It’s one thing to have an online presence for your good business. It’s another to use the right tools to help save you time and money, and boost your engagement, communications, and all your great efforts. Like all of our lists, this one is ever changing, but these are some of our favourites we use often to help us accomplish all we do.
WordPress There are many different platforms available today to make it easy and affordable for you to get your business online with a website or blog. We’ve tried them ourselves or learned from others’ experiences, and WordPress is still our favourite web software because it’s easy to use and allows us to customize and create anything we want, the way we want it. (Here is our simple solution to get started now).
Bluehost We host with Bluehost because they’re reliable, affordable, and their support is incredible (and 24/7). They worked closely with Wordpress to build their platform, and their experts know WordPress backwards and forwards, which has come in handy for us a time or two.
MailChimp We love to use MailChimp because they make it easy to design and share email campaigns, manage your contacts, and track results—even if you’ve never built an email campaign before. If you’re just starting out, you can try the service totally for free, and as a paying customer, you can send more than 12,000 emails a month, access additional features, and remove MailChimp’s badge from your campaign footers.
Buffer makes it easy to maintain regular posting activity on twitter. Keep your Buffer topped up with tweets and they get shared for you throughout the day.
Upwork Find + hire freelancers to help you with anything that can be done on a computer – from web and mobile programming to graphic design. Post your job and budget and have freelancers around the globe apply for the job.
Paypal PayPal is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account. It’s reliable and secure so your customers feel comfortable sending you online payments too.
Rackspace
The largest managed cloud provider offering expertise across the world’s leading clouds.
Square From mobile point-of-sale tools and online invoicing, to next-day deposits and inventory management, Square has everything you need to run your business anywhere.
Canva makes design simple for everyone. You can access free templates to create your own designs for web or print, blog graphics, presentations, social media graphics, flyers, posters, invitations and more. Or upgrade your account to Canva for Work to create branded files for your business – it’s a great tool to help keep your branding consistent, and consistency is everything
Buzzsumo is a free online tool that helps you identify the most shared content for any domain or topic.
YouCanBook.me An easy to use, online scheduling tool to take customer bookings. Connects with your calendar and only shares the times you want with your customers. Customers get their own notifications, reminders, calendar invites and more.
