“Any other tools I should be using for my small business?”
That’s a question we’ve been getting a lot here at Bablic. Small business owners come across Bablic, sign up for it, start benefiting from increased engagement & sales and come right back to us asking if there are any other tools we can recommend that could help their small business.
We figured it’s time to put together a detailed list of our favorite small business tools in order to hopefully help all of our subscribers increase their revenues, here it goes. If we missed any awesome small business tools please let us know in the comment section at the end of the post, we’d love to know what we’re missing out on. Who knows, we may even sign up for one of the small business tools you mention!
The tools below are in no particular order, we recommend all of them and strongly believe they can help you run a successful small business.
Best Small Business Tools
Bablic
So we may be just a little biased here…kidding. Bablic is actually an awesome tool, it lets you translate your website with just one line of code. It basically is making website localization accessible to small businesses. Adding languages to your website is now an easy and fast process all done through a user-friendly visual editor. We even have a free trial, no credit card required, give it a try, click here.
Pixlr
Pixlr could very well be the future of online image editing. Crop, filter, resize and even enhance images using your favorite web browser. Downloading bulky software to design marketing material or even website imagery is a thing of the past.
IconFinder
Since we’re on the topic of design, IconFinder is a must. A unique service that helps you find the perfect icons for your website, app or marketing material. Icons are small and may seem quite meaningless but truthfully they are a crucial part of a smooth user-experience which can most definitely increase conversions.
HelloBar
HelloBar is amazing. Thought of a last minute promotion or offer you want to display on your website? No need to reach out to your webmaster anymore, with HelloBar you can easily show off the promotion at the very top of your website within minutes. Extremely user-friendly and effective.
Expensify
That time of the month we all hate…well Expensify saves you that. No more spending hours scrambling for receipts, invoices and so on. Expensify lets you focus on more important things such as growing your business instead of wasting time figuring out where that $8.73 taxi receipt from a conference in Vegas last week is.
WhatRunsWhere
WhatRunsWhere helps you take the guess work out of what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it when it comes to display advertising. It isn’t perfect but it definitely gives you a decent idea of what your competition is up to. It’s a bit expensive so what I recommend is signing up for the $1 3-day trial, studying your competition and unless the results are extremely accurate, cancel the service.
Trello
In any business, organization is key and we can easily say at this point that Trello is a master locksmith! A powerful organizational tool that lets you and your team stay on top of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. A simple user friendly way of creating tasks, attaching them to employees, track time, workflows and so on. Oh, did we mention it’s free!
Fiverr
Fiverr isn’t exactly a tool but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Fiverr is a marketplace where you get a ton services done for an extremely cheap price. Not all services are great, for example don’t expect to get a full SEO campaign for $15 but many of the offers are worth it. Get banners, videos, tutorials, content and so on for low prices and delivered relatively fast. Make sure you only buy gigs from reputable sellers who have amazing feedback.
Snip.ly
If your small business is active on social media then I can’t stress enough how useful Snip.ly can be. Lets say you share a link on your Facebook page to an interesting article, before Snip.ly that just meant you were driving your fans to another website. With Snip.ly you can still do that, but while they are reading that post on the other website they will see an ad with a CTA from your company. Try it, you won’t regret it.
Mixpanel
There’s Google Analytics and then there’s Mixpanel. Mixpanel helps you make sense of all the numbers you see in Analytics which could be quite overwhelming. With Mixpanel you can easily create funnels and see where you’re losing your visitors as well as why. Mixpanel lets you dive into your user’s actions to see exactly what they are up to so you can act on it, something pageviews just doesn’t tell you. Keep in mind, they have a free plan if you include their logo in your website’s footer, sounds fair to me.
YouNeedaBudget
Intuitive budget & finance software that will help you keep track of what’s going on in your business, all done through a user-friendly and attractive interface. YouNeedaBudget prides itself on not being only a software but actually a solution that helps people/businesses take control of their finances. Overall a simple and great way of tracking expenses, debt, income and more. The best part, it’s only $60 once the free trial expires.
BuzzSumo
Content marketing is the future, in fact if it currently isn’t part of your small business’ marketing strategy then you must be living in the past. BuzzSumo helps you find out which content you post/share/write is performing best. It lets you know which content your audience actually wants and how engaging they find it. Helps take the guessing work out of “will they like this or not”. Extremely easy to use as well.
Piktochart
Visuals are processed 60 000 times faster than text, I guess that explains the popularity of infographics these days. Piktochart takes the pain out of creating those infographics that can very well go viral. No more opening up Photoshop and not knowing where to even start. Simply get your stats together as well as the information you want to share and visit Piktochart in order to present it in a beautiful way.
