This article is meant to be a checklist and guide for developing an online presence. I’ll cover concepts and points of interests across the different areas of this article. If you are curious about selling yourself or your goods and services online or if you have already gotten started and are looking for ideas this guide should be a good fit. I’ll cover a lot of topics and I’ll try to chain them together sequentially :
What we’re talking about
- Domains
- Hosting
- Websites
- Blogging Platforms
- Knowledge/Resource Hubs
- Contact Relationship Managers
- Marketing Managers
- Automation Software
- Video Managers
- Live streaming
- Social Media
- Ad Platforms
- E-commerce Platforms
- Analytics Tools
- Search Engine Optimization Tools
- Customer Support Platforms
- Collaboration Tools
- Meetings tools
- proposal/quote tools
- Invoicing tools
- Bookkeeping tools
Domains
It’s 2023, we all know what a domain name is. There are barely any left because we as a society have creatively discovered and purchase them all up, mostly. When I wanted to name my (then) agency I couldn’t think of a domain. I hired a freelancer on Fiverr to do research and come back with 10 possible business names with available URLs. Khaotic Digital is what I had after further playing with the suggestions I paid for.
Now days I share the ‘Khaotic’ moniker with a lot of people and businesses. Some of them blatantly infringe. There’s an Etsy store selling designed products that not so original named themselves “Digitally Khaotic”. Sometimes I think the word would have never existed if I hadn’t launched a website back then, and now I have to fight for it. This section isn’t so much about buying a domain name, you can do that with:
I would suggestion Godaddy, they have superior registrar management and a long standing track record of excellence.
This section is about maintaining your domain. Protecting it. And this is a short section, I only have a little advice.
Legal
You need a business name. You can get an LLC for between $400 - $1200. You need a URL, preferably one that matches your name. You’ll want to make it unique enough that you can trademark it, for between $200 - $800. And you’ll want to look into methods and process for reinforcing your trademark as an upkeep chore. If you do this You’ll have legal authority over your domain name but will still need the resources to remediate.
Presence
Spread your domain far and wide. Get as many quality websites as you can to link back to your site, preferably by name so the link text is your website/business name and the link goes to any page on your website that you want traffic. How many? Well 2-10 is great but 500 is better. Business listing services, partner entities, charities, guest posts - wherever you can score a link you should. What this does is drown out any competition. Khaotic Digital is working on this now, this website is relatively new in it’s current state and isn’t much of a contender SEO-wise so it’s currently easy to push us around. If you have a quality website and would like to help us out with a link we’d appreciate it. We can return the gesture. That’s how this works, make friends with other domain owners and trade links. No one is going to work as hard at beating you as you can work at winning at your own game.
Marketability
You’d be surprised at how well you already know this but your domain should be marketable. Which is better ‘www. Imakestuffforpeople .com’ or ‘www. stuff4u .com’? I know it’s a website, but imagine answering the phone and saying “imakestuffforpeople dot com, how can I help you?”
I put email after domain because It’s a really classy move to have an email address like [email protected] instead of [email protected].
All of these providers offer both general email and business email that allows you to connect your domain. The general email is generally free. we use Google Workspace for a lot of our internal collaboration, and we pay about $8/mo/email. It’s worth every penny for the organization tools alone. With Google you also get Docs, Drive, Calendar, Developer Console, and a ton of other apps within a collaborative environment.
Here are some providers:
Create a personal business email, and one for the business. Maybe one for support also if you need it. You’ll get overwhelmed pretty quickly if you use a single email for everything - all of the things you will sign up for and try, the cold sales and backlink emails you can generate and send, just consider all the ways you might use your email and create accounts as needed. If your email inbox gets so overran that you don’t want to use it then it’s not useful to have. The world around you will do everything it can to hook into your inbox and pump it with as much spam as you will allow it so start off on the right track by planning to avoid this invasion ahead of time.
MX Records
Your registrar hosts your domain name. If you use a business email service that requires domain integration then All you will need to do, in most cases, is add a few records to your domain’s DNS records. One is a probably going to be a .txt file with a code that allows the email service to verify your domain. The other(s) will be called MX records. There might be 2 or 3. All of the business email services will have instructions and it’s really easy if you know how to access your DNS records.
