HELLO, THERE!
Welcome to My Tool Chest
I love a great tool, but as you likely know, not all tools are created equal. Over nearly a decade of working with some of the successful online businesses, I’ve had the unique opportunity to see (and help implement) the exact tools these titans use to power their incredible success. This list has been carefully curated…you could say it’s just the cream at the top. I utilize most of these tools in my own businesses, as well and I’ve provided this list so that you can use these to power your success!
Full disclosure: some of the links to the tools on this list are affiliate links, and when you sign up using them, I may receive a referral commission. However, I have used them all and heartily recommend them whether I receive a commission or not.
Email marketing and CRM Tools
Ontraport
Ontraport is my favorite all-in-one marketing and business automation platform. From email marketing, tracking, membership sites, CRM, SMS marketing and more. Best of all, you can sign up for a FREE TRIAL of Ontraport through us and you’ll get LaunchPad – our incredible bundle of valuable bonuses worth $1,982.
GoHighLevel
GHL is our new favorite all-in-one marketing automation and CRM for agencies! If you run an agency or even a consultancy where you serve different clients all in the same niche, you gotta check out GHL. With unlimited subaccounts, you can add in the subscription fee to your bottom line and create a massive new reveue stream.
MailGenius
This is a great, free app to test your emails. Use it to improve your Email Deliverability! Highly recommended!
CONTENT MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS
Skool
Skool is quickly becoming a favorite for our clients for their courses and memberships! It does SO much, so intuitively and simply and all without the need for a separate membership site or Facebook or other community platform. Online courses, Subscription memberships, communities, Group funnels, Coaching programs, Masterminds. Support forums, Influencer / fan communities, and more.
Creating websites, landing pages and forms
Elementor
Elementor is the best, simplest drag and drop WordPress page builder I’ve used. We use it on our site and recommend it to our clients. Create a template, then start all new pages from tempaltes and cut way down on the work and time it takes to get your work done!
Typeform
Typeform is simply the greatest form creator on Earth. It’s all about user experience and when your biz uses Typeforms – your conversions will go way up. They’re infinitely customizable, SUPER simple to create, with branching logic and they integrate beautifully with Ontraport and virtually every other CRM / marketing automation platform you may be using! Use them for surveys, quizzes, polls, feedback and testimonials, and much more!
Thrivecart
ThriveCart is my favorite shopping cart solution! It’s feature-rich, user-friendly, allows you to create order bumps, upsells, and integrates with all the major CRMs. Best of all, unlike most shopping cart solutions, it offers a lifetime account for a one-time payment.
Integration tools
PlusThis
PlusThis is a feature extender for Ontraport that allows you to increase Ontraport’s capabilities in a TON of super useful ways. From creating evergreen deadlines, expiring links, countdown timers, and much, much more! Sign up through us to get 15% off your subscription.
Zapier
Zapier is the great connector! We use it to connect so many different apps together and amplify the power of each of them!
Graphics
Canva
Canva has quickly become our single-favorite app. It lets anyone create incredible graphic designs for everything from social posts, email banners, flyers, e-books, and anything you can imagine. We couldn’t live without it in our business and I think you’ll find it indespencable once you dig in!
Contracts
SignRequest
This is the app we use to automate our contracts. It’s affordable, and it’s got a super simple integration via Zapier with Ontraport and GoHighLevel to make it so that your new clients and customers are automatically sent their contract once they purchase, and only get their welcome email and other fulfillment once they’ve signed! All, autoatically! Sign up through us and get those Zap templates for FREE!
Marketing add-ons
FOMO
Fomo lets you use the past purchases of your customers and the power of social proof to sell more (or get more opt-ins!). We use it on all our purchase pages and it consistently helps us sell more though the power of FOMO!
Deadline Funnels
Deadline Funnels is a powerful tool that lets you create evergreen launches and deadlines that are unique per individuals (instead of a hard date on the calendar), based on when they take a certain action. They can be extrememly powerful and for the right kind of business I highly recommend.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a free WP plugin that lets you turn any link into a nice-looking link at your domain. We use Pretty Links all the time for all kinds of reasons but the two biggest are taking long ugly links and making them short and sweet and memorable and taking big nasty affiliate links and making vanity links out of them. So instead of, say, Ontraport.com/
Stealth Seminar
If you’re wanting to set up an evergreen webinar, then Stealth Seminar is the best tool for the job! With Stealth, you can easily create high-converting evergreen webinars, masterclasses and “video sales letters” to turn your leads into customers through the power of evergreen expiring deadlines that incentivize your new leads to buy NOW! Plus, Stealth Seminar has industry-leading customer service to make the process of getting your evergreen webinars set up quickly and easily!
Getting work done
Google Drive
Accessible from anywhere with internet, Google Drive is a great collaborative tool for teams to use when you’re working with content, files, or images in tandem. Unlike DropBox, multiple parties can be in a file at a time manipulating data or text without having to download and re-upload the file.
