The online tools I teach to small business owners are the ones that are most inexpensive (or free!), stable, reliable and most importantly, always improving. I look for applications that have the same priorities - making online marketing and communication easy for business owners.
Today's blast from MailChimp is a perfect example. The headline: Every 4 weeks we launch new features.
An online tool can't get more up to date than that. I have half a dozen clients using this program, and knowing they all got that email today too made me giggle. What a proactive little monkey!
It takes me weeks, sometimes months, to share the plethora of online gifts that I love with my clients, but in brief, here are some of the wonderful tools (in order of why I appreciate them) that I use for my own businesses, which to me, speaks volumes when I learn from the my own online gurus. In this fast and vast technological age, we are all students just keeping up with the pace-setters like Google and Facebook.
#1: Google. In 2010 I let go of Microsoft's late-blooming organizational assistance and moved all of my email accounts and calendars into Google. Now six Google and POP accounts coexist dynamically in my inbox. It took a little while to get used to, as anything does, but I found that the reliable online storage, folders, bundled email threads and colored coding, shared calendars and documents, chat capability with video, and survey-to-spreadsheet stats systems far exceeded anything I could find from either MS or Mac, or other online hubs for that matter. I do have two Yahoo accounts and an MSN/Hotmail account that I use for spam, signups I won't read, and online orders and when I go in there to check something, I am infinitely frustrated by the outdated platforms, lack of organizational tools, and overall ignorant format of the email system. If you haven't switched to Google, you probably don't spend a lot of time on email. I am also on my second smartphone with the Android system and that's a whole other blog post in itself: Why I Heart My Droid. It's an addiction, and those of you with one surely understand.
#2: Hootsuite. Once I started managing too many Facebook and Twitter accounts to handle them alone, I started paying for Hootsuite and the low $5 cost per month is worth it. I can post from my phone, PC, laptop, or iPad, and my favorite trick is to gather a week or a months worth of posts and schedule them in advance. If a client simply can't manage to post every day, and many can't, I can get done in 30 minutes per month what would take some an hour a day to research and post. There were some predecessors to Hootsuite, Tweetlater and Tweetdeck for example, that many of us got sucked into when Twitter first launched, but none of them are as organizationally masterful as my Owl. Of course I've named her Hedwig.
#3: Mailchimp. I have three words for Mailchimp: Free, easy, and fun. There are dozens of options for mailing systems out there, and for years, we used Aweber with only very little complaint, because it was pretty inexpensive. Also worth mention, several of the businesses I work with have used Constant Contact, and it's got a great thing going, so I won't dog it too much. But my biggest beef with them is that the nickle-and-diming they do can be frustrating if you have a small list and very little budget for online marketing. With the rise of giants like Facebook who store thousands of images for free, storage for pictures is one thing that I just can't justify $5 a month for with Constant Contact. So Mailchimp's free-for-2500-names plan is a no brainer for most of my clients, and for the largest one, the $50 they pay a month to manage a list of nearly 5000 names is well worth it as well. In addition, the ease of its overall system (for some it may take a few times through it, because it is, thankfully, quite thorough), the plethora of campaign styles, and the segmentation of your list and overall list management are three more A+ marks for the monkey. Plus, he gives you daily tips, sends you weekly reports, and as stated above, adds new features each month. Come on!
#4: Weebly and WordPress. Tied for fourth are the two platforms for Web development that I teach. These two systems are so incredibly easy and cheap - if not free depending on the simplicity of your site - that while I've thought about adding other guns to my arsenal (tempted by new ads on TV and posts from my peers), I just haven't bothered to go there yet. Even if I have a client who wants her site to look entirely unique, we troll the vast catalogs for a design-specific template. I have used Weebly for 2 of my own personal businesses and WordPress for our largest one with an online store, and have never been dissatisfied in three years. Many people get confused with WordPress, thinking it's a blogging system, but its backend is a vast landscape of geekdom that will manage and allow growth for any size of Web site, online store, and yes, blog.
Of course it goes without saying that the free marketing and even super-inexpensive budget-specific advertising on Facebook is a must. If you have a Web site and don't have a Facebook page, you're missing a huge marketing tool. Twitter and LinkedIn are very specific, and I only refer businesses to those tools for reasons I won't get into here, but Facebook is THE giant of them all, it's unquestionable.
This is just a start, but a good place to, when developing your online presence in our ever-changing world of technology and the World Wide Web.