Hosting
When I talk about hosting, I’m talking about where your website, blog, or backend live for your company. If you have a HubSpot website then HubSpot is hosting your website. If you have a WordPress website then you might be using managed hosting on wordpress.com, or you could be using a cpanel on bluehost, or godaddy, or etc. You can launch a simple html website on a server without a manager, provided the server has the bare minimum requires to accept and process connections and deliver the html pages. There are a ton of hosting services and they aren’t the same.
Cpanels
A cpanel is a pretty old concept. As a business practice, a lot of web dev shops would self host client sites on a shared server space, partitioning the space using cpanels to control the individual sites. A Cpanel is just a graphic user interface for what is usually an apache PHP server. It provides all kinds of management options that you would normally do from the command line and they always have some type of file management system and ftp credential settings. You can push a website build through an FTP client like Filezilla.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting services started popping up around 2012. Wix, Squarespace, Hubspot, and wordpress.com are all examples of managed hosting services. These services are like a cpanel but more flushed out and integrated into a website builder. Instead of having a server you could do anything with you have a hosted website builder that typically doesn’t allow backend programming.
Raw Server
My server of choice is a Digital Ocean Ubuntu droplet. A droplet is just a virtual private server that you can spin up and connect to. AWS and other Hosting providers provide the same type of products. Not just Ubuntu, They have options for every type of development.
You typically access these server through a command prompt. I like to SSH into my servers using Git Bash on my windows computer. A server is a file system like a regular computer. You move up and down the directories and target specific scripts and functions to make stuff happen. But you do it all by typing commands in the command prompt. It sounds like a lot but it’s actually really fast and it’s a different feeling opening a bash shell and accessing a remote server, compared to going to a website and logging in somewhere. It’s faster and feels more accessible.
There is a process to setting up a server for security and functionality. It can be hard to get the hang of. These servers aren’t just for hosting websites, you can run all kinds of projects, like ‘Internet of Things’ or restful api’s.
Websites
If you take the time to set up a quality website then it’s a great idea. If you don’t think you can effectively build a website, use a website builder, hire a web developer, or set up a prebuilt template, a website isn’t always necessary. You might be better off using Facebook or Link Tree for your home page.
A website is a brochure about your thing. What is it, why do I need it, how does it work, where can I get started?
It’s important to bifurcate. Your website is your entity’s brochure, your blog is your entity’s insights, your marketing engine controls your landing and thank you pages, etc. They may all be on the same domain or split on to subdomains (depending on how many services you wire together) but look at each of these things individually then see where you can find solutions for each. HubSpot, for instance, will provide solutions for everything, at a cost. You might have a different tool/platform for each. Don’t assume they are all the same or you might end up stuffing parts of your online presence where they don’t belong and it will stunt your growth.
Plain HTML/CSS/Javscript
You can build a website using just HTML, Css, and Javascript. It’s going to be lame though. For one, all of your web pages are the raw html file so home.html, about.html, etc are in your url. Also, you have no backend functionality. This is a very basic and limited way to build a website and you will still need to know HTML, CSS, and Javscript. You’ll also need a server and that server will need to be configured with the correct url. This is the easiest way to set up a website but it isn’t recommended.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
A content management system is a place for you to store and manage your content. Instead of every html document being a web page, your html documents are used by the system serving the content. A page has a title field and that is a field in a database. When the page gets called the assigned template is called and in the template there is a token for the title that comes from the page info. You could just update the title in the html document, but a content management system takes the development out of the content process making the job less technical. A good Content management system, like HubSpot or Wagtail will make it easy for anyone to go in and create, edit, or update pages within the system.
Your website brand/theme are the templates that your content management system uses to produce your content. You might have a designer design a home page, about us page, gallery page, blog index, and blog post. These would first get hard coded into raw HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and then turned into editable templates that integrate with your CMS. A lot of CMS’s offer marketplaces full of free or for sale themes/template packs that have customizable brand settings. Any good theme will be fully editable from the header logo to the footer copyright. You should be able to change the color scheme across the theme to match your brand using global brand color controls. Your brand shouldn’t change often but these controls ensure that you have maximum control over your site.
