023: The 10 Tools I Use to Run My Online Course Business

Kate Kordsmeier 0:00

Oh, hey, Fancy seeing you here. It's Episode 23 of the Success with Soul podcast. And I'm your host, Kate Kordsmeier. Today's episode is another Facebook Live that we did back in August, all about the 10 tools I use to run a six figure course business. It's a cool thing we've been doing in the Facebook group for the last couple of weeks. And if you haven't joined us, I hope you will, because recording live episodes with y'all in the group is super fun and you get to actually be a part of the show. That being said, if you missed it, and this is the first time you're hearing this, then you'll know what's happening when I'm talking to people in the chat or having conversations with somebody besides myself. Now, before we get into today's content, I want to give you guys a reminder that today, the cart closes for Amy Porterfield digital course Academy. You've been hearing me talk a lot about this course lately as it is one of the best investments I ever made in my business. It took me from being in debt with my previous course launch to having a six figure course launch, not just three months later. And while digital course Academy DCA is packed with tons of valuable content, and lessons, and modules galore, we also have some of our own bonuses and if you purchase through my link, you will get access to over $1,554 worth of live q&a sessions and even a workshop with myself and Amy, coming together to share how to powerfully combine a blog and a digital course in your business. There's after party group coaching calls with me where you can get your questions answered and get guidance and feedback. And we even have hot seats for 10 extra special students whose Sign up early on in the lunch. You'll also get our self care launch plan checklist which includes some mindful planning principles and a guide to launching your course in accordance with cyclical living to maximize your efforts while staying sane. We also have the ultimate blogging online business owner toolkit with templates and swipe copy and checklist you'll get the debrief from my six figure launch back in January. We're also gifting you with a free seat and our How to finally start a blog workshop. and so much more. So go ahead and check it out at successwithsoul.co/DCA. The cart closes today and it won't be open again until this time next year, so do not miss your chance. Now on to today's episode you're listening to the Success with Soul podcast with Kate Kordsmeier x journalist turned CEO of a multi six figure blog and online business. But it wasn't that long ago that Kate was a struggling entrepreneur who lacked confidence, clarity and let's be honest money. But all those failures, experiments and lessons learned helped Kate create a thriving business that impacts thousands and brings freedom, flexibility and fulfillment to her life. If you're ready to do the same and make something happen with holistic, soulful, step by step strategies from Kate and other experts, you're in the right place. here's your host, writer, educator, Mom, recovering perfectionist, bookworm and sushi connoisseur Kate Kordsmeier

Welcome we are back with a another episode of the Success with Soul podcast recording live in the Facebook group. So I'm super excited to be doing another one of these live recordings. y'all get to be a part of it. You To hear yourself on the podcast, you know, hear me mention your name, at least on the podcast when it goes live, which will be September 17. And so you're also getting a sneak peek into the podcast before it releases to everybody. So really exciting and fun. We are with this is the third time we're doing this this month and it's all part of our digital course theme of August and September. So along those same notes, I have a couple announcements that I wanted to share and make sure that everybody listening doesn't miss out on some of these killer deals that are happening right now when it comes to digital courses. So if you have attended before or if you've just been following along in other places, you know that Amy Porterfield is my ultimate digital course Queen mentor. She helped me go from a launch in October of my course where I live To over $12,000 to now being I had a six figure course launch in January. So in just three months of taking her course digital course Academy, I was able to go from being in debt to making six figures in two weeks. And if you want to get in on all that goodness, then you can do so right now. The doors are not technically open to digital course Academy yet that's coming but you can get a sneak peek of the entire first module of DCA completely free now through September 2 at midnight Pacific. So then it is disappearing and there's no catch you're not locked into paying anything. You don't even have to give your credit card information. You simply get to get a sneak peek of the entire first module for free. No strings attached and you can experience how DC is set up Amy's t teaching style firsthand see if it's for you. And you actually get a ton of value in just the first module. So in the first module, you're going to learn how to create instant momentum. Amy has these seven most critical digital course decisions you need to make. And this sets your overall strategy up with just a handful of a few Smart Choices before you even get started. So you're laying an amazing foundation. before you're even like officially on this course journey. She's going to help you get clear on what you want to name your course she has a whole lesson called the art and science of naming your course. And the name alone can and will influence your core sales. So you need to get it right and Amy is going to help you figure out how to do that. You're also going to get total clarity on your course pricing. So you're going to get like figure out that sweet spot so you can stop second guessing yourself. letting this important decision go untouched until after you've already created your course. Instead, you're going to be able to let it help you steer how you design your course from the beginning. And I'll say this pricing module or lesson was so integral for me, I actually significantly changed my pricing from October to January, those two launches I mentioned. And I do think that this had a huge effect on our course sales and overall conversion. So really important stuff. And then you're going to map out your entire course creation plan and your launch date so that you can know right off the bat, how you're going to sell your program, who's gonna buy your program, and how to get people excited and ready to buy so that when you open the doors to your course, they are ready and waiting. So really excited about the fact that you can get into the entire module one For free right now. So again, that's now through September 2, so you have like a week ish to check it out. And there's just so much value in there. So we have the link in the like caption

