plan and its associated team collaboration tools. Your team will also have access to their instant messaging software called Microsoft Teams which you can use for video calls and internal communication. The pricing is friendly for small businesses.
Zoho Mail
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: From $1/month
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
For business email, Zoho Mail is a cheaper alternative to Google Workspace. Use this if your team will never use Google Docs. Zoho’s office tools are below par compared to Google.
Team Tools
Trello
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Trello is a Kanban board that helps manage your projects. The product is free to use and but has premium features that cost extra. If you have a content marketing team, you can even build your content calendar in Trello to manage your content marketing strategy.
Asana
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Asana is a project management tool similar to Trello. Compared to Trello, Asana is less visual. But Asana’s free version has more features than the free version of Trello. Asana can be the place for team collaboration for remote teams where all your team projects are tracked and completed.
Zoom
- Category: Team Tools & Funnel
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Zoom is a video conferencing app that allows users to connect with each other from anywhere in the world. Zoom offers high-quality video calls and audio, as well as features like screen sharing and group chat. It is free to get started with. You can also use it to host webinars with up to 100 participants for free. But it does not have all the features of a webinar platform.
Note Taking & Documentation
Notion
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Notion can be used for project management, documentation and for several other use cases combined into one. You can also use it like a Kanban board like Trello to organize your team efforts or you can use it as a wiki to store your documentation. You can add your entire team and have all the information and project tracking all in one place. There are many templates for project management and digital marketers.
Loom
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Loom is a video messaging and screen recording tool that allows you to record and share quick video messages. It’s a great way to communicate with co-workers or friends without having to schedule a meeting or make a phone call.
Screencast
- Category: Team Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Screencast helps capture screenshots and quickly share it with others in the form of link. The software is free to use and is a great collaboration tool for teams.
Community
Facebook Group
- Category: Community
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
If you want to build a community then a Facebook Group is the best place to build it. Your audience are most likely already using Facebook. So by using Facebook Groups, your community is less likely to be a ghost town with no engagement.
Akismet
- Category: WP Plugin & Community
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
If you use Thrive Comments (part of Thrive Suite) like Passive Book, you don’t need Akismet. But if you are using the default WordPress comments, you need to install Akismet to filter out spam. Akismet has a pay what you want model, so you can technically pay nothing. But commercial websites paying nothing is a breach of their terms.
Website Tools
Push Engage
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: ~$1 for 1000 subscribers
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Push Engage is used to build a push notification list that brings traffic back to your website, just like building an email list. It is one of the more affordable small business tools out there for push notifications and it is free to get started.
Better Uptime
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Better Uptime is our website monitor. It has a unique feature where it looks for a keyword in a page. If it is not able to find that keyword, it alerts the webmaster that the website is down. It is a very useful feature to quickly be alerted when your page is broken without your website being completely down.
Cloudflare
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Cloudflare is a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service helping you improve your website performance and security. It operates as a reverse proxy for websites, intercepting web traffic and providing security against attacks such as denial-of-service attacks and cross-site scripting. You should put your website behind Cloudflare because it is free to do it and will improve your site speed and security.
Bunny CDN
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: $0.01/GB
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Bunny CDN is from the same makers of Bunny Stream. This is the cheapest CDN you can find on the market. If you install the Bunny.net plugin it will immediately make your web pages with a lot of images load faster.
ManageWP
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Premium
- Stage: Growing & Scaling
- Recommendation: Recommended
ManageWP is a WordPress management platform that helps you manage multiple WordPress sites from one central location. It lets you update WordPress core, plugins, and themes, as well as back up your site and manage security.
Support
Automation
Make
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Make lets you connect different online business tools and automate workflows similar to Zapier. It has the same features as Zapier but is a lot cheaper. The free tier should be enough for most of your use cases.
Zapier
- Category: Website Tools
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Zapier is a web-based automation tool that allows users to connect different online services and apps in order to automate tasks. For example, a user could create a “zap” that would automatically add new contacts from a web form to their CRM. Zapier is simple to use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.
Advertising
Company Setup & Bank
Northwest Registered Agent
- Category: Company Setup
- Price: From $135/year
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
If you live outside the US, you may not have access to Stripe to collect payments on your website. If you live inside the US, you may want to limit your liability in case you get sued. For both these purposes, you need to register an LLC (preferably in Wyoming) & optionally get a US bank account for Stripe.
Living in a country where you don’t have Stripe? Setup an LLC in Wyoming USA with Northwest Registered Agent and get a US Stripe account. It is cheaper than using Stripe Atlas.
Payoneer
- Category: Company Setup
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Used by PassiveBook
Payoneer gives you a US bank account to collect payments from Stripe & Amazon. A great option if you don’t live in the US and you can’t travel to the US to create a bank account. The amount sent to Payoneer’s checking account gets directly credited to your home country’s bank. Sign up with the button below and get $25 after you receive $1000.
Mercury Bank
- Category: Company Setup
- Price: Free
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Mercury Bank allows you to open a bank account in the US without travelling to the US. Unlike Payoneer that automatically transfers the money to your home country’s bank account, the money you receive through Mercury Bank account resides in the bank account unless you manually do a wire transfer.
Business Management
Calendly
- Category: Business Management
- Price: Freemium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Calendly is an online appointment scheduling software that helps busy professionals schedule appointments with ease. It allows users to create custom schedules, send automatic reminders, and track their appointments in one central location.
Freshbooks
- Category: Business Management
- Price: Premium
- Stage: All Business Stages
- Recommendation: Recommended
Freshbooks is a cloud-based accounting software designed to make billing painless for small businesses and their clients. Freshbooks is simple to use, accessible from anywhere, and provides features like automatic invoicing, late payment reminders, and online payments.
Which digital marketing tools do you use?
Which is your favorite online business tool from this list?
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