If you decided to turn your brilliant business idea into reality and be your own boss, you should get familiar with simple tools which might help you to increase the growth of your company.
To help you maintain your business since its early days, we put together a list of 18+ essential tools for every online WordPress business.
1. Google Analytics – Analyse your traffic
Pair your website with the statistic tool by Google is a necessary step before launch. Every business, even the new one, wants to know the traffic generated by your website, where it comes from and who is your audience.
An answer to all of these questions is Google Analytics. In the overview, you’ll find easy to use features which help you analyse day by day, week by week, the key numbers and information you need to lead your company. Google Analytics is user-friendly, easy to understand, and provides clear charts and graphs.
2. DropBox – Backup all your docs / data
With creating a DropBox account you can leave all your gadgets at home. Easy to access from anywhere, DropBox allows users to save their documents, music, pictures, videos onto one account, manage files in folders and share them with other people.
Don’t worry if files are too large. The user can reach them through the link and you save the capacity of your mailbox.
3. Upwork – Outsource your projects
As many other entrepreneurs, your specialisation is in a certain field. To outsource other skills needed to run your company take advantage of platforms gathering up contractors looking for a job. Former Odesk offers a wide range of per-project or hour-rate staff.
Contractors maintain their profiles with previous experiences and samples with projects, which might help you to find the right one. Also, there is a possibility of setting up an online interview. The work is tracked by Upwork’s tool and all the transactions are proceeded via Upwork, so you don’t need to be aware of interchange banking fees.
4. OmniFocus – Project management tool
At the beginning of your business path, you may struggle with productivity and organisation of your time. To keep track of numerous ongoing projects or issues, OmniFocus can be your partner in crime and manage your personal and business projects.
With OmniFocus, you can collect all your tasks, to-do lists or ideas. Then you can organise entered data to the desired form and see the progress. At the same time, OmniFocus will synchronise your data onto a cloud, so you can access them from anywhere.
5. Bluehost – Affordable WordPress hosting
To establish your online presence it’s necessary to choose a hosting platform that suits your needs. Bluehost provides the right tools and templates so that in a short time you are able to create a simple website.
Bluehost is also ready to assist you 24/7. Bluehost is highly recommended by WordPress, and gives you unlimited bandwidth access and enough disk space.
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6. Square – Point-of-Sale solution
A perfect point-of-sale solution for business which requires mobility. A tiny credit card reader can be attached to your mobile device or tablet and you don’t need to carry POS terminal anymore.
Without an option to pay with credit card, many businesses are losing potential customers which don’t have cash. Square doesn’t need a huge investment and you can reach your customers anywhere.
7. Haro – Best PR Tool
Haro, Helping A Reporter Out, is a PR tool which connects journalists and expert sources and helps to build an online presence. Haro subscription offers more benefits.
First of all, you get connected with reporters and bloggers across the world and it’s easy to make new media contacts. Second, if you are quoted, you get a strong backlink good for SEO. Last, but not least, you can build your credibility and become and expert by answering Haro requests.
8. LastPass – Secure Your Login Information
Often happens that we set up an account, don’t use it for some time and then when we really need to access the information, it’s hard to remember the password? If you get familiar with this situation, then LastPass may be worth your attention.
With LastPass app, you can create unique usernames and passwords for free. Afterwards, simply synchronize your favourite or the most popular websites, accounts or servers and you will be able to access all of them with single login. Always create a strong password nobody would be able to guess, but you will be able to remember.
9. Quora – Professional Q&A Platform
As a starting company, you should take advantage of the potential that Quora gives you. The popularity of a question-answer platform is on the rise and attracts more experts from various fields. With a new company, there are bound to be questions or confusions that arise.
To start using Quora, just simply create an account and post your question. Quora has a more sophisticated meaning for entrepreneurs and business owners. Marketplace of answers can be used to discuss ideas, make new contacts by following experts in the field that interests you, source of information for market research and as well help you to improve your communication skills.
10. Trello – Effective Project Management
User-friendly and easy to use tool that helps you create an order and tidy up your tasks, deadlines and also manage and distribute tasks to the team members. It’s simplicity is very versatile and makes Trello a flexible and powerful project management tool.