Zendesk
The customer is always right, use Zendesk to let them know that. No really, Zendesk is an awesome tool for keeping track of customer inquiries as well as support tickets. Once you start getting 10-15 emails a day from potential customers as well as current customers, it becomes quite messy, especially if you have a couple employees pitching in on customer service. Zendesk lets you organize all that in order to make sure all of your inquiries are replied to in a timely manner.
SpyFu
You can probably guess what SpyFu is just based on it’s name and logo from above but let me explain a bit more. SpyFu basically helps you with your keyword research. You just punch in a competitor’s URL and SpyFu will pull up their organic keywords, paid keywords, ads, competitors and more. A great small business tool for inspiration when you get tired of using Google’s Keyword Planner.
Lander
Lander AKA LanderApp is an amazing tool that lets you create landing pages on the fly. Literally, set up a targeted campaign withing minutes, they have tons of templates to start from which can literally suit almost any businesses needs. The templates are fully customizable and they also have cool integrations that can help increase conversions even more. What’s also great is they offer a 14-day free trial, no credit card required!
Browserstack
Browserstack basically helps your business avoid getting emails saying “the sign up button doesn’t work” or “I can’t seem to enter my zipcode on your billing page”. That’s if your lucky enough that your customers take the time to let you know your website has issues in certain web browsers, most people just leave and buy elsewhere. Avoid that, use Browserstack to test your whole website on popular website browsers. It isn’t perfect but it’s better than not testing browser compatibility at all.
Mailchimp
No matter how small or large your business is, you should be collecting emails and sending out newsletters. Most small business owners think this is more complicated than it actually is but with companies like Mailchimp the whole process is quite simple. It’s pretty much plug and play, all done through a user-friendly interface. They also provide tons of content on how to perfect email marketing, give it a shot.
There you have it, our favorite small business tools. These are what we consider at the moment the best small business tools out there. We aren’t naive though, we know there are countless other small business tools that didn’t make the list, in fact there are some we’ve probably never even heard of.
It’s on you to let us know, leave a comment with your favorite small business tool and who knows, we just might start using it thanks to you!
If you enjoyed the post please share it on social media, it only takes a second!
We are small business startup and currently growing, Our favourite tools are proofhub, skype and evernote which solved our most of the problems.
Sapenta is another interesting solution, it combines Project Mgt, Task Mgt, Team Mgt ( Leave request etc), Travel Mgt (skyscanner & Expedia integration for online booking) and expense & purchase mgt. the fact that all information is integrated makes it very powerful.
I own a business coaching & social media management company where I utilize sub-contractors from all over the country. It’s imperative that we have great organization and communication tools that work!
We LOVE using Socialtap for our social media dashboard as I can serve multiple social media accounts, assign accounts to sub-contractors, while still keeping tabs on everything that’s going out. This dashboard is on steroids with what you can do! Truly an all-inclusive option for social media management! I won’t use anything else. http://social-tap.com/
We use Passpac for sharing client passwords securely. https://www.passpack.com/
We use Timetrade for online appointment scheduling (coaching appointments).
http://www.timetrade.com/
For online accounting and payment software we use Freshbooks. I can keep track of all my expenses, create invoices, run reports on the money coming in and out of my business, accept all kinds of credit cards and Paypal. I can assign projects to my sub-contractors and track their time, receive invoices from my subs and then pay them all from that one software which runs me $19.95 per month. Oh, and one of the best features is the TIMER!! I can start and stop the timer on any project as many times as I need to and it keeps track of the exact amount of time that I spend on any one project. By assigning a $ amount to each task/project it will then calculates the time/$ for that specified project earned and it then gives me the option to automatically add those times to the next invoice that I create for that client. No more guessing how much time you spent on a client and how much to invoice them for. LOVE it!! http://www.freshbooks.com/
Laurent, great list! I love to work with Trello, it simplifies the workflow if you work in a team. In my new project we work with http://moneypenny.me/. It’s really easy to handle and it saves a lot of time. You don’t need to be worry anymroe about your invoices or your time tracking. Further, you won’t have hassle with your payments or any accounting stuff. I hope it makes it into your list sometime in the future.
Great list!
I’ll just throw in another ad monitoring tool, http://www.boxofads.com. It pulls out the data about advertisers, publishers, networks, banners, landing pages, text ads and more. The tool is great for a benchmark, setting up your own campaign by looking at experienced competitors and for monitoring the ad landscape.
I would like to mention Apptivo. I’ve been using this tool for promoting my business to many business people’s. This tool is one of my favorites because it ideal to use.
Had to switch from SpyFu because I didn’t even know my competitor has 7 subdomains with different purposes until I checked with SERPstat.