Content management system themes might have a few components:
- Modules - these are reusable chunks of code that generally carry their own editable fields. A module might contain html, css, javascript, templating language, and fields.
- Global Modules - these are the same as above but instead of them be editable per use they are editable from a global area and the way they are set is how they appear across the site. Some common global modules are the site header and footer. These are also great for dynamic content like latest blog posts or etc.
- Sections - In HubSpot, sections are like screenshots of a module or group of modules and their settings. Modules can be highly editable so you might have one module that looks completely different in multiple different settings scenarios. The purpose of sections is to save snapshots of these variations to quickly throw into the page editor. A lot of content management systems/website builders have this feature.
- Partials - this term applies to chunks of code. Depending on the system this will have different purposes, but the idea is somewhere between global modules and sections.
- Templates - these are the core html files that most systems expect. Html stands for hypertext markup language.it’s a markup, document structuring language. Templates in your content management system will rely on templating language, like Django templates, Jinja, or HubL, to output the content from your content management system’s database.
Website builders
Website builders are different from content managers but these two are pretty much the same. Really you could get either product and it would probably have a cheap version of the other. WordPress is a content management system with a templating system. Depending on the template you use you might have some pretty powerful, or basic, website builder capabilities. Divi is a website builder plugin for WordPress that allows you to build out new page layouts on the fly, in the page editor. WordPress is a content management system with or without a website builder plugin like Divi, but I wouldn’t call it a website builder.
Godaddy has a website builder, and it’s not horrible. It’s on par with Wix. These website builders aren’t the best for performance or marketing or even SEO, but you can build a website with them and it combines with hosting for seamless launching.
Hubspot is a content management system and a website builder. It’s a ton of other things too, all neatly working together. You can create and save sections using the page editor and add or remove and rearrange sections within the page editor. And the Content management experience is seamless.
The core requirement for functionality is that you need access to view and perform management functions on your website pages. Beyond that, you need to be able to update your page content, and customize your page templates. All of the user experience perks should enhance that experience.
Blogging
Content marketing started to rise to popularity in 2013. Blogging is a great way to share updates, thoughts and opinions, news, and marketing information. Blog articles are typically not evergreen, they have an anchor date of publication and the information can quickly become outdated or irrelevant. A lot of blogs have posts that benefit the customer service process or the sales process and those articles do not expire much or at all. You can also simply list updates to information on an article. Many blogs on Khaotic Digital are tutorial posts that will be good for a long while. But to blog requires a blog.
If you are using a content management system then you might already have blog functionality. Here are some typical features of a blogging system:
- Blog index template
- Blog index pagination
- Individual post template
- Tagging system
- Post Author
- Post Published Date
- Filter by tag
- Filter by date group
- Filter by author
- Text Search posts
- Share buttons
- Read time indicator
- View count
- Featured image
- Related posts
- Subscribe functionality
- Next post buttons
- Previous post buttons
- Comments
Not all blogging software are created equal. Some software, like blogger or medium, aren’t really white-label. You can tell when you are on one of these sites regardless of the branding. Website builder blogging software might do the trick. This will shock you, but my favorite blogging solution is Hubspot. Most of the items on that list were standardized by the HubSpot blogging environment.
The one item on that list that I have only found a way to provide through a custom DJango/Wagtail blogging solution is the post view count. That is not a normal blogging feature and I’m not sure why. Khaotic Digital’s blog has it, because we use a custom solution. We also have built in buyers’ personas, cta selectors, affiliate ad selectors. Our tags work differently, we have the blog tagging and we have tags that relate posts to contractor types from our contractor listings. Custom blogging solutions are great when you want to try new things but if you are just starting out you are better off going with a prebuilt solution where you can just jump in a post content to share.