for this live.

And then Mara probably also is dropping it in the chat. Although Yep, I actually can see some of the chat now great. Tomorrow dropped the link so you can get your free sneak peek. So with that out of the way, we will move into the topic of this episode, which is the 10 tools that I use in my six figure course business. So if you are getting stuck on the tech, you don't know where to start, you don't know how to pull all of these pieces together then this episode is for you. So also in the chat and if you're listening to this podcast when it comes out in September, then in our show notes, I have linked The 10 tools that you can just click through those links, they are affiliate links disclaimer, but a lot of them come with free trials or discount codes, and other savings. So I definitely recommend checking out those links and if you're interested in any of the tools that we mentioned, so let's get started. Okay, so the first tool I want to share about is actually the software that I use to host my course. So it's where the course lives. It's where we have all of the sales pages for the course. And then after somebody buys the course, it's where they log in and access all of the content within the course and that is kajabi. So I switched to kajabi. In October, I was on teachable and there's a lot to like about teachable as well. I was on teachable for about six months and I had a good experience but there were a few things that really I felt like from user interface and user experience standpoint that was lacking. And so I switched to kajabi. The main thing that I like better about kajabi is the sales page builder. So I found teachables to be pretty clunky, I couldn't do a lot of the things I wanted to do image sizing was a problem. And it was just hard to design a really beautiful seamless page in there builder. And kajabi is is so easy, and it's beautiful. And when we switched and we changed our sales pages, we also changed the copy and you know, a few other things. So it's not only this software that made the difference, but it's definitely part of it and our conversion rates went way up. I have to look up and see I should have gotten this in advance what our conversion rates used to be on our old one, but I want to say it was like two or 3%, and then we switch to kajabi. And they went up to like seven or 8%. If Mara or Sarah are listening, we have those stats somewhere. So if they want to find those for me, and then let me know, that would be awesome. But regardless of the exact percentages, it was a big increase. And so that was really cool. And it was just way easier to use. I also like

