Small Business Resources
Helpful resources for entrepreneurs looking for marketing & social media help, free email marketing tools, and project management for their business.
Competitive Intelligence
- Ahrefs – This tool checks for backlinks and explores a website’s data
- SEMrush – Learn where your competitors are ranking for keywords, and see their traffic
- Similarweb – Analyze your website data, or look at a competitor’s site data
Data Science for Business
- Google Analytics – Get detailed insights about your website like traffic, referrals, and organic searches
- Google Trends – Find out what the Internet is searching for
- HotJar – Find out where your customers are clicking the most, with heatmaps & more
- Nibbler – Test your website and get a good overview of the navigation
- Optimizely – Have different ideas for optimizing a webpage? Change them without a programmer
- Qualaroo – Create popup surveys for your website to ask important questions to your visitors
Email Automation Tools
- Aweber – The original autoresponder email service provider, that’s free
- MailChimp – Send 2,500 emails a month for free using MailChimp’s vast email marketing tools
- Manta – Capture leads, market your business, and implement push/pull marketing
- SumoMe List Builder – Build your email list with this email pop up tool
Finance & Budgeting Tools
- Gusto – Make paying your employees and freelancers easier
- Invoice to Me – Need a free template to generate invoices? Use this tool
- Mint – Manage your personal finances, and stay up to date with your credit score
- Sprout Invoices – Quickly create estimates and invoices and get paid for your work – all through your WordPress site
Just for Fun
- Feedly – Save articles and online content to view later – organized in one place
- Lifeat.io – Set a mood while you work with a variety of lo-fi and ambient experiences in the background
- Skribbl.io – A free online multiplayer Pictionary game – great for the casual online happy hour
- A Soft Murmur – Stream the sounds of rain, fire, and even a singing bowl while you work
- Sporcle – Need a break, but still want your mind to be active? Try Sporcle’s database of mind games and trivia
Graphic Design Tools
- Canva – A web app to help you design anything from logos and social media posts to brochures and banners
- Figma – A collaboration tool for design teams
- The Noun Project – Find icons for everything – use them for your graphics or marketing
- Pic Monkey – Edit photos with designs, and touch-ups – or make photo collages
- Pikto Chart – Infographics, the best marketing tools – learn how to make them quickly and easily
- Sessions Color Calculator – Synchronize colors, and explore new color combinations
- UpLabs – The place to find high-quality design resources for designers, creative agencies, and developers
Marketing Tools
- Blog Topic Generator – Don’t know what to blog about? Let HubSpot’s tool find one for you
- Chat GPT – AI tool based on Machine Learning that helps you generate content, video scripts, write code, and more
- Grammarly – A grammar-checking web app and browser extension to check your writing
- Hemmingway – A web app to help edit and revise your writing
- Imgflip – A meme generator with the internet’s most popular graphics
- Portent – Create titles for your content marketing articles and blogs
- We Video – Create and edit videos to upload and use for marketing and distribution
- WordPress – Do we need to say much more? WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Internet. And it’s free
Online Courses
- SkillShare – Learn new skills, and find new ways to get creative with free online classes
- Coursera – Take courses from the world’s top 275+ universities for free
- Code Academy – Learn how to code Java or Python so that you create your own apps, or just learn the lingo
- freeCodeCamp – Learn how to code from many programming languages, work with databases, and earn certifications – for free
Project Management Tools
- Asana – A Project Management tool for normal tasks or strategic planning
- Atlassian – Enterprise work management for dev, IT, and business teams
- ClickUp – A project and task management tool for tracking projects and online collaboration
- DropBox – An on-the-go cloud storage for businesses with 2GB of storage
- Trello – An easy-to-use Project Management tool. Manage projects, ideas, and teams
- EverNote – Not only a digital notepad but a document and content organizer
- Fiverr.com – For five bucks, you can hire data miners, researchers, or graphic artists
- GoTo Meeting – Combine screen sharing and host digital meetings
- LegalShield – Always protect yourself with contracts and agreements that you can generate for free
- Scribe – Record your processes and get a visual step-by-step to share with your team
- Slack – Collaborate with your team across the globe with Slack
- Upwork.com – Hire freelances and virtual assistants for any task ready to be done digitally
SEO
- Yoast – Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin and is packed full of features to help you optimize your WordPress site.
- Moz Local – Make sure that your local community and customers can find you online
- Woorank – Check your website’s SEO and digital marketing potential
Social Media
- Bitly – Shorten any URL for social media and track your link performance
- Crowdriff – A marketing software platform to source user-generated content
- Later – A social media management and scheduling tool for marketers
- LinkIn.Bio – A tool to add links to your Instagram or TikTok posts and drive traffic to your website
- Redditlater – Advises when you should post in a specific subreddit on Reddit.com
- RiteTag – Shows you the trending hashtags online (namely Twitter) for pre-post research
Stock Photography [Free]
- Stock Snap – Free High-Resolution Images without copyright restrictions
- Unsplash – Free High-Resolution Images without copyright restrictions – Instagram style
- I So Republic – Free images for creatives and designs
- Negative Space – Free Photos released under Creative Commons CC0
- Death to the Stock – Free photos delivered to your inbox monthly free of copyright restrictions, or sign up to get them all for a price
Web Design Tools
- Couleurs – Download this app and you can “eyedrop” any colors on your screen
- Dribbble.com – Free designs, mockups, vector images, and icons
- GIMP – Freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring
- Material Palette – Define a palette for your website and lock in your style
- Moqups – Mock up new ideas for your teams and create wireframes
- One Page Love – Sift through “one-page” website designs to inspire your next project
- Paletton – Find your color and read the corresponding hex codes to use for your graphic assets
- Pixlr – Edit photos and images within your browser with this robust tool
- UI Space – Free PSDs, mockups, text treatments, font treatments, icons, and more
- 1001 Free Fonts – Find your website’s style in the realm of fonts