My go to list of tried and tested online tools for growing your business.
Interested in starting your own small business online? There are many sites and services on the web that offer free tools to help your business succeed. These work for many different kinds of online businesses from building websites for local clients to starting your own online tutorial site and everything in-between. I’ve used each of these myself and find them to be the best of the choices available.
Video Capture and Tutorials
If you want to do online tutorials or videos capturing yourself or your computer screen, or both at the same time, Loom.com has everything you need. The interface is not hard to figure out and you can begin recording your first video within minutes.
Marketing Collateral
I love Canva.com. It’s an asset design tool that allows you to build a bunch of different marketing materials to promote your business. It uses a drag and drop editor which makes using it extremely easy. You just pick a pre-made template and then fill in your own images and text. It has hundreds of templates. Some major ones include:
- YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook banners, ads and video intros
- Website mockups
- Logos
- T-shirts
- Emails, postcards and other correspondence
- Presentations and reports
- Business cards
- Invoices
- Brochures
- Newsletters
Free Images
There are sites online with free, professional quality, images and video for you to use in promoting your business. They are all straight-forward and have easy search capability so you can find what you are looking for quickly. These include:
- Pixabay https://pixabay.com
- UnSplash https://unsplash.com
- StockSnap https://stocksnap.io
Image Editors
Need an image editor with all the functionality of Photoshop but is entirely free? Gimp www.gimp.org is amazing in its scope and ability. It is a little bit intimidating if you haven’t used a full image editor before, but all you have to do if you get stuck is Google the task you are looking for. All my questions were answered by just a quick search. I also use a great site named Logos By Nick https://logosbynick.com/gimp/ as well for trouble shooting Gimp questions.
Podcasts
Podcasts are an excellent way to get your business noticed. Doing quick daily or weekly podcasts related to your services can get you noticed quickly. Anchor FM https://anchor.fm/signup from Spotify can help you. Set up is quick and easy. I used Canva to make my podcast thumbnail that people will see when they find me. The other great thing about Anchor is that it will promote you for free as well, placing your podcast on all the major online platforms so more people see you.
Audio Editing
Speaking of podcasting, if you need to edit your audio you can use audacity https://www.audacityteam.org. It’s an audio editor that even though entirely free, has everything you need to professionally edit your audio files.
Email Marketing
Marketing your business with email can be confusing and time-consuming. I use Mail Chimp https://mailchimp.com for this. It lets you build emails from templates, send to entire lists of potential customers and track stats on your campaigns. It also automates a lot of additional things like follow-ups etc. so you don’t have to do all that manually.
Online Documentation
Are you going to create materials you want to sell such as electronic PDF courses, study aides etc.? You can use GumRoad https://gumroad.com for these. You can create a free account, upload your documents and promote them. Gum Road ‘gates’ them behind a paywall so anyone you direct to them can access and download after paying. Gum Road does charge a small percentage fee for this service, but it keeps your intellectual property from being taken by savvy computer users as well as accidentally allowing access to your documents via targeted search engine queries.
Website Building
Building your own website for your business? There are two routes I recommend going based on how comfortable you are with website creation.
The next two items are not free but are less pricey than other options out there.
Wix https://www.wix.com lets you quickly create a website that looks professional and promotes your business well. It uses templates and drag and drop to accomplish this. You don’t need any web building experience to get up and running with it however you are also limited to what it has to offer (albeit there’s a lot).
Bluehost https://www.bluehost.com lets you set up and build your website using Word Press. WP isn’t really that hard but it does have somewhat of a learning curve especially if you are not comfortable with website creation to begin with. Again, there is a lot of information on the web to help guide you. You do gain more control over your site, but it could take longer to get running and keep on top of.
Video Editing for Mac Users
If you have a Mac, you have access to iMovie. It comes free with your operating system. It is a full video building suite that gives you great control over building your videos.
Finally
Hit any roadblocks on your journey? You can probably find a solution on YouTube.
Do you use anything on the list? Tell me what you like or don’t like about them. Do you love and use anything I haven’t included? I’m always searching for better solutions. Let me know in the comments and I’ll definitely look into it.
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