10 Tools I can’t live without as a business owner
When I first started my business, I remember I was working with the absolute bare minimum. I had no idea what tools to use, what to invest in, what I could use for free, and what my business absolutely could not live without. Now that I’ve been in the game for a few years, I figured I’d share with you some of my favorite tools and must-haves that my biz truly cannot live without! I use all these tools pretty much on a weekly basis and they’re worth every penny. Remember the phrase, “you have to spend money to make money?” It couldn’t be more true. These tools have honestly become non-negotiables in my small business. Many of these tools also offer free versions, so you don’t necessarily have to make a purchase to enjoy the benefits, but if you do want to lock into all these tools have to offer, some might require taking that next step and purchasing a subscription. Some of these tools might apply directly to your business, while others might not feel like an absolute must. I recommend checking out these tools, learning the ins and outs of the benefits and making a decision from there. To help you with that, I’m sharing what I love about these tools as well as what I use them for so that you can get access to the full picture of why these tools are so valuable for keeping my business at peak performance level. Let’s dive in!
I use Canva for a variety of different marketing needs. I don’t know how people get by without it! I know for some graphic designers they HATE Canva because they’ll say it isn’t “real” graphic design, but when it comes to presentation slides, Pinterest graphics and instagram stories, I just need something quick that’ll get the job done and get it done well! Canva does just that. It makes it a piece of cake to create beautiful graphics and I love that I can use them over and over again as a template for future graphics. Experts advise that you post on Pinterest 10-15 times per day (which is a lot). That doesn’t mean you have to be creating 10-15 new pieces of content per day, but I do create several different pin graphics just for a single blog post. That helps me to get more active on Pinterest and drive more traffic to my site. There’s tons of great templates for Pinterest Pins, Idea Pins, and infographics on Canva and they save me so much time when it comes to content creation. Canva makes things a lot easier on me when it comes to making content in batches. It is a true pillar of my social strategy!
In my opinion, this is the best photo editing app out there if you’re not getting into Adobe Lightroom! And even then, the ease and convenience of this app is what sets this apart even from advanced softwares like Lightroom. I love using all the different filters, and you can also play around with different things like adding dust, grain, shimmer or sparkles on the photo, and you can play around with different films like a fuji camera, polaroid, VHS, 8mm and more. I could not recommend this app more and the paid features for this are totally worth it!
I have always used Squarespace for my website and I absolutely love it. While I do have an online shop, it isn’t the main source of revenue for my business. My biggest chunk of income for my business year after year is without a doubt my client work. If you’re somebody primarily selling products, you might look at something like Shopify, although Squarespace can be used for that too! For my Squarespace site, I purchased a template on Creative Market and personalized it for my site. I first built my site from scratch in 2020 and it was in desperate need of a facelift. The template made it easy to make impactful changes and before I knew it, my site was up and running with a complete makeover within 48 hours. My Squarespace template is by Blog Pixie! If you’re in need of a template, you’ll definitely want to check her shop out. It’s a Squarespace template goldmine!
One of the questions I get asked all the time is “what program do you use for your illustrations?” Well my friend, this is it! It’s mind blowing to me that you can build an entire business off of an app that costs a one-time payment of $9.99. It’s crazy to me that procreate hasn’t raised their prices! The minute I got an iPad and purchased procreate, my business was forever changed. I love Procreate because you can use it for so many things, t-shirt designs, watercolor house portraits, social graphics, video thumbnails and IG reel covers, I even use it for my animated reels! Beyond just the business side of things, it can also be really therapeutic and de-stressing to jump on the app and draw something that’s only for you and truly just for fun. Procreate helps me to get creative and bring ideas to life!
I recently made the switch from Mail Chimp to Flodesk for my email marketing and WOW I am so glad I did. It is so much easier to create BEAUTIFUL emails in Flodesk than it ever was for me to do it in Mail Chimp. There’s tons of amazing templates that come with pre-written copy that you could even pull from if you wanted to for your own email copy. They also have lots of different templates for notes you can leave at the bottom of your email by the unsubscribe button. They’re pre-written, so it takes the guesswork out of it for you. One of my favorites is…
Breakups are hard. We’ll likely overthink it. If you really want to go “bye Felicia” on us you can Unsubscribe or Manage Preferences. You should know we’ll still love you.
How fun is that?! They also make it super easy for you to create workflows, or email sequences so that you can craft an entire email sequence, like a welcome sequence, and ultimately guide your new subscriber to becoming a customer. The great thing about an email sequence is once you’ve made it, everything is automated, so you don’t have to touch it again! Every time a subscriber joins my email list, they’re added into a specific workflow, which means I can be sending emails LITERALLY in my sleep! It’s the ultimate time saver and even more than that, I’ve just been so happy with how beautiful all my email marketing has turned out since I switched. I always felt like I could never get my emails to look that pretty on Mail Chimp and aesthetics is a big deal for email marketing!
Flodesk allows me to craft beautiful emails, add buttons, links, photos, lists and more. There’s also templates for all sorts of different emails. Whether you’re welcoming a new subscriber, sending out a life update, sharing a weekly blog round up, giving out some tips, or something else, they have a template for it. And one reason I love it over Mail Chimp is that no matter how many new email subscribers you gain, they won’t increase your payment plan. Mail Chimp payment plans are based on how many email subscribers you have, with Flodesk, you don’t have to worry about your pricing changing! You can get access to Flodesk for 50% off today by clicking the link below!
