Do you want to be a digital nomad where you can work anywhere anytime maybe by the beach maybe at
a cafe well ten years ago this is exactly what i did i started a business because i wanted to
be able to work anywhere be flexible be able to be around my kid more i was a single mom at the
age of 20 and i really desire to be able to work in my own terms and so in this video i want to
share with you the essential online tools that you need in order to work online hi guys it's
Linh Podetti here and for those who don't know me about 10 years ago i took the leap and started
my first business as an e-commerce store and at first i thought it was a great business because
it's online i'm selling products but little did i know that i got caught up with carrying thousands
of products in my spare bedroom and having to go to the post office and deliver those products
i quickly learned that not all online business is really online meaning you might be selling to
clients online but you actually have a production back at home and you're tied up to the actual
stock and having to go and deliver it to your product so after that i moved on to a service
based business where i was doing digital marketing agency services for clients which
i purely realized i mean it became a pure online business because i get clients online i can
deliver it online my staff is online so everything is online and this is where the true freedom is
so over the years i've started multiple successful online businesses selling different services
and i'm also i specialize in building teams for people because i quickly learned that unless you
build your business with a great system hire the right people and really set it up so that
the business doesn't rely on you then this is where the true freedom is because if you have
an online business but you are tied up to selling the product doing everything yourself and don't
have a team to support you then you still have a job you just get to work anywhere if you're sick
or something happens to you then you don't get paid you don't want a business like that so
this is what i teach on my channel and you can also check out Outsourcing Angel my other channel
as well my business channel where you can learn more about building remote teams okay
what's the first thing you need in order to have a business online well i love working off my laptop
so i don't own an actual desktop computer i own a laptop because it's easy for me to bring a laptop
anywhere and i also remember being a pc kind of girl and it took me ages to switch into a macbook
look i'm not here to sell you actual products but i'm just letting you know that if you i used to be
a pc person and when i moved to a mac it really lasts me so much longer it's so much faster
and it really does help me in my productivity when it comes to work so if you're looking at
working online really do invest in a really great laptop and make sure that it doesn't have viruses
and keep on stuffing up on you because this is your livelihood this is the thing that you depend
on in order to work now when it comes to working online if you are ever in one spot though i would
say to always invest in having another monitor so if you're an entrepreneur and you have just your
laptop monitor i find that it's very unproductive but by having another monitor you can kind of drag
another screen over there you can look at one screen and while you type on this screen
it really really makes a big difference now there is actually portable monitors that you can buy so
just google up portable monitors so this is where it just plugs into your laptop and it's as small
and thin as your laptop screen but this will allow you to have two screens no matter where you're
going but if i'm at a desk i actually have like a lcd monitor like a normal little tv thing and it
sits there but when i'm traveling i actually prefer to use some anything that is portable
now the next best thing to a laptop is a phone so really do invest in a great phone because you
need a good camera because being online running a business you always need to be able to take good
photos of things for your stories or for your feed and also creating videos i do a lot of my content
now even on videos and so when you have a great phone you can really kill a lot of birds with one
stone creating content as well as being able to surf the internet and doing a lot of things online
i remember still on my bed having contraction giving birth to my kid and i was still on the
phone being able to use my whatsapp and messenger to kind of tell the team what to do and kind of
still work as i'm on it and i can still check my email so i really do a lot of my work on my phone
so i think it's important to invest both on your laptop and your phone because it's your livelihood
the next thing you want to consider is really good internet so if you want to work anywhere anytime
online you need to make sure wherever you're going it has good internet so well even though i work
online i'm at home most of the time because i have children but then occasionally i would travel but
i don't travel for that long maybe two weeks at a time but i know there's a lot of you guys who
are wanting to actually travel for a period of time so do look into making sure that you have
good internet wherever you are because it can really sabotage your business because you can't
deliver great services or communicate with your team if you have crappy internet and all nearby
to our internet cafe so even when we're recruiting virtual assistants for our business we're always
asking about internet right because it's so important but it's not just do you have good
internet it's do you have a nearby internet backup plan because we want to make sure that you always
have internet with you and over the years when i used to travel to a place for five weeks at a time
because i remember my husband had to go somewhere for work i came with him and i even bought myself
like a portable internet i can't remember what it's called dongle and it's just extra backup
because like i said without a laptop phone and internet then you really don't have a business
