These tools works best with my Eight week launch plan that I have made for you.

In this article, I will share what tools you require to set up an online business. You can design a professional website within 2 hours and make it go live too.

Disclaimer: *This post contains affiliate links. It means I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you purchase through one of my links. If you do, thank you for supporting me!

Today, a variety of free and paid plugins are available. Choosing between them is difficult.

Beginners fall into the trap of using free tools for their business. They expect to earn profits without any investment.

But there is no business without investment. You have to invest a minimum upfront amount for starting any business. For other businesses, it could be thousands of dollars of investment. Then how can you expect your blog will be set up completely free.

You can set up a free blog with free hosting and a free theme. But that won't support your business as the foundation is weak. It is a good choice for a hobby blogging.
 
Hence to make your foundations strong, you should invest in the right tools from the start. If your business scales, these tools will scale with you. No free tool will scale with the increasing number of customers.

I am not against free tools. A free tool like UpdraftPlus is good for taking backups for your site. I think this is the best free tool for your site backups.

But you should buy building blocks of your business as well. They will provide ample opportunities for you to grow your business and scale with your audience.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, that means if you decide to buy any tool, I will earn a small commission with no extra cost to you. However I am serious about my recommendations. I won't recommend you anything that is not good for you.

What is Hosting?

When you make a website, you need to host it on a web server so that other users can see and access your website. In layman terms, you are renting/buying a space from a web host to make your site available to the World Wide Web.

Now some companies provide free hosting. Never opt for free hosting unless you are building a hobby blog. Running a hosting company requires a lot of money. Always try to find out how your free hosting is managing expenses of hosting.

Cons of free hosting providers

Your website load speed is directly dependent on your web host. It is one of the top 3 metrics that Google uses to rank your content. Hence it is essential to choose a reliable hosting provider for your website. 

The problem with EIG Hosting providers

Now comes the harsh truth that no one will tell you. EIG is a company that owns most of the hosting providers. So, if you are getting started with your blogging business, chances are you will end up with the one owned by EIG. 

EIG is a big company. They pay above-average affiliates to bloggers and digital marketers for recommending their hosting companies. All the big hosting sites you have heard the name of belongs to EIG.

I do not recommend EIG backed hosting providers. The reason will be occasional breakdowns in sites and unreliable customer support. 

One of the biggest complaints plaguing EIG is the unreliability of its services.

Hence I won't recommend you Bluehost, one of the most recommended hosting service. Sure they offer the highest affiliates, but I am serious about my recommendations. I won't recommend you any tool just for good affiliates sales. 

How to choose hosting service?

For high budget users

Cloudways has a different mechanism of storing website. It stores your website at multiple servers. That's why it's a bit expensive. But you will get what you want from a hosting website. If you can afford a higher price($13 per month), you should go for Cloudways Vultr High Frequency server for your website.

They provide resources of cloud hosting on a price little more than shared hosting.

What is a Page builder?

A page builder is front end editing tool which is used to design look of website.

To create a beautiful page like this, you need a good page builder. It ensures your site looks professional. At the backend, a good page builder runs optimized code for your website. The structure of a website is a priority for search engines for SEO rankings. Hence, you should ensure you use a good page builder which at the backend runs quality code.

A page builder should be good from the front end too. It should offer you a wide range of options and building blocks to run your website.

See the above tool I am using right now. It is so easy to write a blog post with this. Also, my posts look good and appeal to the audience. Sure there is a learning curve involved with page builders. But it is worth it. You will have control over how you want to design your website.

Don't know how to design? Page builders come with a pre-designed template that you can use to design your website within minutes.

Why Free theme won't work?

There are several free themes in the market. But almost all of them are not optimized for speed. Poorly coded free themes can affect speed of your website. As a beginner, you will be using a shared hosting for few months. Shared hosting already slow down a website. If you will be using non optimized theme, your website will further slow down.  

Hence invest in a good page builder. There are page builders which cost as low as $2 per month and are very good. Let's discuss one in detail.

Elementor is one of the best and cheapest option for page building. If you are on tight budget, use this as your page builder. It generates optimized backend code, making your side faster than other heavy page builders. Most of the top bloggers use this tool to build pages and make their sites look professional.

This is how front end editing looks like. You can simultaneously know how your website will look to your users. Also it is easy to build with drag and drop builder. It is very interesting and fun to work with different elements of page builder.

Since your are just starting, Elementor will be cheapest and best option for you. It will cost you $49 for a year on one website. Cool isn't it?

Email marketing should be your number 1 priority while setting up your business. There is no reason why you don't want to start your list building from day 1. It will earn you loyal fans. You can interact with them and help them if you have their email address.

Your subscribers said yes for the knowledge you are sharing. To help and interact with your subscribers, let's understand what we need to do.

How to choose Email marketing provider?

My recommendation is FluentCRM. It is a more budget friendly option. It pretty much offer everything inside the WordPress only. For me, it is good that I can manage my emails inside WordPress. However if you want to keep your email marketing separate from your main site, it is your choice. But is it very expensive and your data is on third party hosted service.

I know most of you think that you can launch a free blog as well. Yes you can. But it will have a weak foundation.

Without an email list, you are not building followers who will be advocates of your brand. They will find you and be lost forever if you don't have their email address. 

Without a good host, neither your website speed is ensured, nor your authority on your content.

Without a page builder, ummmm... okay I agree without a page builder you can go. You can use Gutenberg editor of WordPress for the start and a theme. But you will soon grow out of it. So soon that you will have to redesign and rebuild your website again which will add complexity to your business. It will shift away your focus from your business to your website look and design. Which is again a waste of time in my opinion.

It all depends on you. Whether you want to build a proper business for a long term. Or you are just hobby blogging. But I believe if you are trying to set up a business, give your everything to it. It will make sure you don't have any regrets left after.