There are some key things to buy that will make you money online & grow your business faster! In building Primal Video, some purchases we made have paid themselves hundreds of times over – saving us a ton of time, and maximizing our passive income streams.
These are simple purchases (items, systems & software) that if set up correctly, can keep paying dividends for your business for years to come.
Important: When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission!
With a solid internet connection and a great passive income strategy, making money online with an online business is an awesome lifestyle that allows you to have your own schedule and freedom!
In this guide we’ll share the top SIX things you can purchase to help you earn money online and grow your business long after the initial purchase.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Website
This is a place where people can find out about you, your business and your other content. Having your own website is essentially a central hub for everything surrounding your business.
You can use it to:
- Create opt-in pages
- Help grow your email list
- Create a ‘Resource’ page with all your recommended gear
- So much more!
All of these are things that will help you earn passive income AND earn money online through your online business.
If you’re just starting out and need something super cheap, you can get low price website hosting from somewhere like SiteGround for just a couple of dollars!
We started out using SiteGround and it really is great bang for buck. They’ve got awesome customer support and provide a bunch of extras that a lot of other hosting companies don’t include in their base pricing.
PRO TIP: A lot of website hosting companies on the lower pricing end often increase their pricing after the first year.
If you do have the budget for it, we’d definitely recommend checking out WPX Hosting. This option is a bit more expensive but it’s fully managed. This means if something goes wrong (like your website gets hacked, for example), their support completely covers it.
We really do think it’s important to have full website management. Our website went down once and it lost us a lot of revenue. So now management is a number one priority for us.
Having said that, if you can’t afford that level of management just go with a cheaper option as the benefit of having a website can still be huge for your business.
#2 Email Platform
What we’re talking about here is investing in building your email list. This is an asset that you own and control which is super powerful!
If something ever happens to your primary marketing channel (e.g. YouTube Channel, Instagram account), you have the ability to contact your subscribers.
You can still get in contact, drive traffic to new content, increase ranking indicators, increase affiliate revenue AND share information about your products and services. When it comes to building a passive income stream, your email list is vital!
Using an email platform you can easily set up simple automated email sequences that go out to your subscribers. The emails in these sequences can add a ton of value to subscribers and help you increase your revenue in the process.
Investing in building our email list is one of the first things we did here at Primal Video and it’s one of the best decisions we made!
There are so many options out there when it comes to email marketing. Here are the top ones we recommend:
- ConvertKit: Best option for beginners or anyone who doesn’t require any advanced tools or automations
- ActiveCampaign: Awesome option for more advanced users who are serious about email marketing and want more flexibility
- Bento: Great choice for really technical users who have felt limited by other email marketing platforms
Check out our complete guide on the Best Email Marketing Software to find the right email platform that suits your needs.
PRO TIP: Interested in getting started with building an email list completely organically? Join our FREE Email Growth Workshop.
#3 Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is an amazing tool that helps you identify keywords for your YouTube videos. It’s a Chrome and Firefox browser plugin, so it’s super easy to install and use.
This tool is an integral part of our keyword research process that we run through for every single video that we create for our YouTube channel.
It allows you to see how much search traffic each keyword term is getting which can validate your topic ideas BEFORE you create a video on them.
By ensuring there’s enough search volume and demand for a topic, you have a higher chance of getting your videos to rank on YouTube.
This way you’re not just creating content that you THINK people want, but content you KNOW people want.
Keywords Everywhere isn’t free but it is ridiculously low cost. It runs on a prepaid credit based system. So $10 will buy you 100,000 credits. One search equates to one credit. For us, the $10 top up will last about 6 months.
PRO TIP: Make sure you turn off the browser extension when you’re not doing keyword research so you’re not burning through credits unnecessarily.
#4 Transferwise
Transferwise is a service that essentially lets you set up bank details in different regions all over the world. It helps you receive international funds locally for a super low fee (much lower than what most banks regularly charge!).
It makes it look like you’ve got different local bank accounts in different regions around the world – wherever you need to transfer money. So all of your transactions seem to be local, rather than international which is where the big fees come in.
For example, we’re based in Australia and have Australian bank accounts. For us to receive money from the US to Australia, it’s an international transaction which incurs big fees. Of course, a US to US transaction incurs NO fees. So Transferwise carries out the transaction as if it’s a US to US transaction so as not to incur extra fees.
On top of that, when you go to transfer the money out of Transferwise and into your local bank account, it uses the same exchange rates from xe.com. This means they’re not jacking up the prices like a lot of banks do with their own rates.
So we use this service a lot here at Primal Video, especially when it comes to collecting affiliate payments and affiliate income from places like Amazon where there are different currencies involved.
It’s saved us not just lots of money but also a ton of time!
#5 Zapier
Zapier is a tool that allows you to integrate and automate manual processes. It’s now an integral part of our business.
There are SO many ways you can use Zapier, but we’ll give you an example so you can get an idea of how it works.
We used to use Zapier to connect ActiveCampaign (the email marketing platform) with Kajabi (the course and membership platform that hosts our Primal Video Accelerator membership).
Having these two separate platforms connected via Zapier means that any updates made to a user account for example are automatically passed onto the other platform. This saves so much time and manual work!
We started out on Zapier’s free plan and began with some small, simple stuff. This is a great place to start! It means you can look into what things you can automate to free up your time.
As you progress, you can start automating entire business processes. For this, you’ll need to jump on a paid plan which you can check out here.
For the amount of processes we’ve automated in our business, it would equate to having an additional full time staff member on our team!
#6 Audible
Audible is a subscription that gives you access to books on every type of topic you could imagine. The best part? They’re narrated so you don’t actually have to read them!
This is how we get a ton of ideas and learn new skills that we can bring into the business. It really has played a huge part in growing our business.
It might sound like a cliche, but one of the best ways to grow your income long term is to invest in yourself!
Here are 6 books we highly recommend on Audible:
- Overdeliver by Brian Kurts
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sathi
- Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
- The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield
- Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
- The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss
If you’re not on Audible already, you can jump on a free trial to get started.
So those are the top SIX things you can buy to make money online and grow your business long after you purchase them.
If you want to learn more about how you can generate passive income streams that ACTUALLY work, check out our guide on How We Make $1+ From YouTube.
Recommended Gear & Resources
Check out an up-to-date list of all the gear, software & tools we use and recommend right now at Primal Video on our resources page here!
