Online Tools for Influencers
Here they are! I hope they help you as much as they have helped me! Also check out our library of free downloads for even more resources.
Small Print: If you want one of these things – click from this page and I get a small affiliate payment.
Lets start with Tools for productivity, finances, email marketing & social media and images. (see below for more)
Productivity Process
The team and I use Trello to track projects, tasks, assign staff and deadlines. Each client has a secure folder in Dropbox and we collaborate with clients using Google Docs / Sheets.
Acuity books all my appointments, keeping track of all my calendars (work, personal, to-dos), preventing double booking, accommodating time zones and taking payments.
And no geographically diverse team would be complete without Zoom, and Slack, the inter-office water cooler.
Financial Business Tools
We use ZOHO Invoice to provide our clients with a portal to view past /future invoices, estimates and projects. It is also my CRM. We also use Stripe for recurring credit card payments; and Paypal for bank, Paypal and credit card purchases. We also accept electronic fund transfers (EFT) – any way to accept money is a good way!
Social Media & Email Marketing
Flodesk – a flat rate email marketing service that doesn’t increase the price as you get bigger! $38/mo; includes beautiful forms, automations, and campaigns. It does not include RSS campaigns.
Mailerlite – NEW to us is Mailerlite. We chose it because of the cost, the ease of use, free automations and the many many free integrations.
Later – Schedule all your social media posts in advance. With analytics, repositories for reuse, and organization systems.
Tailwind – The only app approved by Pinterest for scheduling pins. We use this for their suggested hashtags, saving hashtag groupings, saving and scheduling images in both Instagram and Pinterest. They also have a robust group/tribe function.
Images / Photographs
Creative Market My favorite place to purchase social media images (to be edited later) and blog photos. They have an awesome assortment of the new flat-lay and desk top images.
*FREE* Unsplash, Pexels, Public Domain
Big Stock Photo a great place for more stock photos. When creative market doesn’t have what I need, these folks do.
Canva With the pro version, you can save your uploaded photographs, custom branded fonts and colors and re-use whenever you need! Less customization of photos and more super-fast social media images.
Website Systems
To set up a website, see this blog series for beginners and use the tools below. You will need one of everything: a domain name, hosting company and WordPress software.
Domains
WPBarista – we resell eNom domains and set them up for you.
Hosting
Why, us of course!! WPB Hosting Services >>
Software
What we’re talking about on this site is your own copy of WordPress. This is a free download from WordPress.org (NOT wordpress.com – see the difference?) Most host companies have a one-click install for WordPress and for my boutique hosting service, I do the install for you. http://wordpress.org
After you have your website, comes the fun part: Plugins & Styles!
Plugins
Install plugins through the dashboard. Sometimes a special license is required – in those cases I have linked to the site.
- Social Sharing: Our favorite plugin for sharing buttons is Nova Share
- Backups: UpdraftPlus or VaultPress
- Spam: Akismet or CleanTalk
- Speed: WP-Rocket and WP Cloudflare Page Cache
- SEO: Yoast SEO Plugin standard (free) version
- Related Posts: Jetpack
- Popular Posts: Jetpack
- Optins & Forms: Happy Forms(& Easy Fancybox for popups)
- Security: WPBarista – we bundle Blogvault for our maintenance clients, which bundles monitoring, cleanups and firewalls with our backups and upgrades for full peace of mind.
- Recipes: WP Tasty and WP Recipe Maker
Gorgeous Themes & Styles
Kadence includes starter templates, the fastest framework for WP that we know of, and easy to use block interfaces. We use it for all our custom work, standard themes, and small business packages too.
Kadence – free theme and the most customizable you will find! All block based!
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