As a small business owner, you know technology moves fast. When it comes to resources that can help your small business be successful, the truth is the same.
If you’re ready to scale up your profit this list is designed for you! Ami Mariscal, the Founder of Lift Your Business has gathered all the best tools and resources into one place for your viewing pleasure. This is a growing list of the best tools and resources for entrepreneurs to create their ultimate prosperity system.
Some of these resources will be just what you were looking for. Many of these tools & resources will be new to you, but know that small business owners and entrepreneurs alike are using these tools with great success.
Best App Ever
Evernote is cloud-based with apps for your phone and desktop. It’s super simple to keep track of audio, images and writing all-in-one place. With tagging, geolocation, and notebooks it’s super easy to search and share. Ami keeps her lists of higher altitude goals and projects in here as well as project details and notes.
Funding Sources
A non-profit organization that specifically helps small business owners get money when they need it most.
A crowdfunding platform that makes it easy to raise interest-free loans from your network and Kiva’s network which is in the millions 🙂
Business Strategy
Business Model Canvas
Though made for startups, this is a great, yet unknown tool for established companies. It’s especially useful for developing new areas of your business or new product lines. Check out our LYB blog post for the details on why to use it, what it is, and how to use it.
This tool is not quite finished yet, but I’m particularly excited about how it’s designed for established businesses; Canvanizer. So if you start using the business model canvas now, you’re ahead of the curve!
Profitlandia by LiftYourBusiness.com
Create your ultimate prosperity system – even if you don’t know you have one yet.
Lead Generation and Sales Conversion
Personal Sales
Contactually helps you nurture leads by setting up buckets and/or tags and then emailing groups that you determine while still being able to customize each email. It also has robust sales pipeline automation that can trigger almost anything you or your sales people want.
Infusionsoft is probably the best bang for the buck in terms of CRM, ecommerce and landing page testing all-in-one.
Content Marketing
Hubspot is the best website for inbound and content marketing tools and resources such as templates and educational videos. For example the “Blog Editorial Calendar Template” and “Social Media Content Calendar Template” and the Marketing Grader which allows you to type your website url into the tool and it gives you checklists of what to do and why to do it; awesome.
This is a great list and infographic to check out if you’re really into content marketing!
If you can’t think of content generation ideas, you need to work on your core message. We suggest Portent’s Content Idea Generator as a great tool for coming up with headlines.
This is a great tool that’s exactly what it says it is by Sumo.
Build timelines and tell stories using content on social media and throughout the web. With the paid version you can extend the life of your stories automagically.
“Prezi presentation software uses motion, zoom, and spatial relationships to bring your ideas to life and make you a great presenter.”
A great place to store photos and edit them. Ami uses this app on her iphone to spruce up photos before sharing them to social media.
Super simple and fast image browser and workflow tool. You DO NOT have to upload your images in the program like Lightroom or Photos which is why Ami loves it dearly.
Screencasting and video editing software that makes it easy to record audio and/or video from your computer screen or from real life with your computer camera and mic.
Videoscribe is a tool for creating animated content to tell your story. Make whiteboard-style animations quickly and easily without technical knowledge.
“Canva makes design simple for everyone. Create designs for Web or print: blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more.”
Find a banner that you like and know is working and then have these guys model the style for you.
A designers sandbox of fun! This site has lots of artists and great deals on super-cool images, textures, fonts, power point templates, graphics toolkits and more. Plus each week they give away 6 goods for free!
Adobe Stock Photos has the best collection for the best subscriber price – especially right now since it’s fairly new.
The best quality images, video and music in one place.
The Creative Commons search tool allows you to find images, videos, music and other media that is licensed under a variety of licenses including free to modify for commercial purposes.
Digital Marketing
WordPress is the best content management system for most people and businesses. It has a ridiculous amount of support and it’s industry standard.
Drupal is also an industry standard CMS. It’s a bit more complicated to use, a bit harder to find support. It’s great for incredibly complicated websites, for example Sony uses Drupal.
Click Funnels has got everything you need in one place, not only to create landing pages, but to build out your entire sales funnel! We highly recommend it if you want to change the look of one of your webpages, add products to your site for the first time, or want to a/b test for optimization. It makes building web pages and entire funnels simple and it works.
The best competition research tool available for free! Just type in the domain and SimilarWeb.com tells you web traffic by countries, traffic sources, top referring sites, top destination sites, organic and paid keywords, social traffic and even shows you their display ads!
Bitly has been around forever; it’s reliable, free and industry standard.
Mailchimp is an email marketing solution to manage subscribers, send emails, and track results.
aWeber is just like Mailchimp with a few more autoresponder and follow up series capabilities.
Edgar is our new favorite social media tool! You can upload posts and send them out on a schedule according to categories that you create. The best part is that it keeps them in your library and automatically sends them out again later.
Hootsuite makes planning and schedule social media posts super simple. Use it to post to Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more. Do NOT use it to post to Facebook because their algorithm doesn’t want you using a third party to post.
Post Planner makes finding super-engaging content and posting it easy.
Use Buzz Sumo to find the most shared content and key influencers on topics. With a paid plan you can see backlinks to your competitors.
Crowdfire helps you follow the followers of Instagram and Twitter feeds such as your competition or potential partners with your ideal 20% prospects. And it helps you unfollow people who are not following you back.
Shortstack has a many tools, but we like it for their Facebook sweepstakes application that integrates with popular CRMs such as aWeber and Constant Contact.
The largest distribution network for press releases and multi-media stories, includes analytics.
Direct Marketing
Vistaprint empowers you to design, customize and print affordable marketing materials for your business such as business cards, postcards, invitations and more. They also have automatic mailing options so you can send your list and they’ll mail your collateral for you.
Advertising
We need to fill in this space. Do you know of a good discount radio ad company? Or a good discount advertising company in general for small businesses? Please let us know in the comments below!
Miscellaneous
FBinfluence covers the strategies you need to know, and gives you ‘Homer Simpson Proof’
instructions on how to execute them.
Video Traffic Academy is your Ultimate Guide on getting more traffic, sales and leads.
LinkedInfluence is an online course that shows you exactly how you can use linkein to Drive tons of traffic to your site and get qualified leads, Successfully network with high-profile individuals and stand out from the crowd and stary getting job offerrs.
This is the best and the only book on sales and marketing that I will ask you to read. Chet takes the concepts everyone talks about and turns them into concrete systems for consistently growing your revenues. While you’re waiting for your book, check out…
Free video courses that your team can use to self-train on principles such as ‘Content Marketing for Professionals’ and strategies such as ‘Gamification’.
Have clients book themselves based on your pre-determined schedule, or make it super easy for your assistant to schedule for you with a cloud- based app that hooks up to Google Calendars or iCal.
Better than Skype for online video meetings. I constantly have problems with Skype connections and never have problems with GotoMeeting software. The free version doesn’t require either user to download anything or enter any passwords – KISS! This is also great software for one-to- many webinars, but that is an upgrade.
This personal to-do list manager is backed up in the cloud with apps available for your phone and desktop. You can make lists with sub-lists and search according to ‘Context’, ‘Maps’ (great for errands), type-in search, and more. You can also prioritize and add photo notes.
The cult-hero of productivity, David wrote a three-book trilogy on the topic. In this epic journey which I highly recommend, David rolls out his detailed system for tracking projects and actions which most of the phone apps are based on today 🙂 But he doesn’t stop there. David scoops on the knowledge one book after the other building on what you learned until you reach a sort of transcendental state… Yep time management gets spiritual, check it out!
The Power of Chunking
This is at the heart of all great productivity. Basically break a big project into smaller projects that you can get done in chunks. Tony Robbins explains it well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mcrGveHM4
