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grow your business

ByLx2 Posted onJanuary 4, 2021October 18, 2022 Updated onOctober 18, 2022

Tools, Tips, Tricks and Resources to Grow your Business in 2021

Table of Contents
  • Create A Website
  • Website Building Platforms
  • Website Resources
  • SEO Tools
  • Site Speed Checkers
  • Google has lots of tools to help you with your site and SEO
  • Design Pretty Things
    • Graphics
    • Freebies and Templates
    • Free Fonts and Typography
    • Social Media Graphics
    • Photo Editing Software
    • Photo Compression
  • Speak to your clients
    • LiveChat
    • VOIP
    • Online Surveys
  • Marketing – Social Media
    • Tools
  • Social Sharing
  • Publishing & Automation
  • Content
  • Be More Productive
    • Manage yourself with a to-do-list
    • Useful Little Helpers
    • Online Contracts
    • File Sharing and Storage

At Minx, we want to help your business grow and achieve success. To help give you back a little time in your day I have curated a list of my favourite tools and resources.  Many are free. I hope you find them as helpful as I do.

Create A Website

Yes, you can create a website yourself.  It will take you many hours to create a site but you can do it. If you wish to learn how or you can save yourself those hours and the grey hairs by working with a professional. At Minx, we have 30 years in the digital space so google loves our work and our clients and their clients do too.

Being very experienced with SEO, your site is built correctly from day 1 so google can crawl and index your site and give it the place on search it deserves. Nobody wants to see their site on page 2.

Website Building Platforms

WordPress

My preferred platform and also preferred by many web developers and designers.  WordPress powers over 30% of the web.

WordPress is open source which means anyone can use & create for WordPress. It’s particularly great for s as nobody can kick you off the platform. If you own your domain & your hosting you have full control.

If you want to DIY I suggest Siteground for Hosting as their have an easy to use dashboard for beginners and lot of great freebies which save you money such as Free email, CDN, SSL and the SG Optimizer plugin.

Wix

Very easy to use but I find it’s too limited.  We have created sites for clients in Wix at their request. It is a website builder with templates, drag ‘n’ drop editor + a cute mobile site editor.  

Wix controls everything so not great if you want something to WOW your clients. You also need to read their terms and conditions to see if your business and wording fits in with their guidelines. Wix is paid by the month and you can only host with Wix so you need to recreate your site elsewhere if they ask you to leave. It’s a tedious and time-consuming job.

Website Resources

  • NameMesh – Free domain name generator
  • WindowResizer (google chrome) – Helps you check different screen sizes to test your website design layout

SEO Tools

  • SEranking Great for SEO beginners, excellent value for money & easy to use.  The SERP reports are easy to ready and include the ability to monitor SERP features.  I like that you can add keywords directly from Google Search Console.
  • HotJar
  • SEO Site Checkup
  • SimilarWeb
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider
  • SEMrush – A great tool for experienced SEO and the tool I use personally

Site Speed Checkers

  • Pingdom – check your website speed
  • Gtmetrix.com – Website Speed & Performance Optimization including a waterfall so you can see what you need to fix
  • www.webpagetest.org – this is the one I use as it’s the most thorough.

A fast well design website is vital for SEO and conversions.

Studies have shown that if a site doesn’t open in 3 seconds many people will move away. After 10seconds you will have lost over 50% of your audience.

Google has lots of tools to help you with your site and SEO

  • Google Alerts – Monitor the web for new content
  • Google Analytics – Every website should have Google Analytics so you can check your website traffic
  • Google Search Console – Shows you where your pages rank
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • Google Optimize
  • Google Pagespeed Insights excellent analysis tool by google with recommendations of what to fix

Design Pretty Things

Graphics

  • Canva There is thousands of design resources available for anyone to access I have used various but I personally love Canva and get all my clients on it too.  It’s so simple to use, I do Canva Graphics on my phone in the ads if I am watching TV lol.

Freebies and Templates

There’s no need to design everything from scratch. There are tons of freebies online

  • Copy Paste Character
  • Freepik
  • GraphicBurger
  • Pixel Buddha
  • TETHR

Free Fonts and Typography

With so many free fonts available at the click of a button, you can have ultimate flexibility in your designs.

  • Canva Font Combinations
  • FontFace Ninja – Browser extension to help you discover what fonts were used on a website.
  • Google Fonts – Open source designer web fonts.
  • WhatTheFont – If you see a font on someone else’s website you can use this site to find out what it is

Social Media Graphics

Creating social media graphics—like blog headers and Instagram quote cards help grow your social media followers

  • Over
  • Pablo
  • Canva

Photo Editing Software

  • GIMP
  • Paint.NET
  • PicMonkey
  • Pixlr
  • SumoPaint
  • VSCO Cam

Photo Compression

Before uploading images to your website you need to optimize them.  I use photoshop, but these sites are handy tools that will help you save on Website hosting bandwidth, speed, and storage

  • Compressor.io
  • Kraken.io
  • TinyJPG

Speak to your clients

LiveChat

You can speak to clients with these tools added to your website

  • LiveChat– This is the one I use – Lots of functionality available
  • Tawk.to – Free messaging app that lets you monitor and chat with visitors on your website.

VOIP

  • Skype – Free video calls, voice calls and messaging.

Online Surveys

Surveys are a great idea if you are stuck for ideas.  Collect real-time feedback, demographic information and customer satisfaction

  • Google Forms – Create online forms and surveys for free.
  • Survey Monkey – Online surveys and questionnaires.
  • Twitter Polls

Marketing – Social Media

Tools

I am not a social media person but I use it to help grow my brands.

  • Bitly – Create, share, and track shortened or custom links.
  • SocialRank – Find and analyze your followers on Twitter and Instagram.
  • TweetDelete – A great tool to delete all your tweets or delete them after a certain amount of time.

Social Sharing

I always have social sharing buttons on my blogs.  Make it easy for your readers to share your content across the web.

  • AddThis
  • ShareThis – Free social sharing buttons for your website or blog.
  • SumoMe Share – Smart share buttons optimized to increase social media shares on your website by 20%.
  • Disqus – A popular comment system for your blog.

Publishing & Automation

Schedule post and plan your social media from 1 platform

  • Hootsuite – Manage up to three social media profiles and get basic analytics, content scheduling, lead capture campaigns, RSS feed integration and free social media courses.
  • Buffer – Share what you’re reading and schedule social media posts.
  • Later – Schedule and manage your Instagram posts.

Content

  • Copyscape – Plagiarism checker that searches for duplicates of your content.
  • Free PDF Creator – Create PDF documents from any Windows program including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
  • Free Summarizer – Summarizes any text in just a few seconds, then sends you the summary via email.
  • Grammarly – Improve grammar, word choice, and sentence structure in your writing. It’s free!

Be More Productive

Manage yourself with a to-do-list

  • Nifty – This is what we use at Lx2 Agency to keep us all organised. We love Nifty!

Useful Little Helpers

  • 1Password & LastPass  Save your passwords & Logins
  • Unroll.me Keeps a list of all your subscription emails so you can unsubscribe easily
  • Evernote
  • Google Keep

Online Contracts

  • DocuSign – Send, sign and approve documents

File Sharing and Storage

  • Dropbox – File sharing with up to 2GB of free storage. I use dropbox to store and share photos with clients.
  • Google Drive – Google cloud storage.  I use the spreadsheets & documents in google drive to store & share data with clients.  The first 15GB of storage is free.
  • WeTransfer – Transfer photos and files for free up to 2GB

I hope you have found my list helpful and you found some tools to help you grow your Business in 2020.

Lara Blog Signature

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