3 Options for Domain Registration in 2022

I’ve registered hundreds of domain names over the years.

During that time, I bought a domain from virtually every platform in existence. Some experiences were great, others were awful, and the majority fell somewhere in the middle.

Whether you’re buying a domain for the first time or looking for an alternative solution from your last registration, you need to understand that you have options.

Where can you register a domain name? The choices can be segmented into three categories:

  1. Domain Registrars
  2. Hosting Providers
  3. Website Builders

I’ll show you the difference between these options and point out the top platforms within each category. Use this guide to learn the best way to buy a domain name.

Top Rated Domain Registrars to Register a Domain

If you want to register a domain, you’ll need a domain registrar. Here’s the best options.

  • Bluehost — Best for creating your first website
  • Domain.com — Best for keeping domain costs low
  • Porkbun — Best deals on unique domain extensions
  • Network Solutions — Best for locking down domains for decades
  • GoDaddy — Best domain registrar for protecting your personal data
  • Namecheap — Best domain registrar for tight budgets
  • NameSilo — Most affordable domain deals with bulk purchasing

You can read our full reviews of each domain registrar here.

Quicksprout.com's compete beginner's guide to domain registration.Quicksprout.com's compete beginner's guide to domain registration.

1. Domain Registrar

As the name implies, a domain registrar’s primary function is domain name registration. There are some registrars that provide additional services as well, such as hosting plans or website builders. But the best domain registrars specialize as platforms to buy a domain name.

Let’s review four of the top domain registrar services on the market today.

Domain.com



Continue reading

A Beginner’s Guide to Developing Online Business Ideas

Running an online business is a dream for entrepreneurs worldwide. An online business offers flexibility, financial freedom, and, best of all, flexibility—the ability to work from anywhere.

You can turn this dream into a reality by coming up with a great idea for an online business.

If you know you want to start an online business but you’re struggling to come up with an idea, this guide will steer you in the right direction. 

What Makes an Online Business Unique?

For the purposes of this guide, an “online business” refers to a company that’s completely digital. You don’t need office space, warehouses, or any physical presence to start and operate it.

Compared to a traditional business, online businesses are unique in the sense that they’re easy to start, scalable, and typically have low overhead costs.

This means that anyone with internet access can start an online business with less than $1,000 in the bank. 

9 Best Online Business Ideas

To help give you some inspiration, I’ll share some of the best and most profitable online business ideas to get you started. Not all of these will necessarily be a great fit for you and your skills, but you can dive deeper into subjects that pique your interests. 

Website Design Services

If you have graphic design experience, great. If not, no problem.

Today, anyone can offer website design services and turn a profit from this online business. With user-friendly website builders like Wix and Squarespace, you can just start with a template and customize everything from there—no coding or technical experience required.

There’s no shortage of potential clients in this space. Every business needs a website. So you can help bring small businesses into the digital age by cold calling or cold emailing them offering your design…

Continue reading

How to Start a Lawn Care Business in 5 Simple Steps

Starting a lawn care business gives you the rare opportunity to combine your entrepreneurial spirit and love for the outdoors.

Despite being a competitive industry, lawn care is one of the more affordable startups that offers tons of flexibility.

You can choose the services you offer, set your own schedule, decide whether you want to cater to residential or commercial customers—or both, and amazingly, get paid to exercise and follow your passion.

But just like any other business, you have to figure out the initial steps to put yourself on the fast track to success, which is exactly where this guide comes into the picture.

I’ll show you a step-by-step breakdown of how to start a lawn care business to ensure your venture is well planned, properly registered, and legally compliant.

Let’s begin, shall we?

Top Business Formation Services to Start a Lawn Care Business

If you want to start a lawn care business, you’ll need a business formation service. Here’s the best options.

You can read our full reviews of each business formation service here.

5 Steps to Start a Lawn Care Business

Starting a lawn care business is simple when you break it down into smaller, attainable steps:

  1. Chalk out your business plan
  2. Finalize your legal structure and register for taxes
  3. Set up your business account
  4. Procuring the necessary licenses and permits
  5. Build an online presence

How to start a lawn care business in 5 easy steps.How to start a lawn care business in 5 easy steps.

The Easy Parts of Starting a Lawn Care Business 

The best thing about starting a lawn care business is the low startup cost. 

All you need is some equipment and a way to arrive at your client‘s homes, and you can start…

Continue reading

How to Make Money from a Website in 5 Simple Steps

We’re living in an era where anyone can start a website and use it to generate income. Whether it’s a small side hustle or a full-time job, the potential profits from starting a website are virtually limitless.

For so many people, the idea of making money from a website sounds like a dream. They love the concept but just don’t have any direction for getting started.

