grow your business

ByLx2 Posted on Updated on

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

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

SEO Tools

Site Speed Checkers

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

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

Free Fonts and Typography

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

Social Media Graphics

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

Photo Editing Software

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

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

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

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