CUSTOM GPT
We’re super excited to offer Custom GPT as one of our preferred tools! Custom GPT lets you create your very own chat bots for you, your team, and your members to access info faster and more intuitively. Imagine being able to load up Chat GPT with custom information from your business. Here’s 3 use-cases we’re getting it set up for now!
A chat-bot for members: which allows our members to access membership content via ChatGPT-style interface. Loading it up with membership content, articles, videos, etc, so that our members can ask real questions and get answers from the chat bot, including the link to the video where that content is stored. And since Leg Up has hundreds of past videos, This will dramatically improve the engagement with your content, by making it far faster and easier to get at the exact information your members desire when they need it!
A chat-bot for our team’s internal work: This bot will be loaded up with all of our internal company processes, documentation, SOP’s, etc. to allow our team to get answers quickly about how we do things, from new client onboarding to agency workflows, and more!
A chat-bot for me and our writers: This bot will hasten the creation of marketing copy, fed with all the copy on the LU sales page, plus all of our marketing emails so that instead of the more generalized responses we tend to get from asking Chat GPT to help us with our copy, we can get far more nuanced responses based on our highly-specialized marketing automation niche as well as the nuanced voice that is only possible when the bot is fed with past marketing copy in my voice.
Courses
The Leg Up Arsenal
“Though it’s not a course, per se, I’d be remiss not to put it here! Leg Up is the premier Ontraport funnel campaign template, training & coaching program that lets small businesses put automated systems in place along their entire customer journey, learn effective strategy and and grow their knowledge of the powerful platform, all while taking a breathtaking amount of the time and work and hassle out of turning your business into a predictable profit machine.
This ain’t another info product or online course where you go through and watch a bunch of videos and then have to try and figure out how to apply what you’ve learned. No friend. With Leg Up, when you finish watching the videos and customizing each campaign, you’ve got a real, working business system causing real results in your business. 💥 💣 💥”
Ontraport for VA's Course
If you’re using Ontraport and you’re a soloprenuer, you should have a VA working for you who knows OP very well! The best and most affordable way to acheive that? Dawn Marrs’ excellent course ‘Ontraport for VA’s! I wish I’d have had this course whe I was first getting my VA up to speed! Sign up through us and get 20% off!
Consulting Accelerator
Looking to become one of the top 1% of consultants? This program is the most comprehensive training will walk you step-by-step, through the process (even if you’re starting from zero) to six-figure income as a consultant. When you register through our partner link you get a free 7-day trial to the program, as well as $500 off the tuition for the program if you choose to invest in it ($1,500 down from $2,000). I have personally done Sam’s programming and it is quite simply best-in-class.
Email Deliverability Masterclass
What if all your emails went to your list’s primary inbox? How would it transform your business? How much more money would you earn? If you or your clients have an email list and want to make more money, the very fastest way to do it is by getting more of your emails opened and read. How to do that? Get more of ’em into the primary inbox. Period. This course is by my friend and longtime associate, Jan Lesanovsky, and he’s simply the best and the brightest when it comes to inbox delivery. We’ve been referring clients to him for ages and they’re thrilled by the results he’s provided. But he charges thousands for his done-for-you service. Want to own those skills natively on your own team? This is your chance!
Video Tools
Loom
It would be difficult for me to say too much good stuff about Loom. We use it like mad in my business and life would be tough around here without it. At its most basic level, it lets us create screenshare videos with lightning speed. We make these little “Looms” for all kinds of things, but they’re especially useful for team communications.
Instead of trying to type out what I want my team members to do, I can make a super quick Loom vid and show-and-tell it. This not only saves LOADS of time, it also eliminates confusion by making the directive crystal clear! We also use them for talking through design revisions (eg – “make this a little bigger and move it over here to the right-hand corner” etc). It’s also killer for documentation, allowing us the ability to create training videos both for our team and our clients! They give a lot of features with their free version, but with the (ultra affordable) paid versions, you can even host an unlimitted amount of videos on Loom as well, so we host the recordings from our Zoom coaching calls with clients, which get automatically transcribed, allowing our clients to easily find what they need along the timeline instead of having to rewatch a ton of irrelevant parts! Plus they let you watch vids at faster than 1X speed which is a great feature. I could go on and on, but I’ll let you give it a try and judge for yourself!
VideoAsk
VideoAsk is a unique and powerful tool that lets you easily ask and get responses with video…because sometimes text just doesn’t cut it. There are many use-cases, but we recently used VideoAsk to generate a series of powerful video case studies / testimonials from our clients. And the truth is that we couldn’t have gotten nearly such compelling, emotional and specific testimonials any other way. Check it out!
Business Credit Cards
Chase INK
After being in business for ages, I finally wised up and got a business credit card. But I didn’t just close my eyes and guess which one to get. Nah. I asked the queen of Business Credit, Ms. Kendra J. Lewis (Credit Architect) which card she recommends and this one was it. We love the rewards points and have already gotten massive cash back, as well as easily building our business credit rating. Highly recommend it!
