How to Choose Your Technology Platform

tech Jun 29, 2020

Introduction

Yes! You made it to the six week mark.

If you’ve been following these blog posts from the beginning than you should have already read and completed the “Quick Action Result” sections for all these posts:

So what's next?

Well at this point, we need to dig into the nitty gritty of your technology platform.

Whenever you build an online business you need a way of hosting your content to the world. The easiest way to do that is to leverage the power of the internet to distribute that content.

>> Click here to get a FREE instant download of the PDF version of this post... I'll throw in my audio narration as a free bonus.

So we're going to dive in but before we get into your technology platform, I want to share the story of how I chose my current platform and also explain my rationale for doing so.

My Story

When I first got started building my online business, it wasn’t really a business. It was just a blog.

So I did what most people did: I went to WordPress, picked a free theme and built my blog using a free webhost called 000webhost.

In the beginning I was more concerned with the appearance of the site than I was concerned about the content on the site. I thought, if my blog looked professional people would come.

I didn't realize content creates value not design.

Well, after a few weeks, the blog grew and to my surprise it actually crashed after I shared a post on a popular tech resource. My little free website couldn’t keep up with the sudden rush of new traffic; the poor server "fell over".

I guess it was a good problem to have but it was still a little frustrating. I had a new problem: I needed a beefier web server. I started Googling and found a cheap decent one at Justhost Web Hosting.

All was well for about a year.

That’s when I realized I needed a way to accept online payments for digital products I created. I also needed a way to automatically drip emails to people subscribing to my email list and I needed a way to store my products and host them. I couldn’t do this easily with WordPress or Justhost.

I come from a web development background so I started concocting my own hodgepodge solution... it was coming along slowly but it was a huge headache. Stuff was always breaking for unknown reasons and I spent almost all my time maintaining the site instead of running my business.

So - I started looking around for different paid offerings that could host my business.

Note: Download the FREE PDF Version of this article so you can read offline, anytime and print it for easier viewing. As free a bonus, it includes the audio narration as an MP3 file so you can listen on the go. Just enter your email address to get the entire thing. It's free, instant and available now.

My Technology Journey

First, I started with Mailchimp as my email service provider. Mailchimp was free so it was no brainer to start there.

I would have just used my Gmail account to send emails except Gmail doesn’t do auto-responders so if people subscribed to my email list Google wouldn't subscribe leads to a campaign. That’s what I needed.

With Mailchimp, I grew my list to over a thousand leads. It actually wasn’t that hard. I just kept publishing high quality content and kept sharing my content on every social platform I could find.

This worked well for some time but eventually I reached the limits of what I could do with my free Mailchimp account. The other problem was I still didn’t have a way to accept payments or host video content for my site.

I actually signed up with Gumroad to accept payments and I was using Youtube to host my video. Then I signed up with ConvertKit to manage emails and Wistia to manage my paywalled video content...

It was becoming a nightmare. I just couldn’t manage all the moving parts.

So I started looking at higher priced offerings. Infusionsoft was too expensive at the time so I started playing with Teachable since it had the lowest price point at the time ($79 per month) and it had everything I needed to host my online courses and accept payments.

I ran with Teachable for a few months but always wanted to try out New Kajabi. Mainly because one of the top internet entrepreneurs in my field was using it, Jeff Walker, and I really respected him.

The only problem was New Kajabi was like $150 per month which was insane. I didn’t have that kind of money.

I procrastinated on New Kajabi and tried out the free trials for Ontraport and Active Campaign but Ontraport was just too damn confusing. There was too much power. It was an awesome product but I was just getting started and all the features scared me.

And Active Campaign, well it was equally confusing. There were so many automation paths and logical conditions I could set for automating email delivery that it left me dizzy. I mean, if I sat down for a week and put in the work, Active Campaign had the technical ability to automate my entire business... and that would have been a huge timesaver obviously. I just didn't have the discipline to configure Active Campaign for that.

I finally sucked it up and went back to New Kajabi. That’s when I noticed they had a 14 day free trial. I figured, “Ah what the heck, let me give it a shot”

I have not looked back since making the decision and I have never been happier with this platform. I’m so happy with it I even became a New Kajabi affiliate partner to share the love with others.