If you’re ready to turn that dream into a reality, you’ve come to the right place. Throughout my career, I’ve turned countless websites into money-making machines. I created this guide to share my knowledge and teach you how to do the same thing.

Top Website Builders to Make Money from a Website

If you want to make money from a website, you’ll need a website builder. Here’s the best options.

  • Wix – Best website builder for your first website
  • Bluehost WordPress Website Builder – Best for building sites that grow with your business
  • Squarespace – Best website builder for creators of all stripes
  • Weebly – Best for making money with an ecommerce store
  • GoDaddy – Best for building your website from your phone

You can read our full reviews of each website builder here.

5 Steps to Make Money From a Website

Making money from a website might sound complicated, but the entire process can be summarized in just five simple steps. I’ll break this process down into greater detail below.

  1. Choose Your Monetization Strategy
  2. Get Hosting, Register a Domain, and Create Your Site
  3. Identify Your Target Market
  4. Create Content and Build Out Your Pages
  5. Drive Traffic and Scale Your Site

What to Expect When Making Money From a Website

Here’s a closer look at the easy parts and challenging aspects of making money from a website:

The Good

The…

Continue reading

The Beginner’s Guide to Freelance Business Ideas

So you want to be a freelancer? (Or at least you think you do.)

There are some great perks to being a freelancer and having more freedom and flexibility than those employed by a company. 

However, that freedom doesn’t come without a price. If there’s one piece of advice we can give you about becoming a freelancer, it’s to be ready for a life of constant hustle. Even when times get tough, those meant to be freelancers have the drive to keep going and must serve as their own motivation. 

In short, freelancing isn’t for everyone. But if it’s something you’re interested in, it’s worth diving deeper to see if it may be the right fit for you. 

The first step in considering freelance business life is coming up with an idea. What service can you offer to people? 

To help you answer this crucial question, we have created this guide. Here you will find all you need to know about freelance business ideas to get you started down this path.

Developing Freelance Business Ideas

Freelance business ideas are those that focus on your skills and passions. 

If you have always loved photography but never had the right opportunity to share those skills, you may want to consider turning your photography skills and interest into your freelance career. 

Freelancing is growing in popularity, especially since COVID saw many people let go from their more stable careers. With the ability to work from home, many people are starting to pursue their passions in a way that allows them more freedom: a.k.a freelancing. 

However, it is important to note that working for yourself as a freelancer comes with its fair share of stress, thanks to the fact that work is never guaranteed. But, it can come with many rewards, most notably the…

Continue reading

The Essential Guide to Online Meeting Etiquette

Whether you attend one online meeting a month or a dozen each week, it’s important to know what to do–and what to avoid–to maximize the success of each call. While online meetings are a lot like in-person meetings, there are some nuances that require you to pivot and up your meeting etiquette game.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure where to start. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the “hows and whys” of online meeting etiquette, so you can avoid being that person in your next Zoom call. Everything you need to know to be an online meeting pro is covered here.

Online Meeting Etiquette Guide Quick Links

If you’re new to online meetings, reading through this entire guide from start to finish is a great way to get up to speed. But if you’re an online meeting veteran, feel free to jump to the sections you most want to know about right now.

  • Why Online Meeting Etiquette Is Important
  • Key Rules of Online Meeting Etiquette
  • Considerations for a Hybrid Meeting
  • Use the Best Tool For Your Online Meeting
  • Final Thoughts About Online Meeting Etiquette

Why Online Meeting Etiquette Is Important

With remote workforces the norm these days, chances are you’ve been invited to more than a few virtual meetings lately. It’s also likely that at least one of those meetings didn’t feel as productive as it could have been.

Meetings are a necessary part of the work day, whether they are in-person or online. But inefficient meetings rob businesses of valuable employee productivity time, which has a cumulative effect as the number of meetings and attendees increases. 

Any meeting can go south fast, but online meetings are even more susceptible due to their more casual nature and ease of scheduling. The good news is that…

Continue reading

How to Organize Slack Channels

Slack is a ubiquitous business communication tool, but using it without a strategy to keep channels organized can lead to chaos. Lost messages and confusion over channel purposes are just a few common Slack pitfalls. 

Whether you’re managing Slack for your team or the entire company, a few minutes of planning and organizing your channel strategy at the start will save time and eliminate confusion down the road. It’s easy to do, and I’ll show you how.

Organize Your Slack Channels In 4 Easy Steps

Slack is the most versatile team messaging software on the market today. It’s an easy and effective tool to make everyone’s workday more efficient. Streamlining Slack channels takes just four steps.

  1. Create New Slack Channels
  2. Set Up Slack Channels for Maximum Success
  3. Put the Right People in the Right Slack Channels
  4. Archive Old Slack Channels 

Ready to become a Slack channel master? Let’s get started.

