15 clever tech tools and apps to help you grow your business
Just started a business? Don’t work harder than you have to – work smarter with the help of these 15 tech tools and apps.
Need some help get in your business off the ground, or keeping it going? It can be hard in the early years when there’s so much to do and just one pair of hands – yours.
That’s why you need an army of handy tech tools and apps to take some of the burden off you, and enable you to work smarter with the time you have.
15 clever tech tools and apps to help you grow your business
To help you find the assistance you need, here are 15 free and affordable tools and apps that will enable you to automate and streamline your business.
1) Evernote
Evernote is an app designed for note-taking, keeping track of ideas and archiving them for future success. It has a free plan that allows you to clip any content from across the web, create new notes, share it with friends, and leave a comment on the documents.
2) Shopify
Shopify can help you process your online payments faster and easier. All you have to do is plug your business URL into the Shopify app and create an online storefront using its vast choice of templates. Their customer support will help you set up instructions and take care of all aspects of your online storefront.
3) Google AdWords
Need to attract new customers to your business? Google AdWords enables you to reach new people with targeted online ads for different channels. You can start running things with a small budget, and increase it with time and experience.
4) Hootsuite
Do you find yourself wasting precious time on social media? Hootsuite helps you to manage multiple social media profiles from one dashboard.
You can schedule posts, engage your followers, track mentions, and measure the effectiveness of your activity. You can also take a look on free Hootsuite alternatives to know much more about different social media scheduling tools.
5) Dasheroo
Like many other business today you’re promoting your services on social media. But how can you tell if it’s working? Tracking the performance on each individual site is time consuming. The Dasherro app lets you access all your platforms in a single dashboard, where you can see all the analytics you need.
6) ShipHawk
ShipHawk ensures that you don’t spend too much on shipments and logistics. It offers a variety of prices from different shippers and assists in scheduling pickups or directing users on where they can drop their packages – reducing the cost of shipping.
7) Headline Analyzer
You’ve written a brilliant blog for your website and want to ensure as many people read it as possible. How can you do that? One way is to ensure you write the most enticing headline. And that’s just what CoSchedule’s Headline Analzyer will do, by scoring your headline quality and rating its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value.
8) Faire
Faire is a wholesale marketplace that connects retailers with more than 100,000 local brands to stock their shelves with. If you’re a vendor, you can apply for free to build your own storefront page on their website and post your products for sale.
If you’re a retailer, signing up gets you access to the entire marketplace with free returns within 60 days of a first purchase. This platform is a must for creators and shopowners alike.
9) Canva
Just because you’re not a Photoshop expert doesn’t mean that you can’t create appealing graphics for your business. Canva has pre-formatted templates you can use to create social media banners, marketing flyers, blog graphics and more within minutes.
10) Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is an all-in-one sales and marketing app. Its powerful customer relationship management (CRM) features allow you to automate lead scores. It also offers a variety of other automation tools, including social marketing, email marketing, sales, and e-commerce.
11) Printful
With Printful, you can create and ship a wide variety of high-demand products without taking on the risk of printing and shipping yourself. The app offers a number of on-demand products that range from coffee mugs and posters to hoodies and tees, giving you plenty of options to choose from.
12) Zapier
If you need to integrate the apps you use and automate the interactions between hundreds of other apps, you need Zapier. You can add a new Twitter follower to your Google spreadsheet absolutely free, for example, for up to 100 tasks. Then you can graduate to paid plans, depending on the number of tasks you need.
13) Linkio
Linkio is designed to give SEOs the right anchor text to build next, by using insightful data to help you make better-informed decisions. It’s flexible, automated and remarkably easy to use. It shows you the right percentage of anchor text types to use to quickly get over all your competition. Linkio checks the existing backlinks of your page to categorise the anchor text and to suggest which links should matter.
14) SalesAutopilot
SalesAutopilot is an all-in-one sales and marketing solution. The services it offers include automated customer feedback and ticket tracking. With an autopilot module, this app is an ideal automation solution for email marketing in any business, and an affordable marketing tool for startups.
15) Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is an analytics tool that helps you work out what to tweak in your marketing. As well as giving you data on which of your website pages are the most-viewed, you can access scroll mapping reports to learn what is important to your visitors, so you can improve your content in that area.
Bonus tool: Needls
Needls helps you to automatically create and optimise your digital advertising. Just upload images, videos and a brief message, and Needls will do the rest for you. It has a variety of features, including social media reporting, page generation, and comprehensive analytics that helps you to keep track of your company’s digital presence.
Free up your time and work smarter
Making clever use of tech tools and apps like these will free up your time and help you to work smarter in your business. So you can spend more time and energy on the tasks that will enable your business to grow.
Lucy Benton is a business consultant, marketing specialist at Admission service. She writes posts for websites for clients like Best Essay Tips. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Facebook.
