Three Small Business Online Tools we Love
Three must have small business tools we use every day. From one small business to another - save time searching where to invest your time and money. These are my top tips.
When you're running a small business, it can be an absolute mine field to figure out where to invest your money and what tools are best to use that will help you grow and ultimately save you time - opposed to holding you back.
If you're anything like me, you can go down a many-hour rabbit hole, researching, reading reviews and forums trying to figure out what's right for you.
As it's hard enough for small businesses to survive, I think the more we can help each other - no place for gatekeeping - the more we can be a force for good.
So here are a few of our favourite small business tools.
Obvioulsy, we love paper, and much of our productivity is aided with our own paper goods (we really design for ourselves first!).
Weekly planners, extra large year planners and monthly planners all help move this little business in the right direction... but without our favourite online tools we would be nowhere.
Three of our favourite digital tools:
1. Shopify
I you want to sell online, on your own website - Shopify is incredible. I'm a long time user / fan and it just keeps getting better.
I would go as far as to say, don't even look anywhere else, nothing beats it.
Everything is designed to be user friendly and intuitive.
Every 6 months, they release a new host of features.
Plus, it's super flexible - you can create your own look and feel with customisable themes. It integrates will almost every software you want and has an app store full of plugins to do what you need. (we just added a clever little survey on checkout, for example).
2. Planoly
A game changer if you're trying to juggle all the small business stuff including your socials. We schedule all our Social Media through Planoly. It's got a drag and drop calendar, which lets you visually plan your feed and schedule content in advance for autopost. Autoposting is the dream - I bulk plan content (not always, but in an ideal world) and schedule it for the evenings or weekend.
It lets you schedule Instagram posts, stories, Pinterest posts and they've just added Tiktok autoposting.
3. Trello
We use Trello every day, all day. It's a project management tool, which lets you essentially create lists. We use this as our collaboration tool.
Everyone has their own 'board' with all the tasks and jobs that need doing. Every task has notes, images, deadlines etc associated to it.
Our product design process is entirely managed on Trello too, from the design stage, print, to getting it set up live - with lots of checklists to check off each stage.
I have to confess a secret - we use the free plan. The main reason is that it only gives us 10 boards. I believe that only having 10 boards helps us be really conscious about how many new boards we create - and keeps all the info very tidy and organised.
We may upgrade to the paid version sometime soon, as I know there are some great features that will come in handy.
It's a great place to keep us all in the loop of whats happening - and instead of having to ask the other person where they are at with it, it should all be noted in the project board.
What are your favourite must have small business tools?