Knowledge/Resource Hubs
What used to be a simple FAQ page has evolved into massive hubs of helpful content that bots can use to intelligently help customers on your website. These Hubs are great for SEO, great for subject authority, great for customer support and retention, and great for your company because you change a little when you dig in and assert yourself as an expert in something. These should be as searchable as a blog but evergreen content without date authority. If your business is a coding language then this would be your documentation. Document your business. Hubspot actually provides tools specifically for knowledge bases, otherwise use a blog style system.
Contact Relationship Managers
Contact relationship management software Is software that accepts your contacts, or leads and customers, as entries in a database and provides you with tools for managing your relationships with them.
Think about that, what are your relationships with your customers? Where do they start? Where do they end? Can you identify and label the various relationship stages a customer goes through with you? Can your identify and generate the appropriate marketing and sales material to guide them through those stages? Then you are ready for a CRM like Hubspot or Sharpspring. With a CRM you will be able to put your contacts into a database, with fields that fill out to make full profiles of your customers. And, now-a-days, it’s not uncommon to be able to fully manage a wide range of communication channels directly from your CRM interface. In Hubspot, for instance, you can see all email, phone, chat and etc interactions with a contact, schedule automated emails, make notes and assign tasks, and literally do anything you need to do to manage the relationships between you and your customers.
A CRM like Hubspot is going to also be your source of forms. When someone fills out a form they should be a contact and so it makes sense that a good contact manager is going to provide you with forms. If you aren’t hosting your website with your CRM provider then your CRM should provide embed forms to place on your website. Any time you need a marketing or sales form on your site you should use a form from your CRM, not your website builder or etc. Subscriptions might be different, but, again, a good CRM, like Hubspot, will provide that functionality also as a subscriber to your blog is a potential customer and should go into your CRM.
Lead churn, lead prospecting, lead nurturing are all phrases in this area of marketing that you will see and hear and they are all actions that happen on your contacts. All leads are contacts but not all contacts are leads. A contact can turn into a lead. If you are paying for contacts and you find out a contact isn’t a viable lead then you should probably remove them from your CRM. If a contact performs actions on or around your brand that indicate that they might be a good customer fit then your inbound marketing strategy should draw them in to interacting with your assets, which should land them in your CRM and further into your marketing and/or sales funnels until they either become a customer or disqualify themselves.
I think it’s important and overlooked that companies allow contacts to disqualify themselves, set up disqualification criteria, and leave people alone that disqualify. The sales messages are getting out of hand. We get it, you got Hubspot now you’re an email ninja, but continuing to flood my inbox with your sales message is how you get a bad spam score. Use your CRM to manage your relationships and be considerate of the people you are tossing into your system.
Marketing Management Software
This is a little ambiguous. The point of online marketing is to generate leads for sales. Leads are contacts before they are leads. The goal of marketing is to generate contacts. You really can’t have a proper marketing management software without contact relationship management tools. But I stand by the distinction, they are different.
Marketing management software provides you with marketing tools. Hubspot is a great example of this, as well. Let’s look at content marketing from a campaign perspective:
You generate an offer: download eBook on widgets
You create a landing page to display the offer
You need ad material to link to this page
You need a form on this page to get get an email to deliver the download link
You need a thank you page
You need call-to-action buttons and graphics, preferably trackable
You need some related content posts for baiting and SEO
You need the ebook itself and a way to deliver it
In Hubspot there is a feature to combine all of these related items under one campaign and track the full impact metrics. If you set your campaigns up correctly and apply some social media and pay-per-click marketing then you should start collecting new contacts and your campaign metrics will start to move. In marketing, this concept can be templated and rolled out from several angles. Metrics tell you what works and what doesn’t. Each of these campaigns is like having a sales person on staff, hanging out on the internet trying to find you customers. How big do you want your sales team?
Marketing Automation Software
Just like how marketing management software is pretty dependent on contact relationship management software, marketing automation software is another layer of independent theory. Automation software can do anything from auto sending an email containing your most recent posts to guiding a contact all of the way through the buyers’ journey, from awareness to delight, acting as a personal assistant to your efforts.
