I’ve been building in and around the internet for the past 15 years and have used dozens of online services to plan, design, launch and maintain projects.

There are tons of freemium services for every recommendation I may have.

While I don’t want you to spend your budget all willy-nilly on shiny shit, I do want you to make the decision that you ARE a business, and businesses have investments that need to be made.

While some recommendations are affiliate links, All of them are services I’ve used in the past or still using. The list is ‘definitive’ in the sense that it includes the baseline of what you need to hit the ground running, but it isn’t exhaustive and I will revisit it periodically as better solutions are available.

What’s also different about this list is, not only are they great recommendations, I’ll share with you the approach in which I use them to launch online projects, aka your online service business.

You are my Dante, let me be your Virgil.

Table of Contents
1. Research
2. Design
3. Launch
4. Maintain
5. Collaborate

Research
– google trends
– spyfu
– facebook
– evernote
Visual
– coolors
– unsplash
– canva
– envato
Platform
– namecheap
– wordpress
– webflow
– squarespace
Performance
– Google Analytics
– Hotjar
Marketing
– Mailchimp
– Bitly
– Twilio
Admin
– Calendly
– Trello
– Asana
Collaboration
– Zoom
– Slack
Payments
– Stripe
– Paypal
Example: https://www.elegantthemes.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=54794&tid1=tbamain
1 Research
– What are you trying to achieve?
– How are you trying to position yourself?
– Who is already doing it?
– How are they doing it?
– What else can be done?

If you don’t already have a gmail account, make one. It has TONS of free services that are already integrated with each other.

Go ahead and make a spreadsheet on Google Drive. Label your co

Now, start with a simple Google search:

[service] [service area, namely yours] / “nutritionists in Baltimore”.

Look at the first three to five search results for your search query. Try to look at search results that are not Paid Ads or from forum sites like Thumbtack or Yelp. We’ll get to those later.

Now that you’ve an idea of what top performing websites in your area look like, you have a starting point of what might be making them successful.

Analyze and study their pages and content.

Pick one of the sites from the results and look it up on SpyFu. Here, you’ll be able to see additional competitors, SEO-rich keywords.

Of course, there is an entire process to selecting your business name, but for this example, we’ll pretend you have a good idea of what you want it to be.