Top Tools for Your Social Media Business (according to Web Friendly)
Every time you do something new (like starting a freelance Social Media Marketing business) you’re going to have to overcome a learning curve. The ability to do this will set you apart from everyone else who wants to make six figures in their pajamas.
Here’s a list of what we believe to be the top tools for your freelance social media business. Tried and true, they will help you be as effective and efficient as possible.
First of all, you need a domain name. I know this is not a “tool” or app, but I just have to mention this. It’s recommended that you purchase the domain for your name (i.e. webfriendly.com) along with the domain of your business name if it’s different. www.namespro.ca is a recommended, easy to use site (www.namecheap.com and www.bluehost.com are also ok). Whatever you do, we recommend you stay away from GoDaddy — more trouble than it’s worth.
The best bet is to do some research before purchasing your domain. Keep in mind, it’s not really about the money (non-premium domains go for about $10–15/year with most sellers). Instead, you are looking at the user-friendliness of the admin panel and the quality of Support.
Build sales funnels! Capture leads for you and your clients! It is the best in the industry and costs about $100 per month. You may have heard of its well-known competitor, Unbounce. However, Unbounce is only made for singular landing pages.
ClickFunnels, on the other hand, has full functionality to create a variety of funnels and is completely mobile friendly. Check out this comprehensive and FREE ClickFunnels training video to learn everything that you need in order to set up a profitable funnel.
In our opinion, it’s the best system out there. Compared to software services like MailChimp or Constant Contact, it has the most features, it’s most widely supported (including a ClickFunnels integration) and has a low cost of $17. Ideally, we recommend going for the Pro package.
InfusionSoft is another good option, but in our experience, it’s complicated to work with.
This is what you use for creating forms and collecting information through them. Obviously, very handy for all sorts of opt-ins, applications or surveys that you want to embed on a web page or mail out.
The free version is all you need, but you can pay $30/month to have features like unlimited forms and a custom logo.
If this list was ranked, this would take the title as the King of top tools for your freelance social media business. This saves you tons of time in scheduling calls and helps present yourself or your company professionally. It integrates with Google Calendar and allows whomever you send the link to schedule a time for a call.
You can customize your availability, follows up with reminders and allows your clients to add it to their calendar. It’s free to use, but if you want to do things like integrating it with Zapier, the $12/month plan gives you everything you’ll need.
Cloud yourself up!
No list of top tools for your freelance social media business is complete without some good cloud-based platforms. Here they are:
Indispensable and, best of all, free! You get 15 GB of storage for free. You can create, organize and share your text documents, spreadsheet, photos, videos, or whatever, and you can access it all any time from any computer. Plus, you get the Google Drive mobile app with all of the same editing and sharing capabilities, as well as a desktop app to sync your local folders to the Cloud!
It’s just awesome, what else can we say?
Make one super strong and super secret master password and this convenient interface stores all of your passwords for you. You can also launch and login to each one of your saved locations with one click.
Install the browser extension to further increase the ease of use. Extremely handy for managing and organizing the five million passwords you will have while working with a dozen clients. It’s literally the last password you will have to remember, and you can access your “vault” in any browser.
Bonus:
The following tools aren’t required to run your social media freelancing biz, but you should definitely consider using them.
This allows you to get an affiliate commission on sales. It’s something you may set up and use for your clients.
A free business account is what you need to get paid. With this plan, you can schedule an automatic payment from your clients without creating invoices or following up. The 2.9% transaction fee is well worth the headache you’ll save with billing.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll probably have to write an invoice at one point or another. When that happens, you can use Freshbooks. You can have up to 3 clients on the free account and it is an easy way to create and track invoices that are made outside of PayPal.
Using Cyfe, you can create an online dashboard to show you social media results from multiple clients! There is a forever free level of service, but at $14 per month for Premium, it’s the best dashboard for the price.
Use this to have quick online meetings with clients. You can have your own branded URL, you can record the meeting, and you look super professional. Another similar service is Zoom and you may get away with using Skype — but you will sacrifice that polished appearance.
Your own 1–800 number! How legit is that?
Starting at around $10 per month, this awesome app allows you to make calls through WiFi or your cellular data from anywhere in the world. It also gives you a toll-free number for people to reach you that isn’t actually your direct number.
You can control when people are able to reach you, and when they go to voicemail.
With these helpful tools and a little trust in the process, you’ll be the next six figure success story!
Pro Tip:
Learn to love the process of learning new tech stuff. New tools are constantly coming out, and you should always be staying somewhere close to the pinnacle of innovation. The lists of top tools for your freelance social media business are destined to update and change constantly.
Do you currently use any of these tools or other awesome ones? What’s your take on this?
