As a virtual assistant and business consultant for the last 15 years, one question I’m asked frequently is what tools and systems I recommend. As entrepreneurs, we have a myriad of tools and systems available to keep our businesses running smoothly. Selecting the RIGHT ones for our needs is essential.
Here is my roundup of my most recommended tools of 2021.
Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
Active Campaign is an email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses. With a sliding price scale based on the number of contacts and your list and your needs, it is the solution I recommend to all my clients if you need to go beyond sending a newsletter.
Just getting started with your business? AWeber can help you grow with email marketing and they have a free plan.
Website
WordPress, of course, is #1. I actually don’t work with any other platform for creating and maintaining websites.
Hosting: I’ve been with Bluehost for over ten years and have never had a complaint. Bluehost plans offer their customers 24/7 live chat, unmetered bandwidth, and at least 5 email accounts. Its uptime is 99.99% and offers fast load times.
Optimze Press Create professional landing pages quickly and easily. Includes many templates to fit your purpose and a simple user interface. You can also get the Optimize Theme to build your entire website.
Membership Sites and Online Courses: Kajabi is the best. I’ve used it almost since its inception and it just keeps getting better.
Social Media
Social media scheduling tools offer a convenient shortcut to queue up posts on your time schedule. They are not one size fits all so you just need to choose what fits your needs.
Image Creation:
Pixelied A full suite of image editing tools, with standalone solutions for the most common uses, tailored for businesses.
Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content.
Always Up to Date Guide to Social Media Images from Sprout Social
Blogging and Blog Promotion
Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule
Missinglett_r monitors your blog 24/7 and when it finds new content, a social media campaign is created. Each campaign contains a year’s worth of social media posts created from your blog post which includes an image.
Scheduling
Calendly is the modern scheduling platform that makes “finding time” a breeze.
Google Calendar – when integrated with the other systems
Project Management
Asana is the work management platform teams use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks that grow business. Asana’s strongest advantages include a simple, user-friendly interface and dashboard that allows you to easily oversee one project or many.
Slack is a collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly. … A Slack workspace is made up of channels, where team members can communicate and work together.
Other business tools
Bookkeeping – Wave is a free accounting solution. It’s a good basic system that enables you to track your income and expenses.
Grammarly.com – Automatically see any grammar and spelling errors in your posts, emails and online documents.
File Conversion Zamar converts many different file types fast, easy and free.
Remove.bg Easily remove unwanted backgrounds from your images. They even have some template backgrounds you can add back in.
Temi.com – transcription online and quick!
That’s a lot of business tools and I can tell you I do or have used every one of them. It can be confusing to make all the pieces fit together seamlessly though. That’s why I created the workbook, The Only 3 Systems You Really Need for a Profitable Business. Learn more about it here.
Leave a Reply