I truly believe we live in one of the BEST times to be a business owner. The business resources available to small business owners and entrepreneurs can drastically reduce business costs. It allows you to bring projects in house that use to have to be done in studios, with expensive software, or through outsourcing.
Here are some of my team’s FAVORITE business resources.
- Headline Analyzer from Coschedule. If you blog or submit articles as part of your marketing campaign, bookmark this business resource right now! It will rate your headlines to ensure you get a maximum amount of clicks. When we discovered this tool, our open rates went up by a couple of percentage points and our click through rate increased.
- Uber Conference. If you’re tired of the unreliability and lack of personality in free conference call options, you’ll love Uber. Uber’s free platform is perfect for small teams needing to communicate regularly, and record for unlimited amounts of time. It is admittedly, not a fit if you are doing large conference calls. However, their paid lines are incredibly low. When we switched to Uber, we got all the services we had been paying $80 a month for, for $120 a year. And they have the best hold music on the planet.
- Mail Chimp. While I’m an Infusionsoft girl through and through (Mention my name and they will attend you), for brand new start ups, sometimes you just need something to get you up and running. Mail Chimp is a simple, easy to use email marketing system that will work until you hit 2000 subscribers. It will interface with your website and run simple campaigns for you. It’s a great starter business resource.
- Picmonkey. While I’m not sure if Picmonkey is cousins to Mail Chimp, I do know that it’s a great resource to create graphics in house with out spending the time and money to train on a more robust program like Adobe Illustrator. It’s great for your social media posts, custom email headers, social media headers, and graphics for your landing pages.
- G Suite
by Google. Google really deserves an entire article dedicated to all the amazing things they give you as a business owner. It is a MUST for any virtual team. Google Drive allows you to share documents with your team, you choose who has access to which documents, and who has editing privilages. You can set up customized email addresses through them. You can do just about everything except cook dinner with the Google Aps. Get familiar with them because chances are you are paying for services right now that Google provides for free. I LOVE all of the business resources Google puts out. - Google Analytics– Data, data, data! If you have a website and have not yet installed Google Analytics, ARE YOU CRAZY! This is a must have tool that will show you exactly how your website, and posts are performing.
- Canva. Canva is another graphic design program that I love. It allows you to upload your own images to play with, choose from their vast library of free graphics, or purchase their images for $1.00 each. I love the volume of templates available in Canva. I love that canva has options for the non-designer (Use a premade template) and options for the experienced designer. It is a fantastic business resource that you will get slightly addicted to.
- Instabuilder. If you are looking for free business resources to build landing pages, this is hard to beat. It’s a drag and drop system that allows you to build clean, usable landing pages. While they do not have the volume of templates that you would find in leadpages.net, the templates they have are clean and effective. The level of customization is also surprisingly high for a free platform.
- Audacity. You no longer need a recording studio to produce high quality audios for your business. Just get a dependable microphone, your laptop and download audacity. It’s simple to use and the editing tools are wonderful. It really is like having a recording studio on your laptop. The ability to layer tracks will bring a higher level of quality to your recordings.
- Amy Walker Consulting’s Blog– (Shameless plug) It’s hard to believe that it’s been 4 years since I started writing weekly articles for business. We’ve got great business resources for you on topics including marketing, sales, leadership, branding, life balance and much more. Please stay and check out the other articles. We hope you will consider us a great business resource and share our blog with others.
