My Essential Small Business Tools (Part 2)


A sequel to My Essential Small Business Tools (Part 1), I hope you haven't been holding your breath waiting. I compiled my list a year and a half ago and, after pulling it out to write this article, was happy to discover that it hasn't changed. I'm still using the same applications and that speaks to their real usefulness.

Here are the remaining items on my list of handy dandy tools I use daily or weekly.

Canva for Work
This program intrigued me right from the start. It makes simple graphic design easy for the inexperienced. While I’ve been doing digital designing of some form for close to 20 years, Canva saves me time with its Abracadabra Resize. It’s not robust, like Photoshop, but it’s not meant to be. Simple and fast, I use it every single day.

I use this as my primary Twitter interface. It also helps me manage my planned posts when it’s convenient for me. I use it to schedule my daily enewsletter tips for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. The option to save drafts saves a ton of time.

This is a powerful tool that you can use on your blog, newsletter, website... anywhere that you can enter a url. You'll find one at the bottom of this post. Click here to read my previous article about it.

This one can boost your productivity big time. It's another one I've already written about - click here to find out more.

A list of my daily tools isn't complete without mentioning email marketing. For 8 years, I've been using iContact to turn out marketing messages for clients and myself. I've tried the rest (well, lots of them) and this is the best. We have an agency account which also allows us to offer some bonuses to our clients.


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