The main reason I’m so ecstatic about New Kajabi is that their technical support team is better than anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve used Lead Pages, I’ve used Survey Monkey, I’ve used all the major internet commerce platforms and none of them offered real time chat support with not only competent staff but generous staff.

I can’t tell you how many times they upgraded parts of my account into higher tiered payment levels for free just because I asked.

I can’t tell you how many times they listened to all my requests (some even unreasonable). On one occasion, I reached out to the support team on four separate issues on the same day!

Every time I hit them up, they were patient and answered my questions to my satisfaction, quickly and professionally. This is why I've been using New Kajabi to build my online business and why this entire course is centered around this one business platform.

The other thing I like is that the platform is really easy to use. You don't get a bunch of stuff you’ll never use. Everything is simplified even down to the on-boarding process where you get a free setup call... it’s amazing.

Now I’m using this thing to establish my product launches, manage my email lists, automate follow-ups, configure marketing funnels and more.

So that's cool and all but I know some people are afraid of putting all their eggs in one digital platform basket. What if the business goes away? What if the servers crash? Will you lose all your data? Will you need to rebuild everything from scratch!?

I was actually afraid of losing my site too because at least when my WordPress site crashed I still felt like I had control. I was actually administering the servers so technically I literally did have more control.

But when I look back on everything, I’ve never had my New Kajabi sites crash. And since they provide an export function I can always backup my content with a click. It’s pretty awesome.

So, here’s what I want to do – the rest of your training from this point will be based on using New Kajabi as the digital platform. It's easier to use a single platform to host everything and I've gotten results with Kajabi so that's what we'll use.

My goal is to have you earning $500 to $1,000 in just 28 days.

Alright, so let’s do an experiment:

Sign-up for your FREE 28 days New Kajabi trial and let’s go through the rest of this free training which ultimately results with you building a completely functioning product you can sell to a targeted audience.

If at day 28 you see you’ve made more than $150 (the cost of one month of New Kajabi) then you stay subscribed and we’ll go into month two as we figure out how to scale your income to the next step.

If at day 28 you haven’t made more than the cost of the product then you just cancel and lose nothing. Although you won’t be able to use the specific concepts we cover in the free training on this blog (because it’s specifically built for Kajabi) you can still transport many of the concepts to other platforms because the core concepts do not depend on any technology platform.

If you’re ready to dive right into your 28 day challenge you can sign up right now here:

Yes, I want to start my 28 Day New Kajabi Challenge!

Your Four Things

Before we dive into this post it’s important to think about the four things your technology platform needs to have. There are many bells and whistles out there but if your technology platform doesn’t have these four core elements it’s going to be very difficult to run a successful online business.

Your People

The first thing you’ll need is a platform that enables you to create relationships with your people.

You need an email service provider that allows you to maintain constant contact with your email list in an automated fashion and also allows you to tag your lists based on various action so you can directly speak to specific segments of your market.

Tags will also allow you to create multiple opt-in forms on your website and gives you the freedom to attach unique tags to each person who opted-in specific forms. Then you can craft your email follow-up sequences to only go to specific groups of people based on how they were tagged.

The reason this is important is because it allows you to write to the specific sub-segments within your market. For example, if you have an email list primarily of CEO's who are big into scuba diving, you can segment your list by tagging groups of people by age, gender, or industry. Then when you send out your emails you can address each group differently based on their age, gender or industry. This is a little advanced but I hope that makes sense.

I’m keeping things a little general for now because we’re going to dig into the meat and potatoes of how to do things like this a little later. For now, I just want you to see the importance of market segmentation. When you build your list everyone won’t have the same needs.

The good news is when you get this right you’ll end up meeting people exactly where they are and consequently you'll end up maximizing your profits.

Your Product

Any tool you select needs to provide a way for you to host and deliver a digital product people can purchase. The platform also needs to have a secure way of handling payments from multiple sources. So, if you can configure AMEX, Discover, Visa as payment methods that’s good. But if you can also add in PayPal that’s a whole lot better. (and since you're business is on the internet, support for foreign currencies is even better!)

Your technology platform also needs to have a way of bundling multiple products into offers so you can create tiered pricing models. That may sound abstract and theoretical right now but the basic idea behind all this is you are serving your people by respecting their ability to pay for your products, and consequently get real value from your offerings, in different ways.

