Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners. To help you save your time searching the internet trying to decide what option to pick, we’ve compiled the best tools for business owners available on the market.
With modern technology, everyone is always raving about a new app or website. There is an app or website for anything you could ever want to do. Whether you’re searching for business advice or looking for a cheap flight, you have a ton of website or app choices. The problem is with the number of options, it can almost be overwhelming. How do you know what to pick? Is this really the best option? To help you get started, we’re sharing our top pick for the best tools for business owners.
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – StratPad and Business Plan & Start Startup.
As we mentioned in Friday’s article, many business owners are beginning to outsource the lengthy task of researching, writing, and creating a business plan. While you may want to consider a professional to write your business plan or serve as an outside advisor and consultant when you’ve completed your first stab at it, your budget may not allow for it. That is completely understandable. Starting a business is an expensive undertaking. The good news is there a million and one apps designed to help you create a business plan.
With all the choices, the business plan app that reigns supreme is StratPad. Forbes named StratPad as one of the best apps available on iTunes. This app does it all. It provides tutorials on strategic business planning, creating business plans, and making financial projections. The nice thing about this platform is it allows you to save your business plan as a high-quality PDF, should you need to print it to share with investors. With every pro, there is a con, and StratPad is no exception. Currently, StratPad is only available to Apple users. You’ll only be able to download the free app on your iPad or iPhone. Speaking of free, you can download and use many of the StratPad’s features for free. However, some advanced features will require a purchase.
Good news for the Android users! If you want nothing to Apple products, check out Business Plan & Start Startup in the Google Play Marketplace. It offers similar features to StratPad, and will do the trick just great!
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Upwork, Guru, and Crew.
If you’re looking to outsource labor, the number of freelancers looking for work is incredible. People all around the world are looking for work in many areas of expertise, from web and app design to project management.
Upwork. Of all the freelance hiring sites available, Upwork is the most popular. On Upwork, you’ll be able to hire anyone from a virtual assistant to an app designer. The only issue is people have complained about the quality of work they’ve received from someone hired on Upwork. Employers have said they had thought the person they hired would have had more experience with better professional habits, including more attention to detail and project timelines. Don’t let this completely turn you away from using Upwork. On the other hand, many employers have raved about the employees they’ve found on Upwork. They’ve praised the dedicated employees’ high-quality work that helped their business boom. The takeaway if you plan on using Upwork is to thoroughly vet your prospective employees. Interview them, check their references, and ask for examples of their past work.
Guru. This site has well over a million freelancers looking for work. It has a similar feel to Upwork but has more emphasis on seasoned technical and design-oriented individuals seeking work. If you’re looking for these types of professionals, it’s worth avoiding Upwork and sticking to Guru.
Crew. By far the highest regarded site to higher freelance web designers and project manager. Crew will give you the best selection of tech-savvy gurus to help you build and design any sort of tech platform. The potential employees on this site have experience working with some of the most successful companies, like Google, Apple, etc.
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Zapier.
Even if you’ve been in business for years or are just opening a business, you’re going to want this next app. Have you ever felt the dread realizing you had to post the same information on multiple sites and apps? Let’s face it, the only way to make sure your content gets out there is to post to many different platforms and do it often. The downfall of this is that this posting process can take hours.
Zapier has solved your problems. They provide an online automation platform that allows all of your apps to connect to one another. They have over 750 apps you can choose to connect to from Gmail to Instagram and all those in between.
“You can connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. Move info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. It’s easy enough that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks. For example, maybe you get a lot of email attachments in your Gmail account and you want to save them to Dropbox. Every time you get an attachment, you could open up the email, click on the attachment, and then save it to Dropbox. Or you can have Zapier automate this for you, saving you time and effort,” says Zapier.
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Grammarly.
Unless you are a perfect human being, it is almost certain that you’ve posted, submitted or sent something with an embarrassing typo. If you haven’t been there, then hats off to you, I aspire to be at your level. For those of us who are typo-prone, it can be a bit of hassle to pull up Microsoft Word, type out what you want to say, and edit it until its perfect to post.
Grammarly heard your problem and gave you a great solution. You can download Grammarly as an add-on onto Google Chrome. Once it’s set up, which takes under a minute, it will automatically perform a spell and grammar check when you type anything on the internet. You don’t have to turn anything on or click a button to get it to proofread for you. It works on all sites from Facebook to Gmail. Do yourself the favor and avoid those embarrassing typos you can’t go back and edit. We’re looking at you Twitter!
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Nibbler.
Ever wonder how your website is doing? Where can you improve? Are you making the most of your social media? When it comes to assessing your website, there are a number of ways to go about it. For example, you can do weekly reports on your social media using the analytics’ platforms. However, this won’t tell you exactly what could be improved on your website and your socials.
“Nibbler takes this idea and goes a step further. Nibbler is a free tool for testing websites. Enter the address of any website and Nibbler will give you a report scoring the website out of 10 for key areas, including accessibility, SEO, social media, and technology,” says Nibbler.
Nibbler has one downside. Although it is free, you are limited to three reports. You’ll have to pay for a membership after that. However, your website and social media are the best tools for business owners, without them being top-notch your business might flop.
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Trello.
No matter if you are starting a business or have a team of seasoned pros, you want to know who is doing what in the workflow. However, you don’t want to micromanage your people. How do you walk that tight line between managing productivity and not micromanaging employees?
Trello is your new best friend. It’s great for both collaborative and solo work. It has a customizable board where all team members can post what they are working on and add updates on progress. This allows you to make sure things are getting done, but also when you see something taking longer than usual, you can jump in and lend a hand. Trello will help you keep projects on track to meet the due-date and prioritize certain items on the agenda. On the employee side, it gives an open door to ask for help when it seems a task is taking too long. It shows you put in the time and effort. No matter your role in the project, Trello will help everyone feel connected!
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – SEMrush.
If you’re dabbling into the world of digital marketing, it can be a bit overwhelming. We’re lucky to be in the Youtube era where you can learn how to do some of the marketing yourself. You need to wrap your head around SEO optimization, backlink sites to spread content, your competition, and more. Despite all the tools available on the internet, there is one that ranks the highest to help you make the most of your marketing.
SEMrush is a one-and-done platform for digital marketers. It has everything! It helps you estimate search volume, stay up-to-date on your competitors, decide what keywords to use, analyze post success, find new backlinks and more. It will make managing your site so much easier and cut down on your learning curve. The only downside of this site is that it’s not free, you do have to pay a monthly subscription. However, if you’re just starting your business, it could be worth the cost if you could do the digital marketing yourself, or part-time, instead of hiring a full-time pro.
Starting a Business? The Best Tools for Business Owners – Bit.ly.
Hate those ugly, long URL links? Yeah, so does everyone else. Bit.ly saves the day by allowing you to shorten URLs making your social posts easier on the eyes. However, Bit.ly is more than a took to shorten links. It also allows you to customizes the links you shorten. This means you can track what link go the most traffic and why.
