7 Tools You Require To Succeed Online

Charlie Page is a successful internet marketer who has been making a full-time living online for the last sixteen years.

When he started he was barely able to afford the $40 membership fee for the Directory of Ezines. He ended up buying the company less than 18 months later.

Charlie now has more than 15 membership sites and serves over 23,000 paying members.

But this successful online entrepreneur and educator has an embarrassing little secret! He's addicted to buying marketing tools.

It's serious. He's an easy sale. 🙁

He wasted tens of thousands of dollars before he saw the light. And then he had an epiphany.

He realised he could run his entire business with only SEVEN tools.

He details these tools in the video below and shows how these are the core 7 tools you require to succeed online.

Tired of buying tools and resources and still not making the progress you thought you would make?

I want to share with you the seven tools you really need to succeed online.

I believe there are 7 core tools we all need to succeed online. Get them and learn to use them and the future is bright.

I know many people say, “You need this tool, and you need that tool,” but I'm a big believer in simplicity, so I want to share with you the simple solution to knowing which tools you really need to succeed online.

Happily, each are affordable and easy to use. Many come with free options.

Here's my list of the big 7.

Number One – You need a WordPress blog

You absolutely have to have a WordPress blog.

We all need a platform.

We all need a home base, a place where we can say, “Go here and see everything that I do.”

For me, it's CharliePage.com. That's my home base.

One place where we can send all of our traffic, we can track real results so we can establish our brand and build trust.

WordPress does this better than anything else.

WordPress is free or it's very low cost to have installed. Plugins add all the extra power you need. You really don't need anything beyond that and WordPress is very, very easy to use. Google loves WordPress blogs too, so you'll rank very well by having a WordPress blog.

Number Two – You need content for that blog

Getting a blog is easy, but filling it up with content is hard, right? Not really so much.

Content is much easier than most people think that it is. You really have three options when it comes to creating content easily for your blog.

Number one, you can write the content yourself.

If you like to write, you know right now that it's not a big deal for you. But if you're a person who looks at a blank piece of paper and says, “No. I'm not doing this,” then that's okay. Hold on. I've got a solution for you too.

Now, if you like to write, here's what I would say to you.

The more you write, the better you'll do it. So get started, doing it. Write every day.

If you write for 15 minutes a day every day within 3 weeks you're going to be writing so much better than you did on day one!

So you can write the content yourself.

You can write from research that you do, or from a base of knowledge you already have, or a type of expertise you have. There are many ways to do the writing yourself. It's really not that hard.

If you use a template, it will take about an hour really to create a great blog post.

You can create a short blog post in about 20 minutes.

If you want to create a longer, more authoritative blog post it takes about an hour. That includes putting images in it and things like that, so it's really not that bad.

The second solution and this is great if you don't like to write, but you do like to read and you like to research,  is curation.

You can curate the content from other sources. Curation means unlimited free content for your blog.

You find great content and you share it. That's what curation is.

If you can go to a movie and then see a friend and say, “Oh, I really like this movie and here's what I liked about it,” without giving away the punchline of the movie, without being a spoiler, then you can do curation online because that's really what it is.

It's like going to a restaurant, really liking it and bumping into a friend at church and saying, “Hey, I love this restaurant! I think you would too, and here's why.”

That is curation. That's content curation. You find great content and you share it.

If you like to read, if you like to research then this is for you. It's actually fun.

You comment on the content along the way. That's what you do.

You share small bits of somebody else's content ethically by providing a link to their website and you comment on what you like about it or what you disagree with about it. Very easy to do.

Option three is to get guest writers to post on your blog for you or use PLR content.

Often when I say this to people, they say to me, “Yeah. I don't have a reputation online. I'm not well-known online. Nobody's going to write for my blog.”

Here's the thing, it's the free way to get content and most people aren't even asking. So, put a link up on your blog today that says “Write for us,” and either offer to pay them a little tiny bit or don't offer to pay them at all and just say, “Hey, you could write for us.”

You'd be surprised how many people are out there right now who like to write, they want to promote themselves with their writing, and they're looking for places for their content to be displayed. Your blog could be that place and that means free content for you.

Plus, here's a little trick for you, if you get somebody else to blog for you, ask them to broadcast a message to their list or to their social media saying, “Hey, good news. I'm on this person's blog and go check it out.” You'll get free traffic too.

Number Three – You need an autoresponder

An autoresponder is the next tool you need and you just have to have this.

An autoresponder means email marketing. Email marketing has the biggest return on investment of any type of marketing and it's incredibly powerful. I've made a full-time living online for about 16 years and I just couldn't do it without my autoresponder.

An autoresponder is a must. It's simply a program that sends out email on a schedule. That's all an autoresponder is. So, you want a series of messages to go out. You don't want to do that every day yourself, you program them into this autoresponder and it sends it out on the schedule that you dictate. Very, very easy to do.

The top choices include:

Active Campaign. Really great service.

Ontraport is who I use. That's a customer relationship management service, as well as an email service.

Drip is very good. Drip is owned by the people over at LeadPages. Very good. Free to start.

Another great one is Convert Kit.