Trello works with boards where you simply create sections such as TO-DO, Completed or Waiting for Approval and then add cards with deadlines, team members responsible for the task. By creating a checklist you can see the progress towards completion.
11. Infusionsoft – CRM and Marketing Automation
Automation of certain tasks using a smart tool can help you to accelerate the business. Infusionsoft is focused solely on small businesses.
With only one software you can manage customer relations, marketing, e-commerce and payments. Infusionsoft will help you to manage your leads funnel, see the progress and details about potential customers, create e-mail campaigns or approach them by phone. It also captures multiple information about your customers in one place.
Although it is mostly known as a marketing automation software after some time you’ll push the boundaries and find out many other functionalities of Infusionsoft.
12. Slack – Real-Time Team Chat
Slack is an essential tool for effective team communication. With Slack, you can easily organize channels for team conversations based on the topic, task or project. It’s a real-time messaging tool so everybody involved is updated about news and updates of the team.
Confidential and other information can be shared in private channels and only open to those who are invited to join the channel. You can easily drag and drop files into conversations and search in the archive.
13. Toggl – Tracking The Work
Every business owner is trying to work as effective as possible. Toggl is an easy tracking tool where you see how much time you spend completing certain tasks. You can create projects, add tasks labelled in different colours. In its premium version, it is possible to add a price per project so you have a real-time money overview.
Toggl allows you to create reports by project hence this tool is useful to accurately keep track of the working hours of your employees.
14. Canva – Simple Graphic Designs
If you can’t afford a professional designer Canva will most likely become your best friend. Create your own designs, pictures, posters, social media posts, infographics or choose from hundreds of free or paid templates.
It won’t replace Photoshop but if you’re not familiar with it or need a quick Facebook post picture, Canva is the right tool.
15. HootSuite – Social Media Planner
Social media drive a lot of traffic to your website but along with other tasks, it is sometimes hard to keep them up to date and bring out new posts. With HootSuite, you can prepare updates in advance and schedule them ahead of time.
Mostly used for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, HootSuite allows you to share information with your audience and establish the flow of new updates while you’re focused on completing other tasks.
16. Grammarly – Free Grammar Checker
Whether you’re not a native English speaker or you just need to check for typos, run every piece of content through Grammarly. Grammarly is a free tool that uses more than 250 grammar rules to make sure your writing is without mistakes, wrong contextual spelling and easy to read.
It marks the errors, suggests synonyms enhancing the meaning, makes you write better, and improves your vocabulary. There is also a plugin for Google Chrome you can add for free. You can read a detailed review on Grammarly here on WPism.
17. MailChimp – Build a Large List of Subscribers
Email marketing is an effective technique and business owners put a lot of effort, time and money to grow their list of subscribers. MailChimp is an easy-to-use email marketing tool that allows you to send and track email campaigns or newsletters.
With MailChimp, you can also create and schedule automated emails that follow up on orders, grow leads and recommend products to your customers. E-mail lists can be segmented according to purchases or location. The best thing about MailChimp is its generous free plan up to 2000 subscribers.
18. HotJar – Deep Insights
To grow your business and offer the best value to your visitors you need to know how they are using your website. Here comes the power of HotJar which helps you to analyse the behaviour of visitors.
Using the results you can plan better content, create better forms, find out the reason why visitors bounce, design a more useful experience that will eventually lead to a higher conversion rate.
Using these tools will help you to maximise productivity, understand your customers and increase the growth of your business over the course of time.
Your Favourite Business Tool?
Do you use any of the above-mentioned business tools? What are some of the essential tools for your business? Let us know in the comments below.
Viktor Vincej is a WordPress user and Blogger at WebCreate.Me. He loves travelling, marketing, SEO, and web design. Check out his selection of best business themes that are adjusted for growth, conversion, and success on his blog.
Good collection for business owners. I need to start using more tools for sure. You could also list adwords because it’s still the best PPC solution which can help businesses to grow.. if you track and optimize your conversion you can start making money quite easily even if you are new to business.