the way that kajabi is set up from a customer standpoint. So when students log into the course I find it to be really intuitive and easy for them to find what they need. And it's easy for us to add things to the course and make updates and all of that. So I love kajabi that is the first tool that we use to host our course. This second tool that we use is Active Campaign. So Active Campaign is our email service provider. I think finding something that's really comprehensive, like Active Campaign is really important. So technically, you could send emails from kajabi. But kajabi does not excel at email marketing. I think they excel at course, platform hosting. And so while it is nice to have things all in one place, sometimes it is better to let the experts in something, be the experts in that one thing. And so there is a little bit of piecemealing together, I've yet to find one platform that literally does everything I need it to do. To the best of its ability, a lot of things are good at one or two things and so we I recommend usually doing software that way. So we use Active Campaign for our email marketing. And what happens is we use it for a variety of things we use it to generate leads for our email. Mail lists. So we have forms and different ways that people can opt into our list. I've got a couple other tools that I'm going to share about lead generation coming up. But we use Active Campaign for those once they're on our list, we use Active Campaign to actually email those people and to start nurturing our leads. So we set up a we send off one off newsletters, and we also have a lot of automation setup so that there's autoresponders in place when somebody subscribes. It's already set up as this happens, then they get this email then this happens, etc. And so you set it up once and then you more or less Forget it. So I really like having the automated response, nurture sequence and Active Campaign is super intuitive, and it's just really easy to create. It just makes sense the way that they lay everything out, so I love Active Campaign. We also we do have a 30 day free trial for Active Campaign at our link which is just cake kordsmeier.com/ActiveCampaign. So definitely check that out and just see if it's right for you. And if you're just starting out their life plan, which is all you would need when you're starting is only $9 a month. So it's super, super affordable along those lines. So I use Active Campaign to nurture people, I use Active Campaign when I'm in a launch. So when we're launching the course, so we have an evergreen funnel, or whatever it might be, we're using Active Campaign to actually send out those email marketing messages to people to invite them to webinars and get them excited about the course and answer questions about the course and address objections and limiting beliefs and that kind of thing. So I love Active Campaign for that. And then same thing once they purchase the course we have a whole welcome series for our students where you get into our course and then we're gonna send you emails to help you keep up the momentum, answer questions where you're getting stuck, etc. So how Having a really good email service provider is highly recommended. I personally don't recommend using kajabi built in email service. Nor do I recommend one of the most popular ones, which is MailChimp. It's exponentially expensive once you start growing and you have beyond their free plan, they don't have a lot of the same functionality and automation and segmentation and tagging and all of these cool features that Active Campaign has. So you'll outgrow it pretty quickly. And their email deliverability is also not as positive and high as active campaigns. So lots of good reasons to not be on MailChimp in favor of Active Campaign. Alright, so that was my second tool was Active Campaign email service provider. The third tool that we use and this is along the lines of lead generation so we use lead pages to collect email ads dresses from landing pages and pop up boxes and sticky bars and all kinds of just cool forms that you can integrate on your course pages or on like on your blog, or your website in advance so, or you can just create a random landing page that you're just directing traffic to. And the only thing that's there is that landing page and so we use lead pages currently for that I've been using lead pages for about five years. I really like lead pages, then my full disclosure is that as my business has grown, and we've started having new needs, I'm looking into switching to something like maybe Click Funnels or ontraport or something else for building landing pages and managing all of this stuff. But this is what I've been using up until today. And so I'm just sharing my personal experience of what I use and i i think lead pages has a lot to love. They've got a drag and drop builder. It's super easy to use. Again, another Just intuitive piece of software. It's not perfect, but I do really like it, we have started creating more landing pages within kajabi itself. And we've so we are also considering, like maybe we should get rid of lead pages and you know, moving everything just into kajabi. In terms of landing pages, that way, we don't have a need to pay for an extra tool. And since we already get the landing page function in kajabi that we're already paying for, that can be a great option. Again, this is not what we've done. Currently, right now, we're kind of using both. So I just want to mention that and it totally depends like what stage you're at in your journey and what your goals are. When I was just blogging on Route and rebel, my holistic wellness blog, I only use lead pages so I don't sell anything on Route and rebel that had no need for a hosting platform like kajabi. So but I did have a need to create landing pages and to grow my email list. So lead pages was great for that. So just want to give that disclaimer as well. Another way and another tool This is tool number four is interact, interact is a quiz platform that we use for lead generation and interact is so

cool. So I started using interact when I was just doing route and rebel, my blog and I would just create quizzes like you know how to know if you have PCs. UCS is a big focus on the blog. And so people could answer questions and then I would give them a very non medical answer of like you check a lot of the boxes. It's possible you might have PCs, you should talk to your doctor, things like that. Now that I have a course I use quizzes and interact to do things like segment out my list and get people started. So we have a really great quiz right now that's called what kind of blog should I start? And people answer questions about their interests, their skills, their passions, their lifestyle, and And then we tell them one of the six profitable styles of blogs that they could start and then we give them their next steps for what they can do after that. So quizzes are a great, very inexpensive lead generation tool to grow your list. People love taking quizzes, and it works really well in tandem with Facebook ads. So we have some Facebook ad budget running towards our quiz, we get a really low cost per lead. Like I'm talking in the 30 cent range, it's incredible. And those leads actually do convert into sales. And so quizzes are an amazing tool and it's really good because you can segment your list as you're doing the quiz because once people answer you can say okay, I know this person is interested in my case in like starting a parenting blog, whereas this person is interested in starting a food blog. And so now I can market to them differently based on their interest or their stage of work. where they're at in their journey we have another quiz where you can determine Are you ready to start a full time blogging business? Or what stage might you be on so then I can know where people are and again market accordingly. So I love doing quizzes interact is the tool that we use for our quizzes and if you go to successwithsoul.co/interact, you can get 15% off any plan with the code six FBA 15. So definitely check out interact quizzes if you're interested in creating one for a lead generation tool. And again, I should just say also that interactive super easy to use. There's a common theme of what I like in a tool. Ease of use is number one, so I love how easy it is to create quizzes with interact. They have lots of templates even that you can just use and just plug and play Your information and figuring out how to score it. And then integrating it with your email service provider is all really, really straightforward and they've got great customer support. So I love interact. Okay,

the next tool that we use is tool number five Sam cart. So Sam cart is our payment processor. And this is something that's a little bit different than what I would recommend to the masses. So kajabi my course hosting platform, that tool has a built in payment processor there that you can integrate with stripe and PayPal, and it's awesome. And if all I needed was just a way to process payments so that people could actually buy my course, I would just be using kajabi I would not be paying for another tool. However, I have affiliates that helped me sell six FBA and so I Need an affiliate tracking system that I can use with my payments. And while kajabi technically has affiliate capabilities, they are very limited. So I needed to find a payment processor that allowed me to have an affiliate program where affiliates could share a link, and it could be tracked to them. And then we could pay them out based on how many sales they brought in. One of the things that Sam cart does that kajabi does not do and why I was not willing to just stick with kajabi is because their cookie window is only 30 days, and you cannot change the cookie window. I don't know why they wouldn't have this functionality because it seems like a really easy thing to implement, but they don't and we like to give our affiliates an entire year for their cookie window. So that if somebody maybe learns about Course threw them in February, but they're not ready to buy yet. But then we launch again in October, they that affiliate still gets credit for all the hard work that they did to bring those people into our sphere. So that was really important to me running an affiliate program to really make sure that I'm treating my affiliates well and rewarding them for the work that they do. And so I decided it was worth the extra cost to use a different payment processor than kajabi and you Sam cart and so that's what we use currently. Again, we are looking into some other options at the time of this recording and those would include Click Funnels and ontraport. Those are kind of our two front runners right now. So if anybody has any experience with either I would welcome your feedback and I would love to hear you know what you like and dislike about them So reach out or if you're watching, leave a comment in the chat and let me know. Okay, I do see one comment coming in from Samantha is Sam cart similar to send owl?

Yeah, kind of. So

I used to use send owl when all I had was an E book.

I think you could do courses with sendowl. Sam cart is much more robust. That is what I found because I was using send out for my ebook. And then once I had the course I felt like I needed something more robust. I went with Sam cart, but I think they are pretty similar, at least in terms of you can get people are able to pay you through these platforms and send out what is a lot less expensive. So again, depends on your needs and your budget and that kind of thing, but it's a similar service. Yes. Samantha also says my favorite software is AWeber for my emails, the only thing they lack is decent forms. So I pair this with OptinMonster. Yeah, that's that's a big thing to lack in turn. have, you know email marketing, because forums are the way that people get on your email list. So I have done a lot of research on the different email marketing services out there. And I found I actually shared this in my course when I have the email module about why Active Campaign, I believe is the best email marketing software, especially for bloggers. So I would recommend if you're, if I don't think you're in the course, Samantha, but you could join the course. And then we talk a lot about that there. And that could give you some more background because again, I

while I like to,

like let whoever does something best do that thing and put together a system that maybe uses multiple tools, so that everything's operating at its most optimum, you know, capacity. I do feel like there's also something to being streamlined and simplified. And so finding an email software that also has good forms so that you're not having to then pay and manage another tool that is just for forms, I think is is worth it. But again, personal preference and if it's working for you don't change it right. All right. The next tool is tool number six, which is deadline funnel. If you tuned in last week, we talked all about evergreen launching versus live launching. And if you have an evergreen course, then I highly recommend doing deadline funnel to create a true and authentic sense of scarcity and urgency. So I'm not going to get into all of the details because we have literally an entire episode that's an hour long that explains evergreen versus live launching. But I will say that we make we have a really nice funnel using deadline funnel and Active Campaign where we can sell our course on evergreen and make money from it every single day. And deadline funnel makes that possible. And it's just an amazing tool. We've been really happy with them. And I highly recommend it if you're considering going evergreen with your course, tool number seven. Sometimes there are native integrations within all of these tools. So like linking Sam cart to Active Campaign is super easy. You can do it right within the platforms, you don't need a third party to help you out. They've got a communication system with their API's where they can talk to each other. And it's super easy to say, Okay, if somebody purchases something in SAM cart, we want to add them to this list and Active Campaign and tag them with this and start this automation and then do all of this stuff, right. So sometimes those things are really pretty straightforward. Sometimes they're not and it's going to depend on the tools You're using this is another reason I really like Active Campaign because they have a lot of integrations with a lot of different tools. But if you are using a different tool, and you they don't have a native integration like that, you're going to need to find a third party system that can help these things talk to each other. And so for that, I love Zapier, they have a free plan. So if you need less than like, I think 100 tasks a month, you can just stay on the free plan. And if you need more than that they have some, you know, different tiers where on their paid plan, but we use Zapier. So one example and I'll talk about my webinar tool in a minute here. But one example of when we would use Zapier is somebody registers for our webinar. And that tool that we use does not have a great integration with our email marketing software. And so we need Zapier to kind of link the two together and get Some of the information from our webinar software and deliver it to our email marketing software. So we have a zap setup for that. And it's actually really easy to set up. And again, just kind of straightforward and intuitive. You kind of just go into their tool and you say, I want this tool

to talk to this tool. And this is what I want it to tell them. And it makes it pretty easy. So we use different zaps for different things. Sometimes it's getting tools to talk to each other. Sometimes it's something as simple as like, anytime we sell a product, we want it to put that data into a Google spreadsheet and we want the spreadsheet to have the name of the customer, the email, the price, they paid the course name of the course that they purchased, etc. And that way then we just have it auto populate so we're not having to manually go in and create a spreadsheet with our data for Tracking and stuff. It's just going to automatically do that through Zapier. So it's a very cool service for all kinds of things and they have literally millions of different zaps that you could create. Love Zapier. Okay Samantha says I spent years on Clickbank and been selling ebooks for years and just moved to send out paired with stripe. And it's perfect for me with ebooks. I agree sendowl is perfect for ebooks. But I have a course launch in October and plan to use teachable with payments into stripe. So that's what I used to do Samantha is teachable with payments into stripe. Now I do kajabi with stripe or PayPal integrations. It's been hard work finding someone good for example wanting a VAT paid along cookie to be able to use my site for sales page etc. So nice to finally find what I wanted. Well that's awesome. I do know that teachable has the built in and stuff, which, as an American, I don't have to worry about that. But I know are you in the EU? I know like European course creators often need something where the VAT tax is automatically populated. And like I said, I don't really know enough about this to explain it. But I have heard that teachable is really good for that. And they're one of the few places that do offer that service. So good luck on your launch in October, and I'm glad you found a system that works for you as well. Again, I should put out this disclaimer, everybody has different levels of tech savviness. They've got different needs, goals, budgets, types of courses, types of products, size of email list years in business experience, you know, all these things. And so, it's really there's not like this is the only tool you should use for this you need to find the tool that works for you. The purpose of this episode is just to share the tools That worked for me. And even as I'm sharing it, I'm saying sometimes not everything about this tool is working for me. So I'm looking into something else. And you know, that's just the way the way the world, I usually, unless it's a very affordable software, or I just have been using it for years. And I know I'm going to continue, I usually don't do the annual plan for a lot of these tools, because we do end up changing things in and out pretty often and I don't want to be locked into something where then I'm paying for it. And I don't want you know, I don't want to use it. Oh, you're in Portugal. Awesome. I would love to go to Portugal. It's been like number one on my bucket list for so long. And unfortunately with COVID it's probably gonna stay there for a while, but one day I will make it out there. All right. Let's see tool number eight. So I mentioned webinars. Now, per Amy Porterfield. She taught me that webinars are the best way to sell your digital course, and after taking her webinar trainings, I totally agree. And so we use demio. For our live webinars. We actually use demio, also for our evergreen webinars up until literally this week, and we've switched to a new system that I learned from my friend Jacques

