Tools of the Trade

May 25

Written By

:::UPDATE::: WE SHARED OUR 2016 FAVORITE TOOLS IN THIS POST COMPARING 'THEN & NOW'

Check it out to see what's changed since this post was written. Today, I discussed The Mogul Mom's income and expenses with a business broker friend of mine. When my friend saw my 2010 and 2011 profit and loss sheet, he was surprised at how little it costs to power The Mogul Mom. Almost all of my income is profit. And that's the absolute beauty of an online business like mine. So, I'd like to share my tools of the trade with you. Maybe you can use some of them to run your business more profitably, too.

Website:

The Mogul Mom runs on Wordpress with a Thesis theme. With Thesis, you can control every last detail of your site and design with three revolutionary features you won’t find in any other WordPress theme. See what they are, here. (You can also check out Studiopress for other options.) Wordpress is awesome because you can add, edit or remove content whenever you want to instead of paying a web designer $100 an hour every time you want to make a simple change. Been there, done that. Thesis is awesome because it allows you amazing customization options and kick-ass SEO capabilities.

Hosting:

For hosting, I use Bluehost and have been very happy. It's fast, safe and cheap...about $6 per month!

Advertising Sales:

Part of my income comes from advertising sales and my favorite advertising "program" is actually a Wordpress plugin called Max Banner Ads. With Max Banner Ads, you can easily add and rotate banner ads in blogs posts, pages or on the sidebar without messing with code. Best of all? It's free. Download the Max Banner Ads plugin here.

Information Product Sales:

The bulk of my income comes from info product sales. To sell information products like Get Famous and Get Retail Ready, I use SendOwl which costs me just $15 per month. I love it because it's cheap and easy to use and you can do cool things like set up affiliate programs and create discount codes.

Information Product Creation:

I create all of my information products (as well as interviews, videos and video tutorials) on a Mac using Pages, Grab, and iMovie. Oh, Mac...how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. No, never mind, that would take too long. Let me just say that I have earned back the $2,000 I spent on my Mac and Mac tools...about ten times over.

Photo Editing:

To edit photos, I use PicMonkey and love it. Best of all? It's free. I have also heard fantastic things about Gimp and Pixelmator. I'm going to give them a try soon.

Email Marketing:

Email marketing is a must for any business. (If you need help getting started, here's a complete reference guide.) After trying nearly every email offering out there, I fell in love with that silly monkey at MailChimp. Every time I log into my account, I'm greeted with a little quip that makes me giggle. MailChimp has loads of cool features like reporting, social sharing, autoresponders and pretty templates. It costs me $50 per month for almost 4000 email subscribers. Not bad, little monkey. And, if you've got a list under 2,000, it's free! Since then we've nearly doubled out mailing list and have moved on to Convertkit. We also recommend any of these other mail providers (most have free options) include:AWeber Get Response InfusionSoft

Payment Processing:

Back in the day, I had a merchant account that cost me tons of money to set up and in monthly fees.Now I just use PayPal to accept payments - it's safe, it's easy and the fees aren't so bad either. People can use the credit card of their choice or whatever might be in their PayPal balance.

Social Media:

I run multiple Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and Hootsuite is my hands-down favorite for managing them. HootSuite allows you to monitor and post to multiple social networks all from one dashboard. It also gives analytics reporting, the ability to schedule tweets & posts and a cool app for your iPhone, Android or Blackberry. I use the HootSuite Pro account and it costs $5 per month. Try it free for 30 days, here. So, my monthly expenses are roughly $100. Not bad, eh? :) Here are some more programs we use and love: