I often get asked what business and marketing tools I use and to recommend something. Often my answer will vary depending on context, need, requirements and budget. However, there are many business marketing tools that I'd recommend over and over again so here's the list. Towards the bottom, are tools that are less marketing related but definitely essential to my business without which there'd be nothing to market.
aMember – I've been working on the backend, developing, teaching and using aMember in one capacity or another since 2004. It's a great system as a shopping cart, membership site manager, digital content protection, selling software access or more. Highly recommended.
Wishlist Member – I use this when a full fledged system is not required.
WooCommerce & Shopify – for my physical products.
Beaver Builder – How I love thee! I'm actually switching to this theme now.
Studiopress – My long time favorite. I still use it on certain sites.
Formidable – This goes on every single site. You can do a lot of different forms from simple payment forms to surveys and more.
BackupBuddy – For simple WordPress site backups. Some sites run both this and AutoSiteSaver because you can't have too many backups.
Sender – Powered by Active Campaign. Rely on them week in and week out.
Amazon SES – A backup system. I connect aMember to Amazon SES so that we email through them, not our own servers. Also, I run a mailing list script (PHPList) and hook Amazon SES up there as a backup mailing system. Because I control this I can import lists easily as well without having to jump through hoops.
Camtasia – Love Camtasia. I sprung for it back in 2004 and recorded my very first video course with it. It was the beginning of the change for my business for the better. Paid for itself many times over. Use it for Demo videos, recording video courses, everything in between.
Screenflow – When I switched to a Mac, this was what I used exclusively and loved it. For some strange reason, after 2 years, an update to it was a little buggy, making editing rather painful. It's still a fantastic tool I use for a backup to Camtasia.
PowToon – I really like this tool as well. Great for explainer and product presentations. So easy to use my daughter used it to create a presentation for school and received great feedback.
Youzign – Let's me quickly create simple graphics for just about anything. I use this a lot together with Canva.
Canva – the other tool I rely on a lot usually for social media headers, profiles, thumbnails and stuff like that. This is where I go to for inspiration.
Stencil – I pull this up every single time I have a quote to share or want to share an article. I quickly create an image in Stencil and share the article. It gets a lot more traction that way.
LastPass – I used to use RoboForm which is still a great tool and would continue to use it if I didn't need to share passwords with VA's and other fabulous assistants so much.
AutoSiteSaver – For both simple/small WordPress sites, static HTML sites and larger sites with a combination of other types of systems on it in addition to WordPress.
BackBlaze – For backing up my Mac. They also support PCs. I love them because – the plan is unlimited (I have a lot of files!) and they backup external drives on the Mac – not many do a good job of that. It just sits quietly, never bothers me or gets in the way or adds icons, colors or symbols that clog up my File Manager. Try it free.
Dropbox – Share & sync my files securely between team members. Despite many others, I chose this because it has the widest 'buy-in' among the people I work with. I'd much rather use something they already use rather than make them jump through hoops.
Slack – This alone cleaned up my email inbox tremendously. It also allowed better communications between everyone on the team. Some people use it for group chats. I prefer to stick to team communication.
Evernote – capture ideas, saves receipts, write emails, save to do's. Everything!
Bullet Journal – This isn't a journal at all. It's more of a system. I found it early 2015 after being dissatisfied with everything I've tried electronic or otherwise. Mostly because they were not customizable to the way I work. My bullet journal helps me stay on task, create habits, and move my projects along. On top of that, it also lets me be creative, rest and relax because I can journal in it too. So much to love.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping – Love this so much! I've been using this when it was called Outright before GoDaddy bought them. Everything is automatic. It grabs my transactions from PayPal, automatically categorizes them. This may require a small bit of manual categorization when you first set up but you can set familiar merchants to automatically be categorized. That itself saves me hours. For things that it cannot figure out which category, you just log in once a month and put them in the right category or set them to categorize automatically from then on. Only a few minutes each month. I used to despise tax time but this totally makes tax time a breeze.
Plus, the key part – knowing my finances is so, so helpful. I love the weekly emails I get that tell me what my profits are. Way to keep you on your toes.
YNAB (You Need A Budget) – For the personal side, this is how I manage my daily family budget.
Fitbit – Keeps me active so I'm not sitting all day. Very easy to do when developing programs.
MyFitnessPal – the only thing that has helped me lose weight, keep it off and still eat everything I want.
P/S: Some links in this list are affiliate links but you can rest assured this isn't simply a list of things to make a buck. If they are on here, that means, I'm currently using them, have used them but still love them or my clients use them and I'm working with these tools on their behalf and love them. In short, they've been tried and tested.