21 Free Amazing Small Business Tools

As the business scenario is changing with most of the businesses coming online, the resources are also changing. With the technologies like cloud computing (SAAS/PAAS/IAAS) which are based on the internet, getting resources like data, applications, API’s, middleware, integration, hardware etc. have become easier than ever.

These resources are the tools which help your business with marketing, communication, analytics etc. There is a myriad of such business tools available today with most of them free for a limited use, yet you always have an option to upgrade them for a fully loaded version. We have listed 21 small business tools which would make things much easier for your business:

Content

1. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

What should be the most catchy thing about a blog? Obviously the title. Portent’s Content Idea Generator as the name suggests generates amazingly catchy titles to write about. All you need to do is type the subject line in the search box and hit enter.

2. Hemingway

We often do not realize the oddities and complexities of the text we write for anything- a blog, a tagline, a description (thanks for Grammarly to correct the spellings though). Here is Hemingway, which not only helps you correct the errors but it also highlights the text to tell you if the sentence is too complex and needs to be shortened, or a shorter word is required, identifies weaker adverbs and even passive voice.

3. Sniply

Most of us do not know that a call-to-action (CTA) button is sort of a copywriting thing and so, it needs alluring words. Till now adding and changing a CTA required a lot of technical understanding, but then came Sniply. This tool helps you in creating your own CTAs in a jiffy and integrating them with the content on any other website from which you wish to route the traffic to yours. Sniply gives you different options for what it calls snips like- CTA, form snip, text snip, image snip and hidden snip.

4. WordPress

With WordPress creating your blog has become easier than ever. Although WordPress is not only a blogging platform it is also a CMS (Content Management System) which enables you to build and manage your own website. As it is an open source project, it is being evolved by the day and is free. It offers thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes that give you a huge choice for making a customized website.

Design

5. Pablo by Buffer

A great content on your blog is a collage of several things like the text, background, font color, font size, and pictures. All these come together and the result is an awesome piece of blog. The most important things with pictures are high quality, relevance, and utility. With a repository of more than 600 thousand pictures, Pablo by Buffer gives a wide choice (you could easily find one relevant for you) of high-quality pictures and features like adding effects, text, sizing etc. that gives a lot of utility.

6. Canva

Canva is one of the another free small business tools free for designing is Canva. With Canva you can fully customise your visual content as it gives you a wide variety of choice like designing flyers, banners, brochures, infographics, newsletters etc. It also has a huge repository of fonts, templates, images, and graphics which gives you an amazing way to design.

7. Spaces Logo Maker

The most time-consuming activity before you start your venture is designing a logo. It is time-consuming because the exchange of ideas with the designer takes way too long and then there are revisions and more revisions which adds cost. How about saving all that time and money and investing it into something that could be more productive. That is possible with the Spaces logo maker which gives you the choice of hundreds of icons and fonts to create your dream logo.

Social Media

8. Buffer

In the recent years, social media has picked a fast trend and not only it got popular among individual users but has evolved has a great marketing tool. Individually managing and moderating your business social media pages could be a heck of a job and to make it simple Buffer comes in. You can schedule posts, queue posts, customize post for different social media platforms, analyze the performance of your post and much more on Buffer. It is one of the best free business tools.

9. Hootsuite

Another amazing social media manager is Hootsuite. On a free version, it allows any three social media profiles and if you want to beyond that, you would need to upgrade. All the social media profiles could be controlled from one dashboard.

Analytics

10. Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is a tool that gives you a platform for creating all and any kinds of free and customizable (bespoke theme, fonts, and even the thank-you page) online surveys like customer satisfaction, marketing, market research, employee satisfaction etc. which provide insightful information for your business. SurveyMonkey reaches out to people on various platforms like email, social media, mobile etc. covering all kinds of masses of your select audience.

11. Followerwonk

Twitter has come out as a very strong business face today. Faster than customer care, Twitter is that ‘one’ platform which is very powerful in terms of brand reputation. Although Twitter has its own analytics tool yet Followerwonk is totally different. Followerwonk would give you search people’s bios, compare users, provides analysis, tracks and sorts your followers on Twitter.

12. Moz

Since its inception in 2004, Moz has become a very popular SEO tool. Although there are lots of business management tools It is an ensemble of business tools like Moz keyword explorer, MozPro that does crawl checkups, tracks ranks, competitor tracking and much more. Another tool MozRank is an alternative to Google PageRank which checks the quality of backlinks of your website and ranks it accordingly.

13. Siteliner

For great customer experience, you need to have a great website. And a website not only becomes great by having a pristine layout and perfect color theme but something more than that. Your website should be technically as strong as it is appealing. Siteliner helps with that by analyzing the number of pages on your website, searching and spotting duplicate content on it, checking broken links, searching for related domains on the internet etc.

14. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider just like Google has its Spider and analyzes the SEO elements of your website like content type on a page, title, meta description, character length, heading text, HTTP header response code, images, alt tags etc. It also finds broken links and duplicate content like the Siteliner. The free version gives you a chance to get 500 pages to crawl and beyond that, you need to pay.

Marketing

15. Unbounce

What is the most important aspect of online marketing? Getting traffic? If that is your answer, you are wrong. Getting traffic is not that difficult but converting it to sales is. For successful conversions, you need not good but great landing pages. Unbounce is a tool that helps you create targeted landing pages which eventually converts the website traffic into meaningful conversions.

16. Hubspot

With the advent of social media and the widespread use of the internet, there are hundreds of ways to market your business on the internet. And with this changing scene, the importance of marketing shifted from the traditional outbound marketing to inbound marketing. Hubspot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps you manage all your inbound marketing activities like SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, forms, analytics etc. at one place instead of going for multiple logins, interfaces, and databases of different marketing apps.

17. Optimizely X

Optimizely X is a platform helps in improving the customer experience by enabling you to experiment. It easily lets you test variations of your website. There are so many cool small business tools. When you are ready to launch an experiment, Optimizely engine automatically gathers data on how the new experiences are performing and let you know when a variation becomes a winner. You could also personalize your offers fitting your target audience. The behavioral targeting takes place in the real time, so when a visitor shows an interest in a product and returns to the home page, he/she would get a changing experience on returning to the homepage.

18. MailChimp

One of the most powerful business tools of marketing is email and just like the bang-on landing page and an awesome CTA you need to have for marketing you need to have emails that engage people. MailChimp provides a platform for email marketing and a marketing automation tool which also aids in building campaigns. It analyzes and generates data like- number of emails opened, time of opening etc.

Communication

19. Skype

Probably still the best free messenger cum internet calling service, Skype doesn’t just slip down the list. It gives you both the ways to connect to people- text and calling (video too). You could share files and even quote the previous chat as a reference to make the communication more coherent. You could make groups which would enable you to share the information with a bigger number of people and even video calling and calling features are available for groups.

Scheduling

20. CoSchedule

CoSchedule calls itself as an all-in-one calendar which helps in collaborating, scheduling, and automating your content and social media. You could plan all your marketing activities, blog posts, and social media on one calendar by simply dragging and dropping. You can automate your social media content and queue your posts, this could help you in publishing your campaigns even when you are not around. CoSchedule also helps in collaborating with your team by sharing tasks and uploading resources making it easier and simpler to communicate.

Organizing

21. Google Drive

Organizing things is the biggest challenge for any business. Google’s answer to is the Drive. It helps in organizing everything right from documents, presentations, photos, designs, recordings etc. by storing (15 GB of storage space) at one place and accessing from anywhere. In short, it provides everything that MS Office does but at the same time not restricting you to one place. You could also collaborate with your team by sharing everything you do on the drive.

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