In many softwares you will find the automation features under workflows. Workflows are like individual files of automation. Workflows consist of interaction triggers between your customer and your properties/objects, and if/else statements to move them through lists and deals boards.These can get crazy large and in depth and the triggers can range from a contact looking at a specific page to them filling out form A after clicking button C while on Page D and even that doesn’t explain it because you can get so granular, but you can keep it simple too so ease into the concept.
Video Management Software
A good video management software will store your videos. A great video management software will allow you to easily share or embed those videos. The best video management software is going to have onboard video editing and management tools.
And guess what, you already know what Video management software is.
YouTube, Vimeo, VidYard, Rumble are all video managers. Most of them are also social media. And a lot of other things. But they are video management software, for sure. You can upload your videos, they have privacy settings, you can share the videos, embed them, they have analytics and some of them have enterprise and white label options. All of these softwares have apis you can use to manage and retrieve your videos. And some of them allow you to control advertising on your videos.It’s important to pick a video manager that will support your business goals and processes. And it needs to work with your website, but embed codes work just about anywhere.
Live Streaming
I have spent a lot of time in the live streaming world. I’ve had several amatuer and failed little live stream shows and I’ve moderated and support several more. It’s an art when done correctly and great waste of time when things go poorly. I’ve watch some of the weirdest stuff with live streamers.A lot of people support themselves by going live every day.
But live streaming is a flooded space, it isn’t lucrative unless you have that special sauce that draws a crowd, and maybe some support from people with reach. For as many people as are on the internet, very few actually give a damn about your live show, and, with social media, someone has to care enough to provide a like or a share for you to get any visibility or traction.
From a business perspective, live streaming has traditionally been used for seminars. I’ve seen a lot of contractors build a career off of teaching, and the same for very decently employed developers with large community followings. Teaching is learning with the expectation of excellence. Teaching is building subject authority for your brand. Teaching is giving and that always comes back. But the internet is clogged with base level tutorials about how to update your email address or create your first email. To quote Bruce Lee, “ We need emotional content”. It is going to be really hard to find live streaming success in the current market having something special or different to offer. Or you can provide that special and different something somewhere else and have those efforts translate to your live streaming endeavors.
There are several Platforms to livestream on. I’d like to tell you that certain platforms are better for certain things, and they are, but overall it’s just different audiences on different platforms. It’s a very fragmented environment. Check out the list:
- YouTube
- Twitch
- Kick
- Trovo
- Rumble
- Dlive
And a ton of other platforms. Each with its own stream key. The marketer in you is saying “if each has its own audience I need to be on each”. Your instincts are correct. And to do this you need a multicasting software that you can put each of your stream keys into, and that will provide you with a single stream key you can use with your streaming software. A platform like Restream provides that functionality and also has an onboard studio you can use as your streaming software.
A lot of these software provide popout chat functionality and allow you to embed your stream channel into your website, so you are technically live on your website. That’s really cool if you think about it, you can go live and easily put a live feed on your website.
Live streaming is hard for beginners. You can’t go in without a plan or expecting to do a lot of crowd work because you probably won’t have any for a while. Go in with a strict format, keep it short, and be friendly to visitors. You’ll have regulars in no time.
Social Media
I could list and link all of the social media sites here but we all know them. I want to make a funny quip about how we are still adding (fomerly Twitter) when mentioning X. And what the deal with Meta, is it social media? Threads is a joke. I love the independent platforms but honestly their user bases are small and… fringe?
Social media is social media. If you want to get popular on X channel your inner shit poster. Drama goes over well on Facebook. Redditors like to be intellectually stimulated and given the inside scoop.Youtube is all about the thumbnail, I’ve heard boobs work well on instagrams and really they all have a personality style you have to adopt within your brand to be successful. Otherwise you are just making yourself available for support and that isn’t a bad deal. Focus on one platform you can adapt to and just be available with the others.
Social media management
Considering all of the platforms you need to focus on to get full audience access, why even start? Well, check out SocialBee. Social bee is a tool that you connect all of your social media accounts to, and manage and schedule your post from. Not only that, they have AI content generation and content concierge services that will completely automate your social media efforts.Instead of trying to manage all of these accounts, manage a SocialBee account and let it manage the rest.
