Tools Review for Mobilizers: Why I Love Squarespace and Kajabi—and When to Use Them

This blog is for all the mobilizers, leaders, coaches, and influencers out there!

Perhaps your role—your job—is to influence others for the sake of the nations. About half of you that follow me are in this category.

So from time to time, I’m gonna pull back the curtain and go behind the scenes of mobilizing.

Here’s the deal with mobilizing. Over the last few years, I stumbled…and fumbled… into an obvious fact.

I could cast a wider net mobilizing by getting proficient in all-things ONLINE.

But oh my. The tech.

Websites. Podcasts. Blogs. YouTube videos. Facebook Ads. Instagram Stories. Digital courses. Webinars. Again, starting with a website…

All the TECH associated with those words has meant more than a few late nights pulling out my hair…bags under my eyes…wanting to RUN…wanting to GIVE. UP.

But I’m so glad I didn’t give up—and I don’t want you to run away either—just because of the tech overwhelm.

Here’s the truth: Almost everybody is online nowadays. And we can go ANYWHERE to ANYONE online.

Let's start first  talking about having an online presence with a WEBSITE.

A website gives us a space to nurture, inform, and train the people we want to serve—and can lead to that important individual cup of coffee (or videochat now-a-days) in-person.

So, if you’re just getting started as an online influencer for the nations, here’s my first Tools Review. Here's the best tools I’ve found to set up a website—starting with my two faves, Squarespace and Kajabi.

You’ll want to consider Squarespace if you’re just starting out online (and you’re not already part of, or can’t access, a church or organization website). You need a place to house your main website, your blog, your free guides, your coaching options—and you want to pair it up with a free email program like MailChimp to grow your e-mail list for awhile.

Squarespace is an easy-to-use tool, with beautiful templates, that let me create my own beautiful website at an affordable price (about $250/annual fee).

If you’re ALL-IN though, you might want to go straight to the all-in-one option Kajabi, where you can house your main website, your blog, your free guides, your e-mail list, your pipeline sales funnels to advertise events and trainings AND host online digital courses and/or membership sites.

Kajabi is another easy-to-use tool, with beautiful templates, pre-designed automated sales funnel options, and EVERYTHING you need to design, host, and promote a digital online course or membership (a bit pricier option at $150/month, but if you add up the subscriptions to all the extra programs you’ll need to do all of the above, it comes out to that price anyway).

If you’re part of an established church or organization, might I suggest Kajabi if you’re trying to do any kind of online training, or week-by-week online learning groups.

Both programs are SUPER user-friendly, easy-to-learn, with lovely design templates, and have great customer support.

I am NOT a techy person, and I learned to design ALL my own pages on both programs, with very little frustration.

Let me say that again. It’s just little ‘ole me over here at www.jeannie-marie.com.

I never hired a programmer, a website designer, or a marketing guru.

I just buckled down and learned it, and chose the easiest non-techy programs with the most beautiful, useful designs.

Believe me, I’ve tried a bunch of other options over the years.

For websites, I’ve tried the “free” website-makers like Wix (not easy/not pretty/too many ads) to the complicated-for-me website and blog builders like WordPress (too much like programming, not user-friendly, for me anyway).

Using Squarespace, I even learned to do more complicated things like creating a page for my First Chapter Free, that drop emails into MailChimp through a Form, and trigger an automatic welcome sequence.

BUT. Now my list is big enough that I’m going to have to start paying MailChimp big bucks to do all this.

Aaaaaand since I’m now creating digital courses (coming in January 2021!!!) to serve you all BETTER and in a DEEPER way, I had to start adding three, four, five other programs to make it all work.

Enter Kajabi—la la la la, big band music playing, dancing music all around—wonderful, easy, all-in-one KAJABI!

I totally. love. Kajabi.

If I knew all that I knew now, and am doing all I’m doing in the online space, I would just go all in on Kajabi. In fact, I am moving my MailChimp email list to Kajabi, and will likely move my website from Squarespace over, just to have it all in one place and save costs.

It’s THE. BEST. The easiest, the all-in-one tool to create a website, host a blog, manage your e-mail list, design landing pages, create sales funnels, aaaaaannnd, house a digital course or membership.

But if you’re just starting out in the online space, and you’re not planning on doing online courses or memberships, go for Squarespace and the free MailChimp for a year or two!

I love these tools so much, I decided to became an affiliate for both Squarespace and Kajabi, so if you sign up for either of these using my links above, it counts towards my subscription fees, you benefit my work, aaaand with Kajabi, you get 28 days to try it out for FREE (instead of the usual 14 days). Might as well help each other out, right?

If you have other questions for me, like, how and why did God lead me to start a blog, write a book, invite people to join my e-mail list, design that cover page, do Facebook LIVES, or whatever, PLEASE comment below and ask me! I’d love to save you all the headaches of figuring all this stuff out by sharing what I’ve learned the hard-knocks way.

All of this techy, detailed-stuff is for the higher purpose of helping you mobilize others to get involved with the three billion people with LEAST ACCESS to Jesus. May it be so.

YOU can do this!