We’ll dig into the psychology behind tiered-pricing and why it works later. Right now I just want you to get a baseline of the features your technology platform should have to deliver the greatest impact in your target markets lives.

One last awesome feature is if you can create multiple types of online courses then that is a plus. For example, if your technology platform allows you to build Mini-courses, Webinar Courses, Membership courses and Coaching courses that's huge.

If your technology platform enables you to do this you’ll be in a great position to deliver content to your audience in exactly the way they need it.

Your Promotion

So after you create your products how are you going to promote them? You could go the old school way of manually emailing your list or blasting your social media contacts but this has been shown to be largely ineffective.

People today not only want relationship but also conversation.

People don’t want to feel like your shoving something down their necks. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves and they want to find someone who really understands their issues.

When it comes to promotion, your technology platform must have a way of creating funnels. This is just a fancy term for transforming leads into customers through a multi-step trust building process. You can do this with an email autoresponder sequence (this has been proven to be effective) and more and more people are using funnels like product launches and webinars to deliver massive value, build trust and maximize sales.

New Kajabi makes it really easy to do this. I tried ClickFunnels and although it excels here as well, when I looked into them they cost more than New Kajabi and didn’t have an email service provider at the time (I think they do have one now though)

Your Profit

The last thing that’s really important when searching for your e-commerce technology platform is how it allows you to earn income from your products. New Kajabi makes it really easy to collect payments because there are no transaction fees, multiple methods of payment are accepted (ahem Paypal). Also, at checkout, you can quickly plug-in one-click upsells and order bumps because these have been proven to accelerate profits when the offer is properly aligned to your market’s needs.

>> Click here to get a FREE instant download of the PDF version of this post... I'll throw in my audio narration as a free bonus.

Wayyyyy back in the day... doing all this stuff required dozens of separate pieces. It was like a huge puzzle you had to figure out how to connect everything. But now, with tools like New Kajabi it’s super easy.

Now It’s Your Turn

Do some Googling for tools that can help you achieve each of these “P’s”: Your People, Your Product, Your Promotions, Your Profits. Find 2 of the best tools in each category and put then down in a list next to each “P”. For example, under “People” you might find “Aweber” and “Mailchimp” as these are two online email service providers that allow you to maintain contact with your email list. For Your Product you might find “Teachable” and “Thinkific”. For your Promotions you might find “LeadPages” and “Sumo”. Just Google around and start putting that list together!
Once you have your list add up the total cost it would take to buy each product separately. Then see if you can figure out what it would take to integrate all the solutions together.
Finally, look at the top three all-in-one technology platforms right now: Clickfunnels, Keap and New Kajabi. Compare and contrast cost and options and list the pros and cons of each.

Okay so let's wrap.

Your quick action result is to get started with you New Kajabi free trial.

Since I based my business on New Kajabi and have gotten results with them, I became a Kajabi Partner. This means when you sign up with New Kajabi at the link below I’ll receive a small commission. I just want to be completely transparent with you because I hate all the dishonesty and half-truths I’ve been seeing in this market these days.

So, just to be 100% transparent with you: when click my New Kajabi link below and sign-up I will receive a commission.

Now the really awesome part about this is my goal is to have you earning between $500 and $1,000 within your first 28 days of signing up. This means you’ll be able to cancel before your free trial ends without paying for anything.

I’m going to walk you through this income generating sequence over the next couple of posts so don’t worry about getting lost. We’re in this together and I’m going make your success my priority.

Part of the reason I’m doing this... again here’s the transparency... is because I know if I can get you real results with New Kajabi then you’ll be more amenable to giving me a great testimonial which in turn, would boost my credibility and put me in a position to help more people.

The other thing I want to share is that once I get you going with New Kajabi I’m going to show you how to do what I’m doing. In other words, I’ll teach how you to become a New Kajabi partner so you can also earn affiliate commissions on referrals too.

It’s going to be awesome! Here’s your link to get started:

https://app.kajabi.com/r/Zv3MyAVF/t/prsuwmcx

I’ll see you next week in our next post when we dig into choosing the domain name for your online business!

Yes! It’s about to get real buddy. Talk soon.