Small Business Resources

Welcome to the Small Business Starter Kit

Building your online business may seem both exciting and intimidating. You have so much potential and yet there are an over-abundance of tools and services that you can use.

How do you know which ones to choose?

Over the years, I’ve tried and tested many WordPress plugins, services, and tools. The items you see listed below are where I’ve settled on the best resources for me. I’m happy to recommend them to you.

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Business Formation & Registered Agent Service

BEST Way to Form Your LLC
Northwest Registered Agent
4.9
$39 + State Fee

If you're considering forming an LLC, you may be wondering if you should hire a registered agent service. We recommend hiring Northwest Registered Agent for the best price and customer service.


Northwest Registered Agent provides the following core services:


  • LLC formation service
  • Registered Agent service
  • Address privacy (keeps your address off the public record)
  • Lifetime customer support
  • Annual Report reminders
  • Online document dashboard


Northwest is a leader in the industry, providing quality formation and registered agent services at an affordable price. They provide excellent customer service, lifetime support, and annual report reminders to help keep your LLC in good standing. You can easily access your important documents in one place with the online document dashboard.


Pros:
  • Premium registered agent service
  • Top Notch Customer Service
  • Don’t make your address public
  • They keep your customer data private
  • Offices in every state
  • No hidden fees
  • Same-day scanning of received mail
  • 100% error-free guarantee
  • Free legal forms
  • Reliable LLC formation service
  • Business formation experts
  • Annual report service
Cons:
  • Some other agencies have cheaper prices
Protect Your Business Our Review
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WordPress Hosting

BEST WordPress Hosting
Cloudways
4.8
$11/month & up

Cloudways makes it easy to find the best-performing web hosting providers so you can get the best performance for your website. They offer friendly support, speedy performance, and enterprise-grade security to give you the best web hosting experience possible. And with New Relic server monitoring and metrics, you can keep an eye on your site 24/7.


You choose which data center is right for your server, and you can always scale up as your site grows.


Sign up today and see how Cloudways can help you create a high-performance website for less than many shared hosting providers.

Pros:
  • FAST Performance
  • Reliable hosting with excellent uptime
  • Inexpensive compared to other hosts
  • More server resources than managed WordPress hosting
  • Scalable so you can add more resources
  • No long term contracts
Cons:
  • Limited trial period
  • Complex setup for new users
  • Custom (non-standard) user interface
  • They don’t sell domains
Buy Now Read Our Review
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Email Service Provider

BEST Overall
ConvertKit
4.7
$9/month

If you're a creative person who wants to start building an email list, ConvertKit is the perfect solution for you.


With a free account for up to 1,000 subscribers, you can get started without breaking the bank. And if you're ready for more features, there's a low-priced plan for only $9/month.


ConvertKit makes it easy to integrate with other services and create landing pages and opt-in forms to grow your list. Marketing automation lets you create workflows to send the right message to the right person.


And if you're running an e-commerce business, you can use ConvertKit as your shopping cart. Sign up for ConvertKit today and start building your list and your sales.


Email deliverability: 93%

Pros:
  • The free trial (and free plan) makes it easy to start
  • Easy to use
  • Plenty of integrations with other tools and services
  • Embeddable forms and landing pages to include on my blog
  • eCommerce built-in
  • Enhanced email designer
  • Excellent support and tutorials
Cons:
  • It’s not a CRM to manage customers
  • Lead scoring is only on the most expensive plan
Buy Now Our Review
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Course/Membership Platform

Our Pick
Searchie
4.7
7-Day FREE Trial

Searchie is the perfect solution for membership, coaching, and course platforms. It's reliable, easy to use, and packed with features,


With Searchie, you can easily import videos from other sources like Zoom, Facebook, or Vimeo. Plus, you can create beautiful hubs with content for your students or members to enjoy. And because Searchie is self-hosted, you can be sure that your videos are always available and never go down.

Pros:
  • Easy to use
  • Search within video or audio to find the content you want
  • Video & Audio hosting
  • Automatic transcription
  • Ad-free
  • Unlimited video uploads using Searchie Chrome extension
  • May allow users to download video, audio, or text transcript
  • Works great on mobile devices
  • No transaction fees
  • Searchie Academy training to learn how to build your hub
  • Use your own domain
Cons:
  • No community features
  • Free trial, but no free plan
  • Hubs must be Public or Private only
  • SSL requires Cloudflare DNS
Buy Now Read Our Review
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Shopping Cart Service

BEST Shopping Cart Service
ThriveCart
5.0
$495 (one time payment)

ThriveCart is the easiest funnel builder and sales cart service I've found. It operates on a robust platform, so you don't need to dedicate your WordPress server resources to keep it going. It also has a course platform included with the cart service.


As a Lifetime Deal, you pay once ad use it forever.


ThriveCart is packed with features to help you succeed online. With an easy-to-use interface, you'll be able to create beautiful carts optimized for conversion. Plus, integrations with major payment processors make it easy to start selling immediately.


Pros:
  • Lifetime Deal - One Payment
  • Funnel system is easy to use
  • Rock-solid uptime
  • Very secure
  • Works with many payment gateways
  • Integrates with many other SaaS platforms for courses, email, or memberships
  • Included course platform
  • Friendly customer support
Cons:
  • Upsell for additional features
Buy Now Before the Lifetime Offer Expires
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WordPress Theme

Our FAVORITE WordPress Theme
Kadence Theme
FREE!

If you're looking for a powerful WordPress theme that can help you create any kind of site quickly and easily, the Kadence Theme is definitely worth checking out.


It integrates well with plugins like LearnDash, so you can easily create a learning management system (LMS) site or use the free Starter Templates to create a site for just about anything else.


Plus, with the FREE Kadence Blocks plugin, you can take full advantage of the Gutenberg editor to easily create beautiful pages and posts.


You can upgrade to the PRO version for most features to create Mega Menus, hooked elements, and much more.

FREE!
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WordPress Plugins

Lasso Brag