Ad Platforms
Ads are a rough market. Sometimes you might get an offer from GoogleAds for $500 in free ads when you buy $500. That’s $1000. That $1000 can pay for 4000 clicks you never get, or 1 click that doesn’t convert. You can get 500 clicks that turn into customers or 10,000 clicks that turn into customers. It’s all in how much you state you are willing to pay clicks or impressions on which keywords.
Here’s the thing, If your site isn’t at 100% performance by performance checker standards, if your SEO is not spot on 100% in tune with all the keywords and word counts and blah blah blah… don’t worry about ads.If you do the proper steps to get here then you will know enough about keywords to transition into ad buys smoothly, otherwise this is over your head and your website needs work.You shouldn’t pay a ticket to get people to your website if they are going to have a horrible experience or if they would have ended up there anyway if you had used the right keywords or posted the right article. You are competing in a global marketplace, act accordingly.
You can also use ads to supplement parts of your site. Khaotic Digital has the goal of providing free business and listing services to independent contractors and freelancers. We run ads on our blog articles only and it actually pays for the server space each month, which is great. You want to keep other businesses' ads far away from your conversion content, other people’s identities on your site (like listing profiles) and far away from your marketing and sales pipeline. We aren’t selling anything here at Khaotic Digital, just hanging out and talking about marketing. So the ads work for us.We appreciate your putting up with them for us as them and our affiliate sponsors keep us going.
We use Ezoic Ads. It’s an intelligent ad platform that has ad delivery and ad purchasing. I’d highly recommend it as a product, you will really like the dashboard.
E-Commerce platforms
Commerce is defined as “the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale.” the ‘e’ stands for “electronic”. You’re welcome.
There are few open source solutions for an e-commerce platform. Magento is an example. I’m sure there are some new-aged javascript options. Honestly Shopify is probably the best solution.
There’s a lot going on with an online store. You need the product, Shopify has integrations with Printful and other drop-printng/shipping platforms. You need shipping, warehousing, packaging, etc etc. You can do it all out of a spare bedroom, completely through drop-management, or you can have a giant warehouse like Amazon. Shopify has integrations for all of your logistics, marketing, and sales needs.
Analytics Tools
Whether you are hosting your website in Hubspot, or running an event with EventBrite, or sending subscription newsletters, or posting on social media; there are analytics for you to look at. Google Analytics is the defacto website analytics platform, and it can connect to a lot of your properties and assets to give you a fuller picture. You can get more granular on your website with Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics is the tracking tool, it’s been around forever. Google Tag manager is the tool that sends the data from your website to Google Analytics. Google Analytics did this before Google Tag Manager, Google Tag Manager give you extra abilities within that process such as targeting interactions with specific page elements. Google Tag Manager can interact with other tools too.
Business Intelligence Tools
Tools like Tableau take analytics a step further by wrapping your analytics in workflows, insights, and tools that help you grow. These tools are expensive and require higher level knowledge of what analytics are and how they work.
Other Analytics
Business intelligence tools will allow you to tie a lot of your analytics sources into one dashboard. You’ll have analytics from your social media accounts, your website, your blog, your shop, your server, your marketing platform, your sales platform, and on. Focus on the specific conversion metrics you are after and focus on user experience metrics first. You will naturally move on to the rest as you improve in an area. It’s a lot to manage even with an all-encompassing dashboard.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
Search engines index the internet and make it searchable for users. Search engines have giant databases containing the known internet.Naturally, there is no way to give you this all at once so it’s delivered in a list from top to bottom. But now the top spots matter because the user will see those spots first. Now we have competition, but how are we competing? There are a lot of factors that go into search engine optimization. It’s become an intricate science. The tried and true method is to just put out good content and a lot of content on a performance optimized website. If you cover all of your subjects you should naturally build keyword rankings over time. If you know exactly how this works then you can go right in and start to make a huge SEO impact out-the-gate. But nobody really knows anything on a specific level with SEO, it’s all just general techniques and theories. And Google is always changing the way they rank things, if only partly because the world is always coming out with new ways to cheat the system. Imagine SEO being easy to hack… it’d be even harder to rank.
There are several tools to improve SEO. for performance checks I go to Google PageSpeed Insights. It will analyze your pages and give you tips on what is holding you back.
For on page SEO there are a few tools that you can use that will scan your site but I really just use HubSpot’s SEO tools on HubSpot websites. These tools check for content level issues like missing image alt values or multiple H1 headings on the page.
SEO Building tools like SEMRush help you out with building backlinks, doing keyword and competitor research, and a lot more. It’s a proactive SEO Tool.
Local listings is a term to describe your business’s listings on various listing sites across the internet. Some of these are great backlinks. Here are 50 website to list your Business, from business.com. Moz Local is a tools that will do these listing for you and to a very high standard. But if you have multiple locations it will get expensive.
Customer Support Platforms
Did you know that there are tools available that can give you the power of an entire support team? Support ticketing systems are a great way to allow your customers to file support requests that you can get back to and track. Some tools go a step further by providing you with things like knowledge bases and chat bots to automate a lot of your support. You might even choose to try out AI, given the current climate. Hubspot has support ticketing tools available. Helpdesk support is another option you go look at. You’ll want to map your customer support user journey and cover all of your requirements with whichever tool you choose.
Collaboration Tools
Collaboration tools aren’t just for teams. Sometimes your customer is part of your team. You can use collaboration tools with your customers. You can also use collaboration tools around your customers. Task managers, schedulers, and timers are all great tools to incorporate into your journeys and flows.
Meetings tools
Meetings tools like you can get with Hubspot or Calendly are scheduling systems that sync to your calendar (google calendar for me) and provide available time settings to generate available times on a calendar that your customers and business connections can choose from to schedule a meeting with you. You share your meeting link, they choose a time, meeting is scheduled. It gives the customer all of the onus and power, within your parameters. It’s a smart move and makes your life simple.
proposal/quote tools
If you send proposals or quotes, you can automate this process while upping your style game with a proposal management tool. This would ideally connect to your CRM. If you have chosen Hubspot as your CRM then you are in luck because Hubspot has a quote system with templates, download options, payment processing, and more. I find it best to give a quick company intro, a guarantee of service, the numbers, some resources, and the signature. You should have already had a discussion before the proposal, don’t overload the proposal.
Invoicing tools
Invoicing tools give you what you need to bill your customers and clients. You will typically get templates, customizable line-items and pricing, and reusability. A good invoicing solution will have integrated payment processing and analytics regarding your invoicing performance. Some clients don’t pay and you need to know who’s website to turn off. Quickbooks, Hubspot, Freshbooks, and a lot of other tools exist for this.
Bookkeeping tools
At the bottom of all of this is the bottom line, and that’s the bean counting. Benjamin Franklin (or someone in a wig) said something like to say you are in business is to be in business. Startup culture teaches us that until you have your first customer you are just playing pretend. I’d argue that money is the life blood of any business. The smartest thing you can do is correctly keep your books. Debts and assets. Invoices don’t matter if they aren’t paid, not if it means anything if the customer doesn’t pay for your time or energy, and when they do pay you need to handle the income correctly. Bookkeeping tools like Quickbooks give you forecasts and insights to keep you on track, and integrate with software like Hubspot to automate your bookkeeping endeavors.
Conclusion
This was a long article so I will keep the conclusion short. There is a lot to take in, there is a lot to do. Some of the stuff here is imperative, some of it is optional or not relevant to you. Your goal is to build a client base, a user base, a viewer base, some kind of base. Figure out what works best for your base and expand from there. I would not suggest blindly going down this list unless you have a team or a lot of time on your hands. If you manage to tackle all of these items then your brand will have staying power on the internet. Take Hubspot for instance, you can’t search for anything related to their product or industry without getting mostly Hubspot articles back. They own their online presence. Be like Hubspot.
