One of the huge shifts going on in the world is how easy it is for individual people with an idea and a spark to set up a webpage and start a business getting their ideas out there in to the world.
One of the hiccups though has been the technology.
Business Is Changing
10 years ago, best practice for getting a website online would have been to get a website laid out in a program like Dreamweaver and make it dynamic and interactive using a programming language like Cold Fusion or ASP.Net. And that’s the way many large companies still operate today.
Then open source came along. And people love free, so the open source community thrived and kept adding features that people wanted. Pretty soon, for small entrepreneurs, the best practice technology stack was something like
- A WordPress Blog
- A premium theme like Thesis to make it look and work better
- A range of WordPress plugins to make it work better
- Custom graphic design and coding (CSS, HTML, PHP) or a steep learning curve to learn these technologies because Thesis out of the box is not all that friendly to work with if you want to use it to make websites rather than just blogs
- A membership site plugin for WordPress to control who has access to which pieces of content such as video (after all you don’t want everyone on the web to see your premium training videos or old marketing videos)
And that’s before we start tackling email auto-responder services, e-commerce shopping carts, e-commerce gateways and merchant accounts, joint venture partner tracking strategies, and other aspects of running an internet business.
So that was the current state of play. People who were serious about business on the internet had to learn about these technologies or get someone to do it for them.
Until about a year ago.
A New Platform
One of the internet marketing “gurus” got a bit tired of cobbling together these old systems, and figured if he had this problem then others would too. So he built a new system, which he’s been testing for the last year and is launching right now. It’s code-named “Kajabi”, and is being launched by Andy Jenkins.
Basically Kajabi replaces all of the bits and pieces of the WordPress blog and associated tools with one integrated platform you can customise and scale out and use for both internet marketing and for delivering your training and coaching content.
I’ve used Kajabi as a customer for several internet training courses and I can tell you it’s a solid platform with heaps of features including integrated social media for collaboration and developing community.
I think it’s a game changer for small business owners and anyone in the information industry. It makes it easy to market more effectively and to scale out your training and coaching content to a global audience.
If you want to follow along with the launch and find out more, visit
this page.
Disclaimer: Please be aware that I was a customer of the Kajabi product during its beta testing phase, and I joined the Kajabi affiliate program during the launch phase because I believe it has huge advantages for my business and believe it will for yours as well. The above link is an affiliate link, meaning I may make some small amount of money if you eventually decide to purchase the product after following the link. There’s no-one saying you have to purchase anything, and you should evaluate its benefits to you for yourself before purchasing!
Looks interesting Lauchlan.
Hi Chris,
It's a game changer! I love it.
If you haven't seen it already, Andy has released his free report on some of the key psychological frustrations faced when getting going in internet marketing and how to resolve them (and the answer isn't just 'Kajabi!'). You can access it here for the next week or so: http://get.kajabi.com/funnel_events/317?kjba=4eaca9b8
I find pp. 9-19 in the report particularly useful.
Cheers!
Lauchlan
Nice blog, Thanks for sharing about the shift in change with small business webpages and how to utilize the internet to your advantage. I'm really behind on this, thanks for the update.
Thanks! Kajabi has now gone live to market, you can access it and see what it's about at http://get.kajabi.com/sales_pages/138?kjba=4eaca9b8
At the time I'm writing there is a two week free trial so you can check it out and see how it works for your business with no money required up front. I gather after a little while it will change to a money back guarantee during the first 30 days.