from the online course guy. I was actually a guest on his podcast a couple weeks ago, he shared this new system with me that requires no fancy webinar software. And this is for evergreen only. But for live webinars, if you're not going to use something like zoom, then you may want to look into a more robust webinar software and we have been using demio since January. So we've used demio for about eight months. And I really love demio I love the fact that you can you have Like your live chat feature, you can share your screen. You can upload documents, you can add links, you can add polls, you can add handouts. If you want a PDF to accompany your webinar, it is really easy to do all of those things. They have great customer support. And I think the user experience is really is really pretty good on demio. So I have been a fan of demio for live webinars, and I recommend checking them out if you also do live webinars to sell your course or evergreen webinars for that matter. Okay, tool number nine, which is a tool that basically anybody at any stage in their business could be using. And I think most people are at this point. So we'll see if this is a new to you tool or something that you're already familiar with. But Canva is the tool that we use to create any and all graphics for a wide variety. have things we create Pinterest graphics there, we create Instagram graphics there we create graphics for when we're doing a Facebook Live. And we want a pretty picture with some text over top to say join us for this Facebook Live. We create graphics for a podcast episodes when they come out, we create blog posts graphics, we create graphics for our sales pages when we want something that's a little bit more custom than what we can do in kajabi. So I highly recommend using Canva. To do this. They have an amazing free plan. And they have tons of stock images even so you don't have to be a professional photographer to get great photos for your graphics. Canva does this all for you. I'm actually on their paid plan, which I think is like $9 a month. And it's amazing. We share it amongst the team. So different people on the team are creating graphics and they're putting it into our shared album where we can all Go in and see and edit and download and whatever. And they've got cool integrations now with Pinterest. And you can, you know, I've even made it for personal things like baby shower invitations and stuff. I love Canva. I use it every single day. So hopefully, you are either using Canva already, or you are going to start after hearing that recommendation. Again, we have links for all of these tools in the chat or in the show notes. The link for Canva is successwithsoul.co/Canva. Keeping it easy. The last tool and this is kind of a two parter. I'm gonna give you a little bonus here. This one's pretty obvious, but we use Google and I don't mean Google like the search engine rather we use G Suite. We use G Suite for all things in my business. We have G Suite so that when somebody emails Kate with They want to email me, they can email me at hi @ successwithsoul.co. And it's a custom domain with you know, with my domain in in the email address in that I was gonna say URL, I guess it's not a URL, but it's @successwithsoul.co, right or @rootandrevel.com. So I really recommend if you want to create a custom email address like that checking out G Suite. We also use G Suite for their Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This is what my team uses to coordinate everything, keep track of everything, share things with each other. It is it's incredible. And I feel like we would be completely lost without it. We also use the Google Drive where we upload images where we upload, you know, recordings of videos where we upload other assets, even things like HR documents when I have something that you know, people on my team need to sign. It's awesome. So I love it. G Suite. And it's pretty affordable, I want to say it's like $6, a user or something like that. So it's pretty affordable. Especially even if you're just a solopreneur and a team of one, you could still get a lot of advantage of using G Suite.

