Your Free Small Business Toolkit

We’ve rounded up some of the top freely available tools to help tackle your business’s day-to-day challenges

As a small business owner, you’ll already know the value in swallowing your pride and accepting a bit of help along the way. Be it the advice and guidance of a trusted mentor, the moral support from family and friends, or the honest feedback from fellow business partners, these confidants help you to provide the best product or service for your customers. But what if your pool of resources extended beyond the people around you? These resources, your essential small business toolkit, can be found online. And many of them don’t cost a cent.

The internet is home to a vast — and underrated — selection of free resources that can improve your personal productivity while also moving your business closer to its goals.

These tools can address some of the most common hurdles faced by startups and small businesses. Of course, finding the right resources to add to your small business toolkit is a challenge, too. Where do you begin? How do you free up time to research the perfect live chat tool? What if you sign up for something that doesn’t do what it says on the tin? Besides, aren’t all the really useful tools too costly?Worry not, as we’ve gathered nine of the top free resources out there, along with the common problems they can help you solve. If working smarter sounds like your cup of tea, then read on.

Problem #1: There’s so much to do and my tasks are all over the place. I’m not sure how to stay organized!

Maintaining a sense of organization and control over your task list is essential for the daily running of your business. Of course, this is easier said than done when operating outside the clearly defined structures of a large enterprise. You may even be juggling multiple roles as you build up your team. Whatever the case, there are several tools available to help you manage your time and responsibilities:

Trello

Hello, Trello! A popular project management application, Trello helps you and your team members stay on top of your projects. The tool was built for easy collaboration, but its trump card is how easy it is to instantly create lists (or Boards) and then move them around as you complete them. The customizable interface also makes using Trello feel quickly familiar.

Process Street

Process Street is a painless way to stay on top of team workflows and regularly recurring processes, adding enhanced functionality to your small business toolkit. With a 5/5 rating on the software solution website Capterra, Process Street has been praised for its attractive, minimalist interface and ease of use.

Markticle

As a business owner, you naturally read a lot. You’ve got to monitor competitors and keep your eye on industry trends. Life happens, though, and getting distracted midway through the latest blog is an all too common occurrence. Markticle allows you to quickly mark articles you’re reading and resume again at the specific point you left off. It’s the digital bookmark you never knew you needed!

Problem #2: I can’t keep up with online customer queries. Oh, and content creation on social media is a serious problem, too.

As a general rule, the level of customer service you provide should scale up along with your product or service offering. The two should be equally prioritized.

If you find yourself only getting back to customers days later, or not getting back to them at all, they’ll soon find someone else who does.

Added to this, dormant social media pages with outdated posts simply don’t cut it in 2019. Thankfully, you can add these solutions to your small business toolkit to help you reliably reply to customers while ensuring a steady flow of fresh content reaches your audience:

Clickatell Touch

Instead of checking your business’s Facebook page, Twitter account, and website individually for customer comments, there’s Clickatell Touch. This next-generation live chat software means that all customer queries come through to a single chat desk. Automated messages can also be sent to customers when you aren’t online, ensuring that no customer will be ignored. You can sign up for free, no credit card or coding required.

Hootsuite

While there are a host of social media management tools out there, Hootsuite is one of the most renowned and remains a competitive tool. The free plan allows you to connect three social profiles, while also keeping track of brand mentions from a single dashboard.

Buffer

As an alternative to Hootsuite, Buffer also enables the easy scheduling of content on your social media accounts. You can also analyze your content to track the performance of different post types on various networks.

Problem #3: My website isn’t up to scratch.

Your website is often the first impression of your brand. While one piece of haphazard content on social media may not be cause for alarm, this is a bigger problem on your website. It needs to look good, work smoothly, and contain content which is optimized for search engines if you want to attract new customers.

Too many small business owners neglect their website in favor of tasks which seem more urgent.

Or, there’s the perception that web management tools are only available at a significant cost. That’s simply not true, and these tools prove it:

Keyword Tool

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should form a ‘key’ part of your website’s content strategy. You don’t want to be wasting resources on content that your target audience won’t be searching for. Keyword Tool allows you to search for the top performing keywords so that you can include them in your content.

Quick Sprout

This handy tool will analyze your business’s website, providing the information you need to create better content or optimize any areas of concern.

Google Pagespeed Insights

With the majority of internet users expecting web pages to load in about the same time as the latest Ferrari hits the speed limit (i.e. no more than three seconds), your website’s loading speed should always be closely monitored. Google Pagespeed Insights is a free, easy way to check if your website loads within the recommended speed range.

So, for those everyday menial tasks and routine checks that even your most knowledgeable counterparts can’t help you with, the great world wide web has your back. By periodically updating your small business toolkit with the best free resources out there, you can achieve so much more — and with less effort.

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