1. Create New Slack Channels

Slack comes with two public channels already created–#general and #random. By default, every member you add to Slack is automatically added to both channels. The difference between the two default channels is that members cannot leave #general, making it a great spot to share company-wide announcements.

Of course, you’ll want to add more channels to fit your business needs. There are two types of channels you can create in Slack:

  • Public channels are discoverable via search and denoted with a # before the channel name. Anyone can join these channels.
  • Private channels cannot be found or viewed by non-channel members, and can only be joined by invitation. If you’re a member of a private channel, you’ll see a lock icon before the channel name.

Now that you understand Slack basics, you’re ready to create your own channels. Three things are…

Continue reading

How to Choose a Webinar Topic

Webinar success is often measured by registration and attendance. But in today’s non-stop, tech-driven world, how do you rise above the noise and capture the attention of busy prospects? And once you do, how do you get them to actually commit their time to show up for your webinar? 

The secret is to offer a topic that is interesting, engaging, and, above all, valuable. If you don’t, you may find yourself presenting to empty seats. To ensure your webinar is standing room only–virtually anyway–it’s critical to choose a great webinar topic. In this article, I’ll show you how easy that is to do.

How to Choose a Webinar Topic in 5 Steps

Selecting the right webinar topic involves more than just picking a subject that is interesting to you. It requires a strategic approach and analysis. But that process isn’t as hard as it sounds. You can choose a winning webinar topic and create a successful webinar in just five steps:

  1. Identify Goals and Objectives
  2. Define the Target Audience
  3. Finalize Your Webinar Topic
  4. Determine the Webinar Layout
  5. Select High-Quality Webinar Software

Ready for success? I’ll walk you through the full webinar planning process in detail.

#1. Identify Goals and Objectives

Choosing a great webinar topic begins with a little legwork. Start by thinking about why you want to do a webinar in the first place. What do you hope to accomplish?

Here are a few common reasons people put on webinars. 

Reach and Teach Employees

With more and more workforces going remote, sharing important information with employees–and ensuring they understand it–can be a daunting task. Zoom is a great option for smaller meetings among teams or departments. But when you need to reach larger groups or even an entire large organization, a…

Continue reading

The Essential Guide to Video Call Recording

With distributed workforces the norm, incorporating video into communications with colleagues and customers isn’t just a nicety anymore–it’s a necessity. Recording the most important of these video calls helps you preserve information that can later be reviewed and shared with colleagues, customers, and even prospects.

In this guide, I’ll show you how easy it is to record video calls and explain the reasons why you might want to hit the record button next time you’re in an online video meeting. I’ll also explain the basics of how video calls work, cover what makes video calls different from video conferences, and share tips on creating a professional video conferencing environment.

Video Call Recording Quick Links

Use this quick link road map to go straight to the information you want to read now.

Ready to dig in? Let’s get started.

Top Rated Video Conferencing Services 

Video calls can be made with a tool like Skype or Slack. But these tools have limitations, especially when it comes to the number of people you can have on any call. And starting a video call is about all you can do with them—there is no easy way to record the video calls you make.

As your video conferencing needs grow, you’ll want a more robust tool–one that easily connects many people in diverse locations. You’ll also want a tool that makes it simple to record and create a library of your past video conferences.

Any of the following services will help you do all this with ease. So you can save your other chat tools for the thing they do best—quick and informal written exchanges.

  • RingCentral — Best video conferencing service with VoIP business phone plans.
  • GoToMeeting — Best video conferencing service for small businesses.

Continue reading

The Essential Guide to How Fax Works

Fax machines have been around for more than 150 years, though the way people send a fax today is quite different than it used to be. So how does fax work?

The short answer is that it depends on how you’re sending a fax–with a fax machine connected to a landline or a device connected to the internet. Let’s go through how fax works, each way you can fax, and everything else you need to know about faxing.

Quick Links

Have a specific question about how fax works? We probably cover it below:

The Basics of How Fax Works

Regardless of how you get it done, the goal of faxing is the same: to transmit a document from one place to another.

There are three distinct technologies that support fax. They all handle the transmission differently, and so the way that fax works is based on the technology you’re using.

Landline Fax

This is the “traditional” way of faxing documents. It requires a wired connection to the public-switched telephone network (PSTN), as well as a fax machine or multi-function printer (MFP).

To use this method, you feed hard copies of your documents into a fax machine, which codes the black/white spaces of the documents into a signal.

This signal is sent across the PSTN using the receiver’s fax number to get it to the right place. That signal is then reconstructed by the receiver’s fax machine, which prints out a hard copy at the new location.

Online Fax

Over the last 20 years, people have begun using the internet instead of the PSTN to send and receive faxes. This requires an internet connection and online fax service.

You can use a computer, tablet, or mobile device…

Continue reading