Aspire is an influencer marketing platform I use to find collaborations! While this isn’t a super large focus of my business right now, it is an easy way to get matched up with paid promotions with companies looking to work with influencers of all sizes and niches. You can apply to a set amount of campaigns per month with this website and it makes it super easy for you to send your deliverables to the company you’re working with and get them approved! One of my favorite paid campaigns I’ve been able to work on because of Aspire is a collab I did with Artifact Uprising! My husband and I also got the most gorgeous wedding album made for us as a result of this campaign, and now it’s a beautiful keepsake showcased in our home! Highly recommend checking it out!
Tailwind is a tool I use to schedule Pinterest pins. There are LOTS of benefits to this platform. One of them is a no-brainer, the ease of scheduling. It’s so simple to schedule pins with this scheduling tool over a long period of time, and because you have to be fairly active on Pinterest each day to see true growth, it’s a good idea to look into a tool that will allow you to batch schedule multiple posts at one time. I love batch scheduling pins and batch planning social content! Right now, I’ve switched up my rhythm from doing it once a month to instead doing weekly batch planning. It helps me to break it off into smaller chunks and only plan a week of content at a time versus an entire month at a time.
If you want access to the FREE content calendar worksheet that I print off and use each week to create and plan my content, click the button below!
During my batch planning session, I plan out Pinterest pins and create graphics that then need to be scheduled all throughout the week. I need multiple pins to go out in one day, and the calendar view on tailwind makes it really easy for me to see how many pins are going out each day. They also have amazing reporting and analytics that help me to see what pins are working and what aren’t so that I can adjust my strategy as needed and hone in on the content that is performing well.
Zapier is a tool I use in tandem with my email marketing platform, Flodesk! There’s tons of youtube videos and tutorials out there to show you how to integrate Flodesk and Zapier with your website, and I did have to watch a lot of those before I got the hang of it, but boy is it worth it! Zapier basically is what you connect to forms and opt-ins on your website. So when somebody signs up for your email list a “zap” is triggered and then you get to choose what action is taken with that data. You can add them to a segment of your email list, add the new subscriber to your newsletter, literally anything you want! Zapier is what connects Flodesk to Squarespace so you HAVE to have both. It might seem complicated at first, but I promise you it is so much better than using Mail Chimp.
This has been an absolute God send for my peace of mind on Instagram, and let me tell you why. I’ve actually lost access to my instagram account before. It was right around the time I had hit 40K on IG and it was absolutely horrifying. Everything I had worked for on Instagram for my business was gone in an instant, and I felt like a part of me was gone when it happened. I almost pulled the plug on my entire business, I was ready to end it all and give up on all my dreams. Years of hard work, all for it to get deleted? That’s the scary thing about Instagram, they shut down accounts all the time. I've seen it happen to so many creators, you don’t know when it’s going to happen to you. But the reality is that we have no control over that app. So many people lose their accounts to hackers. What are you supposed to do when that happens? I know the situation seems pretty bleak, but let me share with you the light at the end of the tunnel.
Notch is INSURANCE for your Instagram account, and if you’re using Instagram to make money for your business, you NEED their coverage. It’s a relatively new concept, and when it first came out, I could not wait to sign up, so I immediately got on the waitlist. As soon as I got the email that I could sign up for coverage, I did it right away. They help you calculate how much coverage you need, and you’ll get paid every single day that your account is down according to how much coverage you sign up for. You don’t need a big pricey plan to get security. I picked one of their lower coverage plans and I would still be getting compensated a huge chunk of cash per day if something were to ever happen to my account. Not only do they compensate you for each day your account is down, they’re also your go-to team to help you get your account back, so they’ll do everything in their power to give you back access, which is something I needed the first time (and hopefully the last) that my account got taken down.
Fortunately, when I lost access to my account, I happened to have a client that worked for Instagram and Facebook that was able to help me regain access. It was a total God thing to be working with her at that exact moment in time, because if I hadn’t, I think I would have been out of luck. Thanks to Notch, I am feeling a lot more peace of mind and way less anxious about losing it in the future. I pray it never happens, but if it does, I’ll sleep a little better at night knowing there’s a team working to help me get it back.
This is an education platform I use to house/host my online course for business owners, Passion to Profit: Turning Small Business Dreams into Scalable Income. I love Teachable because it’s easy to set up and use. It’s pretty intuitive, so I didn’t have to go searching for Youtube tutorials in order to figure things out. You can do a lot with the free version or take your pick of a few different paid plan options. I’m on the cheapest plan they offer right now and it is SO worth it! AND with it being an online tool for hosting courses, usually your course is going to be a higher ticket item, so I basically covered my whole year of payments for teachable within minutes of launching my course. I love Teachable and hope to launch more programs on this platform in the future!
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Are any of these tools new to you? Did any of them surprise you? Which ones will you consider using? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear from you! As always, if you have any questions feel free to drop them below and I WILL get back to you! I love hearing from anybody that’s taken the time to read my blog posts and I hope this was an insightful read for you and your small business as a creative entrepreneur. If I had to pick an absolute FAVORITE tool out of the list, I’d have to say Flodesk. It’s a recent investment for me that I’ve made this year and I can confidently say I’m never going back. Flodesk makes email marketing fun and easy. You can’t put a price on that!
Cheers friends!