And I will just add my, my little freebie here. That's sort of my 11th tool is I have just discovered this tool called sorted s o r t. d. I discovered this tool a few months ago, and we have been using it to organize our email and especially cool amongst teams because basically what you can do is they give you like a combine can ban I never know how you say that style of organization where it's like different columns. And you can drag and drop emails into different columns. So maybe you have a column that's like urgent, not urgent, customer service, marketing or whatever. And when you get emails, you can organize Then that way, so you can kind of easily clear out your inbox, put it on the boards, and then you can respond to them through there. But the cool thing about it on top of that is like, let's say somebody emails my personal email address with a customer service question. So I have a customer service agent who would actually answer that question rather than me personally answering that question. So I put it on the customer service board, and then my customer service rep. She can just go into sorted and it's now on her board, that the customer service works, it's a shared shared thing, right? And then she can respond to that email directly from sorted so I don't have to forward it to her. We don't have to keep track of it somewhere else. It's like it's all through sorted and it's been making our lives so much easier. And getting to inbox zero. So much more frequent. So I love sorted. Alright, so those were my 10 or 11 ish tools that I use to run a six figure course business. And let me just say, again, different strokes for different folks and start slow. Like I didn't start out with every single one of these tools. As I grew and looked at what I needed, and her listen to my audience and added new features and products and services to my business, I have added different services and I'm always changing things up. Right. So I shared about some of the tools that we currently use, but we're looking at other alternatives. I do think there is a very common theme of the grass is always greener when you start looking at other tools and rarely is a tool going to be 100% perfect for you and your needs. So don't fall down the rabbit hole too often of trying to explore a million different tools. Find one that does mostly what you want and need and is easy to use. And again, keep in mind like you can start slow and add things one at a time, the 10 ish 11 ish tools that I just shared, I spent over 1200 dollars a month on these tools. And that is a lot for somebody who's just starting out. So know that this is not a requirement. You don't have to use these tools. Sometimes there are free versions that are better and you can upgrade as you grow. Sometimes it's worth a little investment up front so that you don't have to redo your work when you grow. And I like setting the intention of like, No, I'm going to create this business. And so what would what would a six figure CEO do in this situation? Would they go with the cheap or free plan or product that doesn't really do what I need it to because it's free, or would they invest in this because that's what's best for their business. I really like approaching things with that mindset. to a point of course, I would never recommend anybody going into crazy debt to get their business started. So it really just varies again, depending on your goals and what plans you have how big your list is even you know some of these tools. It depends on how many emails are you sending? How many email subscribers do you have? How many zaps do you need to do each month? How many people do you need to host in your webinar? So there's a lot of variables here.

That's all I have for you guys today. I'm going to come back into the chat, see if there are any questions and then we will close it out. Okay, Sharon says do you think demio has less glitches than zoom does? So Sharon, I have not found any glitches with demio that I can think of off the top of my head. I found it to be really seamless. Sometimes people would have to like if they were having sound issues, they would just refresh their screen and it would start working again. I don't know why sometimes just hitting restart. Turning something off and on solves the problem but that did happen in demio. But I honestly haven't had many glitches with zoom either. What glitches do you have in zoom? And if you share that maybe I can help you troubleshoot a little bit. Samantha says totally agree over the annual plan wanted to leave tailwind when I still had six months left and it wasted a bit of money. Oh, that's such a bummer, but I'm surprised you wanted to leave tailwind? That was one of the tools we thought about including in here but didn't quite make the cut but we love tailwind so I'm curious what your what your problems with tailwind were love Canva they're amazing use them for a long time plus love sharing camera graphics between our account and and with our designers. Yes, exactly. You're on the paid plan. And yeah, I just saw that Canva now has animations which is so cool. I haven't really played around too much with it yet, but I want to because they look really fun. Google Sheets and docs are a true lifesaver, especially to access work from tablet versus laptop versus VHS. Yeah, sharing documents and having like a living working document that the team is working from. So it's not like, you have to download a spreadsheet, make your changes, upload it again, then your team gets it, then they download it, they make their changes uploaded again, it's all just like saved in the cloud. And yes, I love being able to access it from anywhere, whether that's, you know, on your phone, on your laptop on your desktop, when you're at home or away, it just makes it super easy. So I'm glad you have had a good experience with that as well. All right, y'all. That is it for the tools to run an online course business. As always, you can leave questions in the comments of this video if you're watching the replay and we will get back to you. And this episode will air on September 17. So if you want to listen again and take more notes, Or something then check out the episode Success with Soul. And one more reminder that all of the tools we mentioned the links including the free trials and the coupon codes are listed in the caption of this video. We'll see you next week. Bye.

Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of Success with Soul. Before I go, I wanted to just remind you one more time that today is the last day of the year actually for another whole year that you are able to join Amy Porterfield digital course Academy. That's September 17 2020. Today the doors close so don't miss it. And if you want to get in on our extra special bonuses worth over 1500 dollars, go ahead and go to successwithsoul.co/DCA To take advantage. We'll see you there.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai