Have you just started a small online business or a side hustle? If you have, way to go. That’s pretty cool. So how’s the business doing? Are you struggling with balancing both the business and your academics?
As a student and budding entrepreneur, you’ll agree that trying to combine your studies with building a business is very daunting. Thankfully, there are many business tools that can help automate many routine business tasks, and free up your time. If this is what you’re looking for, then this post will definitely help you solve that problem.
Communication Software
If you run a blog, an eCom store, are an affiliate marketer or are building an agency, you need a way to communicate with partners, business owners, customers, clients, and other people you’re likely to do business with. While you could use a free Gmail address, the reality is you’re better off with a GSuite account.
This account allows you to add domain names, customize your sender’s address, gives you free hosting if you want to build a website, and increases your Google Drive limits. Starting from $5 a month, this is the ultimate lean startup tool for anyone who just needs a more solid way to communicate online.
Tools like Slack, Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams can also help you communicate better with your teams, prospects, and other people.
Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing is a super-effective way to grow your audience, generate tons of traffic, and drive huge revenues. But it takes time and requires a lot of endurance.
However, when the website eventually starts gaining traction, all that momentum can easily turn it into a highly valuable business. We’ve seen blogs that have become multimillion-dollar brands because of the phenomenal amount of traffic that they attract.
There are different types of content: videos, blog posts, articles, podcasts, images, and even slides. It all depends on your target audience’s content preferences. Don’t let all that overwhelm you though. There are quite a few content marketing tools that can do all the heavy lifting.
These include Buzzsumo, Surfer Editor, Audiense, Wirecast, Grammarly, Kred, Evernote, Google Docs, WordPress, and many more. Just pick one that works for your current situation and use it to advance your business.
Social Media Marketing
With almost 4 billion users, social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great places to advertise your business, grow your audience and drive a ton of traffic.
However, mastering and using these websites manually can be overwhelming. You want to grow your business, not spend all day trying to figure out social media marketing.
Tools like Sumo, Hootsuite, Mention, Buzzsumo, Buffer, Tweriod, Twilio, MeetEdgar, and Hubspot are great for social media marketing and management.
These tools help you effectively manage multiple social media accounts and campaigns without any issues. Of course, you don’t need all of them at this time. Just pick one that works right now and get to work.
Project Management Tools
Building an online business is pretty much the same as setting up a regular business. The only advantage that the internet has is that the cost of entry is pretty low.
You need a way to manage teams, processes, assess milestones, and track your progress. Project management software will pretty much solve this problem. But instead of spending a small fortune on an enterprise project management platform, you can use one of the cheaper or free platforms that are available to you.
Some of these project management platforms include Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Loomly, and Teamwork. Choose the one that suits you based on your current and possible future needs.
Please note that most of these platforms have their peculiarities, so you might want to try them out first to see if they’re a good fit for your projects.
Marketing Templates
In the old days, people believed that all you had to do was build something fantastic and people would come. Unfortunately, those low-effort days are gone. These days, it doesn’t matter if you build something great if you can’t get people to see it.
So you need to do a ton of marketing. We already talked about a couple of marketing strategies earlier. But one thing that can help smoothen the entire web marketing process is marketing templates or playbooks.
For example, running a Facebook ads campaign can be quite overwhelming for beginner advertisers. But with templates like Whatagraph template, for instance, you can speed up the entire ads campaign setup and be up and running in no time.
Also, landing pages which are often web-based applications like Leadpages, are excellent at helping an online business newbie setup and high converting landing page where they can collect prospects’ contact details.
Data Analytics Tools
Every marketing campaign must as a matter of necessity, have powerful analytics. Data helps you track your marketing campaign’s performance. Without it, you won’t know how well your marketing efforts are doing. This is a major problem that many small businesses face.
With good data analytics though, you’ll have ample information on who is visiting your website, what pages they’re checking out, their current location, whether they’re male or female, and much more.
In fact, data is what separates average small businesses online from high-performing businesses. Some examples of good data analytics tools that you can use for your online business include Google Analytics –pretty comprehensive and free too, Eyequant, HotJar, and Kissmetrics Analytics.
Bonus tip!
When you’re looking at software, it often makes sense to start with what’s already out there. Many of the best “off-the-shelf” solutions have some element of customization. In other words, they allow you to adapt them to your own needs and wants. You should, however, also remember that you do have the option to create your own software (or have someone else do it for you). If this is new ground for you then devops consulting services can be very helpful.
Conclusion
All successful small businesses often use a combination of tools to form their unique marketing stack.
You need to find yours so that your business can succeed too. And it’s not just limited to the tools that we’ve already mentioned, you need to integrate and use as many tools as you need.
For instance, you’ll need autoresponders and email marketing tools like Aweber, Mailchimp, or Getresponse to automate your list-building process and contact your prospects at will. The good news is once you find a stack or system that works for you, you can use it for a long time.
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