There are a variety of online & offline tools you can use to get more traffic, leads and customers for your business.
Some are free and some are paid tools.
Social Media
Everyone can take advantage of the Social Media accounts from
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Twitter
which are free but for some of you, it may be better to hire a specialist because it will save you the time and hassle to set up your social media accounts.
By establishing your business with these social media accounts, you can get more exposure and bring in more customers for your business.
Blogs
Having a blog is superior over your free social media accounts because you get to own your blog. You will have full control of what you want to do with you with your site.
All social media accounts are a property of the respective social media companies and they have the right to suspend or terminate your account without any warning.
You can create a free blog using Blogger, but most people prefer to create their own blog using their own domain name (yourbusinessname dot com).
To purchase a domain name, I recommend NameCheap.com. They tend to have deals from time to time so head over to their Deals Page here.
The #1 tool for blogs is WordPress. WordPress is free when you purchase a hosting plan.
I will cover more about hosting plans in another post, but if you need to get a hosting plan right away and not have to shop around, I recommend SiteGround.
I’ve done extensive research on this subject and by far, SiteGround is the best service to use.
Themes & Plugins
Once you get into the world of WordPress, you’ll find out there are more tools.
The two main tools for WordPress are Themes and Plugins.
Themes
Themes are basically design layouts for your WordPress site. Inside WordPress, there is a section where you can choose from a variety of many different themes. There are free and paid versions where the free themes give you limitations and the paid versions give you the full features and provide support if you have questions.
The top 3 theme providers are Elementor, Thrive Themes and DIVI Themes (Elegant Themes).
They all have a huge library of theme design templates and they give you a page builder that works well with their themes. I will cover more on Page Builders later in this post.
Plugins
Plugins are small little software programs that work within WordPress to give you additional functionality. For example, you can install a plugin that makes your WordPress site load faster.
Website developers understand that page load speed is very important because visitors who click on your site, do not want to wait several seconds for your website to load.
Therefore, many website developers are willing to pay for such plugins because visitors will love the speed, and so will Google. They will give boost your SEO ranking if your website loads fast.
Page Builders & Autoresponders
Once you have your Theme and basic Plugins, you will also want a Page Builder and an Autoresponder. These two tools work hand in hand to help you collect leads and send follow up emails.
Page Builder
Page Builders allow you to design specialty pages like a capture or squeeze page, or a landing page, checkout page and more.
If you use themes from Elementor, Thrive Themes of DIVI, they will provide you a page builder, but they don’t supply templates that is niche specific and you’ll need to design them on your own using their page builder.
There are other page builders, some of which can be a plugin or a totally separate software.
ClickFunnels and LeadsPages are the Industry standard page builders. They have their own hosting platform that can integrate with your website and autoresponder so they charge you a monthly fee. More on autoresponders in the next section.
For people who are on a budget, can start out with plugin page builders like WP Profit Builder or Optimize Press which is a one time fee.
The drawback to plugin page builders is that they tend to slow down your site.
Autoresponder
An Autoresponder is basically a software that allows you to collect your lead information like First Name, Last Name, Email Address and Phone Number and work hand in hand with your Page Builder.
The Page Builder creates the page to allow visitors to enter their contact information, and the autoresponder stores that information and responds to the visitor’s request automatically.
For example, if the lead enters his or her Name and Email address to download a Free PDF Checklist, you can set up the autoresponder to send an email to this lead saying “Hello First_Name, thank you for your interest in our checklist, please click this link to download it.”
The most popular autoresponders like
all charge a monthly fee.
MailChimp is also very popular but they are free to use for the first 2000 subscribers with a limitation of sending 12,000 emails a month.
There are other autoresponders out there and will cover them extensively in another post.
Image and Video Editing (Offline Tools)
In order to create Facebook Fanpages, Instagram and Pinterest photos as well as photos for your website blog, you will need some kind of image composer and editing software.
Image Editing
The #1 image editing software is Adobe Photoshop. For beginners, there’s going to be a learning curve and you must pay annual fee of $240 to use it (comes out to $20/mo).
If cost is an issue, there are plenty of free image editing software programs available but too much to cover for this post, so I’ve compiled a list of free image editing software tools.
To get access to these image editing software programs, I will set up a sign up to receive a PDF file that lists the most common Image Editing software tools that is totally free to use.
Video Editing
You’ll also want a video screen capture to narrate training videos and then use an editing software to put the videos all together.
To record your screen, you can use ScreenCastomatic (free or paid) or QuickTime Pro for Mac users.
There are other popular screen capture software like Camstasia but it does cost a decent amount.
I use the paid version of ScreenCastomatic for screen capture, and Power Director from Cyberlink to edit my videos.
So to recap which tools you will want for your business, they are
Social Media accounts
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Twitter
Blog using WordPress
• Domain
• Hosting
• Themes
• Plugins
• Page Builder
• Autoresponder
Image Editing Tools
Video Screen Recording
Video Editing software
There is a lot to cover and it might be a bit overwhelming for beginners to grasp all of this, and they tend to look at the cost as an expense, but entrepreneurs who already have an established business look at these tools as an investment to help grow their business.