I know many people have opinions about which autoresponder is best. Here's the thing I would say, there are many on the market and all of them are really doing the same thing. Some of them are doing a great job.

Just always use a smart autoresponder.

Here's what I mean by smart.

If you have 10,000 people on your list, make sure you're only getting charged for 10,000 people not multiple times if they join multiple lists.

With some old-style autoresponders, if you've got 10,000 people and all of them are on three of your lists, you're paying for 30,000 people. You see what I mean?

So be careful with that. If you need any help on that, let me know.

Number Four – You need a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a must. You've got to have a great lead magnet.

What is a lead magnet?

It's a small piece of helpful content that you give away in exchange for a person joining your list.

You've seen this and probably participated in it.

You've probably joined a person's list because you wanted to get a free report. Then you downloaded it, you read it and you really enjoyed it.

That's a lead magnet.

That's all it is.

Great lead magnets include things like how-to guides, how to do a particular thing, resource guides, where can you get resources to do a particular thing, toolkits, cheat sheets, mind maps, checklists.

There's a long list of things that make for a great lead magnet.

Anything that helps a person take a step toward their goal will make a great lead magnet. You notice I said “A step” not “All the steps”.

A great lead magnet needs to be useful, but incomplete. If you give away the entire story, if you give away your entire knowledge base in a lead magnet, you will never make any sales.

A lead magnet whets a person's appetite so that they'll want to buy your product.

It does it in a really ethical way because you're giving them a preview of coming attractions.

It's a preview of what they're going to get if they buy from you. It works beautifully well.

Number Five – You need a page builder

What's a page builder?

It's a program that builds beautiful landing pages.

What is a landing page?

Believe it or not, a landing page is simply a page someone lands on. That's where they go when they click a link.

• That could be a blog post.
• It could be a sales letter.
• It could be a squeeze page.
• It could be a thank you page.
• It could be a download page.
• It could be a million different things.

Any page a person goes to when they click a link is considered a landing page.

You can use a service like LeadPages or Instapages. They charge a monthly fee. Perfectly fine.

I use and recommend Clickfunnels for building all types of pages.

Or you can use a WordPress plugin, and this is what I love about WordPress.

If you have WordPress, you really have what you need. You can use a plugin like OptimizePress or Thrive Content Builder or there are other ones out there that are very good too.

Number Six – You need tracking

Another thing you need is tracking.

Tracking gets confusing for people, so let's break it down and keep it simple.

There are basically two types of tracking that matter most, click tracking and visitor tracking.

Click tracking means how many people click a link that you promote.

You send out a solo ad, you promote something on Facebook, you post a free ad on Craig's list, you send out an email, and you're asking people to click a link.

That's where click tracking comes in. What they do after they click is also tracked by that click tracker.

Visitor tracking shows how people behave once they reach your site.

How long do they stay on your site? How many pages do they visit? Do they take any particular action that's important like joining your list or buying something?

For click tracking, I use and recommend Wicked Reports.

Wicked Reports is advanced, but it's very, very powerful. I like it for click tracking.

For visitor tracking, I use and recommend good old Google Analytics, which is totally free, and it's easier to use than you might think. Google actually has some really helpful tutorials on how to use Google Analytics.

If you want something simpler for visitor tracking with a low fee, try Clicky.

Clicky works very, very well. I think it's $10 a month.

You just install it once on your blog and it tracks all of the pages and shows you what people do. It'll even give you a heat map.

A heat map is just a little graphical display of what people do when they're on your site, as far as, where do they click. It can be really helpful.

Number Seven – You need traffic

Next, you need traffic.

Everybody's chasing traffic.

That's fine because without traffic we really can't do all these other good things.

There are three types of traffic, basically. I don't have time here to go into a deep traffic analysis, but here's something simple that I think will really help you.

You've got cold traffic, warm traffic, and hot traffic.

Those are the three types of traffic. If you learn to think about them in that way it really would help you because ultimately you want to build a capture system for each of these types of traffic.

These three types of traffic represent three types of people and they need to be related to differently.

You've got cold traffic, those are strangers who don't know you.

Warm traffic, they know you a little bit, but they don't really trust you yet.

Hot traffic, they trust you. They're ready for Freddy. They want to get to know you better, buy a product from you, have a conversation, or take the action you want them to take.

Cold traffic is made up of people who don't know you yet and they often come from paid ads or free ad postings or social media.

They don't really know you, they see your ad, they are curious, and they click it.

Other types of mass marketing work that way too. If you do any kind of outbound telephone marketing or you do any kind of outbound direct mail marketing, the people who respond are all cold traffic.

Warm traffic comes from social media, people on your list, and affiliate marketers who are promoting for you.

The affiliate's promoting for a commission, so he or she is not promoting you as much as they are your product. For that reason, this is warm traffic.

They know who you are, they're getting a recommendation from an affiliate, but clearly, there's an affiliate relationship, so the recommendation isn't “Hey, this is my friend” as much as “Hey, this is a great product.” Warm traffic is really good. It's very important to have a warm traffic system.

