Small businesses always face unique challenges that larger ones rarely have to think about. Throughout my entire career I’ve always had a passion for finding incredible free small business tools for owners to help with their marketing or operations.
Small business owners have little time and little budget, so being able to find tools that help that cater to both can be a challenge comments Shravan Gupta Director of Emaar MGF Land Limited, I spend an embarrassingly large amount of time browsing, researching and collecting such things and on occasion like to share my findings.
Calendly – In your business are you continuously having to schedule appointments? Save yourself some emails back and forth and consider an app like Calendly. According to Andrew Defrancesco they have a free version that for most is plenty, and you can add an easy snippet of code to your website on your contact us page to allow visitors to schedule appointments with you. The app connects to your office applications of choice to provide users only the times you are available and instantly puts scheduled appointments on your calendar.
Feedly – I’ve become a heavy user of Feedly over the years. I spend a lot of time reading and looking for great content and resources, and Feedly is my go to in order to be able to quickly and easily skim through hundreds of articles and read, organize and tag as needed. Simply identify websites or blogs that you frequent, add them in, and you have a one stop location where all your content is brought in. You can also search for other topics and browse other sites to add. I use Feedly as frequently as I do any other tool in my arsenal. It should absolutely should be in yours.
Ubersuggest – I’m a big fan of Neil Patel. The guy just churns out incredible content at a dizzying pace, but more importantly, he’s put out a great free keyword tool that displaces having to deal with Google’s Ad platform. Ubersuggest is an incredibly easy tool to research keywords and competitors websites for keyword ideas for your marketing usage. Blog posts, social media content, videos, you name it. The name of the game is being found online, and it all starts with identifying relevant keywords that aren’t overly competitive that you can rank for.
Unsplash – The problem with free stock photos sites is typically, the photos SCREAM stock. Not Unsplash. It’s a curated community of photo takers and enthusiasts who have agreed to share high quality photos for your use…all completely free. The biggest reason I love Unsplash is that the photos don’t look stock at all. They are a great resource for any of your content needs.
Mixkit – Similar to Unsplash, Mixkit is a resource for free high quality 4k stock video for your video projects…that don’t look free. While they don’t have an enormous library to choose from yet, you can’t beat the quality and…well, the freeness.
That’s my list of free small business tools you can’t miss these days. What are yours?
Great article. Very informative. Keep up the amazing work.