May all your businesses be successful and abundant, and in the words of one of my favorite companies, Life is Good: Do what you like, like what you do!
Today's blast from MailChimp is a perfect example. The headline: Every 4 weeks we launch new features.
An online tool can't get more up to date than that. I have half a dozen clients using this program, and knowing they all got that email today too made me giggle. What a proactive little monkey!
It takes me weeks, sometimes months, to share the plethora of online gifts that I love with my clients, but in brief, here are some of the wonderful tools (in order of why I appreciate them) that I use for my own businesses, which to me, speaks volumes when I learn from the my own online gurus. In this fast and vast technological age, we are all students just keeping up with the pace-setters like Google and Facebook.
#1: Google. In 2010 I let go of Microsoft's late-blooming organizational assistance and moved all of my email accounts and calendars into Google. Now six Google and POP accounts coexist dynamically in my inbox. It took a little while to get used to, as anything does, but I found that the reliable online storage, folders, bundled email threads and colored coding, shared calendars and documents, chat capability with video, and survey-to-spreadsheet stats systems far exceeded anything I could find from either MS or Mac, or other online hubs for that matter. I do have two Yahoo accounts and an MSN/Hotmail account that I use for spam, signups I won't read, and online orders and when I go in there to check something, I am infinitely frustrated by the outdated platforms, lack of organizational tools, and overall ignorant format of the email system. If you haven't switched to Google, you probably don't spend a lot of time on email. I am also on my second smartphone with the Android system and that's a whole other blog post in itself: Why I Heart My Droid. It's an addiction, and those of you with one surely understand.
#2: Hootsuite. Once I started managing too many Facebook and Twitter accounts to handle them alone, I started paying for Hootsuite and the low $5 cost per month is worth it. I can post from my phone, PC, laptop, or iPad, and my favorite trick is to gather a week or a months worth of posts and schedule them in advance. If a client simply can't manage to post every day, and many can't, I can get done in 30 minutes per month what would take some an hour a day to research and post. There were some predecessors to Hootsuite, Tweetlater and Tweetdeck for example, that many of us got sucked into when Twitter first launched, but none of them are as organizationally masterful as my Owl. Of course I've named her Hedwig.
#3: Mailchimp. I have three words for Mailchimp: Free, easy, and fun. There are dozens of options for mailing systems out there, and for years, we used Aweber with only very little complaint, because it was pretty inexpensive. Also worth mention, several of the businesses I work with have used Constant Contact, and it's got a great thing going, so I won't dog it too much. But my biggest beef with them is that the nickle-and-diming they do can be frustrating if you have a small list and very little budget for online marketing. With the rise of giants like Facebook who store thousands of images for free, storage for pictures is one thing that I just can't justify $5 a month for with Constant Contact. So Mailchimp's free-for-2500-names plan is a no brainer for most of my clients, and for the largest one, the $50 they pay a month to manage a list of nearly 5000 names is well worth it as well. In addition, the ease of its overall system (for some it may take a few times through it, because it is, thankfully, quite thorough), the plethora of campaign styles, and the segmentation of your list and overall list management are three more A+ marks for the monkey. Plus, he gives you daily tips, sends you weekly reports, and as stated above, adds new features each month. Come on!
#4: Weebly and WordPress. Tied for fourth are the two platforms for Web development that I teach. These two systems are so incredibly easy and cheap - if not free depending on the simplicity of your site - that while I've thought about adding other guns to my arsenal (tempted by new ads on TV and posts from my peers), I just haven't bothered to go there yet. Even if I have a client who wants her site to look entirely unique, we troll the vast catalogs for a design-specific template. I have used Weebly for 2 of my own personal businesses and WordPress for our largest one with an online store, and have never been dissatisfied in three years. Many people get confused with WordPress, thinking it's a blogging system, but its backend is a vast landscape of geekdom that will manage and allow growth for any size of Web site, online store, and yes, blog.
Of course it goes without saying that the free marketing and even super-inexpensive budget-specific advertising on Facebook is a must. If you have a Web site and don't have a Facebook page, you're missing a huge marketing tool. Twitter and LinkedIn are very specific, and I only refer businesses to those tools for reasons I won't get into here, but Facebook is THE giant of them all, it's unquestionable.
This is just a start, but a good place to, when developing your online presence in our ever-changing world of technology and the World Wide Web.
May all your businesses be successful and abundant, and in the words of one of my favorite companies, Life is Good: Do what you like, like what you do!
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