now the next essential tool that you'll need if you're working with clients with your own team
is you need a communication tool so for example for many years we use skype because it's a free
chat software you can video call you type text and it's free and we can make phone calls as well
however recently in the last few years we moved into slack so slack is just even more amazing for
teamwork because it allows you to create lots of channels and you kind of know where to find things
it integrates to a lot of bots so it's almost like a virtual office for us so we decided to
invest in slack because we needed our virtual office to kind of replicate what it would be
like working in a real office so there's different rooms departments and the team can access all the
information and we can communicate well now if you depend communication purely on emails then there's
a high chance it gets lost the conversation is not very i guess smooth because when you're having a
chat conversation it's a lot more quicker and you get to the bottom of things faster and slack
also even allows you to do video calls as well so you don't have to actually jump onto skype or on
zoom to chat to the people within your company we also even invite our clients on slack if we need
to communicate with them ongoing but i guess for projects this is where i'm going to share with you
that you also need project management tool so for example we used to use base cam but i'm moving
on to asana but something like that you need something that allows you to create projects
assign tasks put deadlines in and assigned to certain people because this is where you kind
of ensure that you're going to deliver the service at the right time you get the right
information corresponding with your team and you don't get anything missed now if you just purely
depend on email like i said your email inbox gets clogged up you don't know where things are
and you just can't work effectively with your team or your clients but look if you
have certain services that you don't need a lot of corresponding with your client then still
with your client you can still email them but i would always recommend every email that you
send to a client create a new subject line to make sure they know what stage you're in and they know
what the email is about versus sometimes if you don't even know how to use your email effectively
like having a long chain of emails talking about multiple topics then you just don't know where
to find that particular email mentioning the particular thing because it's all clogged up
in one chain of email whereas if you're using email it's always important to even put new
subject lines and make the email short and snappy and if you need and to talk about a new topic
create another subject line with that client now the next essential thing is having google
suite so i love google we are on there for gmail for our email account so even though our email
is a company email we moved to gmail because it's just so much more steady we didn't have
times where the emails we didn't receive email there was something wrong with our emails google
is just a lot more dependable so we use gmail as a hosting site to host all our professional emails
and then we also use everything within their suite from google drive where you store your
documents so i used to use dropbox but everything google just makes it easy because everything's in
there so there's google drive where you can store a lot of documents there and you can share with
people to have access to your your folders and we use all of their shared documents so excel word
document etc and this is much better than trying to use microsoft words etc because microsoft
word microsoft excel are non-shared documents so if you create a document on there and you
email someone else then when they send back you don't know what file you're working on whereas i
love the google shared drive and shared documents because you can work on the same document and any
changes reflects on both parties so we depend on google a lot so pretty much use everything
within google suite from google calendar to like i mentioned everything in there finally i think this
is the most essential is that you need a team in order to build a successful online business
so as you can see on my channel here as well as outsourcing angel i talk a lot about teams i help
people every day how to hire their own virtual assistants so that they could actually build
out a business that doesn't need them because at the end of the day if you want freedom in your
business you need to build a team so that they can run all those tools that i mentioned before
or help your clients and and even manage the other team members for you so that you can take a
holiday you can be sick without worrying that how you're gonna you know make your business work so
if you want to learn more about building team i do have a free training you can see in the link below
but yeah it's really important to know that building a team is a long-term game just because
you can do something just because it doesn't take long it doesn't mean that you should do
it because at the end of the day you want to have a business that like i said doesn't depend on you
and that means investing in the time to build out your team as early as possible and over the years
i've been able to keep my team members along with me then that means that they know me so well they
can grow with me they can innovate and think like me and that took a lot of time to nurture
and i'm so excited and happy about that because i've done the right thing now i've built a team
that love my business as much as i do and that means that i could still get paid even if i'm
not working and i get to spend more time creating videos and my business is still running without
me so those are the essential tools and things that you need to run a successful online business
if you have any questions for me love to hear in the comments below if there are anything
that you're unsure of you know let me know as well but thank you so much for watching and if you want
more content to help you grow your business or start a business then check out my video over here