Hot traffic comes from people referred to you from those following you closely on social for example. They don't just follow you on Twitter or on Facebook or wherever, on LinkedIn, they are actually conversing with you. Or it could be people who are on your mailing list. That's hot traffic.

These are the seven tools you really need to succeed online if you want to build a real business.

There's a huge difference between building a business and making a couple of dollars as an affiliate.

It's very important to focus on building a real business. You can finance it by focusing on the things that make you money now.

But if you only do the today dollar things forever, you'll never really build a lasting business because you have not built structure in there.

You want a real business that's durable and scalable, something you can sell, something you can pass on to your kids.

I used to think that wasn't real when people would say that to me. I learned many years ago that's very real. I could pass my business on to my kids right now and they'd do just fine. 

Let's recap.

Number one. You want to have a blog of your own.

That's the best way to have a home base, to have a platform from which you can tell your story, people can get to know you, you can build your brand.

Even if you're not an expert, you need to build a brand.

You need to stand for something.

The person who doesn't stand for something will fall for anything and people are looking for people they can trust online.

When you stand for something people resonate with that and they say, “Oh yeah. I want to follow this person.”

Number two. You need content for that blog.

That could come from your heart and it could flow out through your pen or your keyboard into blog posts that come from your heart, your experience, your research, or your mind or it could be other people's content in the form of curation or guest posting. But here's the thing about content I want you to know. You've got a lot of options and it's not as hard as you might think.

Number three. You need an autoresponder

Once people come to your site and join your list, you want to be able to follow up with them automatically.

You want to be natural about it. You want to be personal, but you want to follow up automatically because you don't want to have to go send an email every day.

Number four. You need a lead magnet

This is required in order to persuade people to join your list.

People need an incentive. It's a natural thing. You give them a great gift, they'll join your list, then your autoresponder can kick in.

You can ask them questions. You can make offers. You can do all sorts of things.

Number five. You need a page builder

You want beautiful landing pages.

We've all seen that thing that says “Ugly pages convert better than beautiful pages.”

That may have been true back in 2009, but it certainly isn't true today.

You really need a page builder, preferably one that uses beautiful and proven templates so you can just basically fill in the blanks and create really great sales letters, lead capture pages, thank you pages, that kind of thing.

Number six. You need tracking

You need to know what your results are.

If you're not tracking, you're guessing.

But tracking doesn't have to be high-level rocket science math. It can simply be some percentages of people who really click your link versus those that don't, how many people stay on your site longer, how many people bounce from your site, which means they come and they immediately leave, just some basic simple numbers you need to follow.

Number seven. And you need traffic.

Again, with traffic, there are really three types and if you think about them that way, then you can begin thinking about how to get them.

So, that's our seven tools. When you've got these seven tools, you've got all you need.

You could buy a million fancy-schmancy things that don't fall into one of these categories and that's fine, but if you want to build a real business, this is what I tell my kids if you want to build a real business online, a durable, scalable business, these are the seven key tools that you've really got to have.

In this video and article, Charlie Page has done a really great job in simplifying the seven tools you require to succeed online.

This should help you concentrate on what you actually need rather than being a marketing tool junky and wasting lots of money on unnecessary purchases.

Once you have your website set up it is very important to get ‘eyeballs' on it so that people can see the products and services that you have to offer. Traffic (visitors to your website) is essential to having a successful business online.

If you do not build a list of potential customers using effective lead capture pages and convert them into sales by following up with them using an autoresponder, then your online venture will not last very long.

There are two main ways of getting traffic – paid and free (also known as organic). A few of the paid methods are PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns on Facebook,  Instagram, Youtube, and Google Adwords.

The free method of getting traffic to your website is by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In reality, there is nothing for free, so what you save financially by not paying for advertising campaigns, you pay for in time and effort when using SEO.

Before creating content for your blog you should research keywords relevant to the topic of your content and the products and services you are marketing.

Keywords are the phrases people are typing into the search engines like Google and Bing to find answers to what they are looking for.

You can find out popular keywords by using Google's Keyword Planner which was formerly known as Google Keyword Tool. It's free to use but you have to set up a Google Adwords Account, although you do not necessarily have to create an account.

There are also paid keyword search tools you can use for a more comprehensive search of relevant keywords to use for your content. One of these is LongTailPro.

With this tool, you can research long-tail keywords (longer phrases people are typing into the search engines) which makes it easier to rank your content than the more competitive shorter keywords.

Doing effective keyword research using these tools, and creating unique, readable content containing the keywords, will make it more likely that it will rank higher in the search engines. In this way, more people will discover your content and be aware of the products and services you have to offer.

In the article, Charlie mentioned certain specific companies that provide those tools. To help guide you, I have put together my own list and links to proven companies that provide the 7 tools required to succeed online:

1. Create a Blog – Leadpages Site Builder
2. Content for your blog – Textbroker
3. Autoresponder – AWeber
4. Lead Magnet – Designrr PDF Creator
5. Web Page Builder – Convertri
6. Tracking – ClickMagick
7. Traffic – TrafficForMe

I hope this article clears up some of the confusion in what is required to start a business on the internet and assists you on your journey to online success.

You can find out more about Charlie Page on his website Common Sense Digital Marketing

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