27 Digital Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know that will Fuel Their Business
As a small business owner, running your business can be overwhelming. I know the struggle of juggling many balls in the air, feeling overwhelmed, being busy and not operating at my highest potential. However, I have found a few missing pieces to the puzzle that affected my productivity, including having a system that worked for me. A bonus is having the right tools to help automate my workflow while working on generating revenue and growing my business.
From social media, accounting, and designing visuals to general productivity tools, it can get overwhelming, especially when you’re just starting or don’t have a team. Freelancing and entrepreneurship have many benefits, like being your boss and creating your freedom. Still, without the right tools and systems, it can lead to being unproductive and overwhelmed.
To help you master your day, improve your productivity, and track and increase your income, I will be sharing some tools that I utilise to help streamline my business.
PS: Some of these are my affiliate links, which means I may get a commission for recommending the product to you. There may also be special deals you can get exclusively.
Productivity Tools
Evernote - is one of my favourite apps that helps me to do almost everything, from notetaking, sketching, and recording to simple presentations. It is also quite helpful in capturing and uploading notes of all kinds, including business cards, your favourite reads from the web, and receipts. They offer free and paid versions, which I have used. The free version provides a limited amount of cloud storage for the month. The paid version offers features like accessing your notes offline, more upload capacity and business card scanning - and is worth the investment, especially as a content creator. The app also offers a work chat feature to share files with team members.
Pocket – use it to save exciting reads from all around the web for later. You can also use it to create lists of curated content for sharing on social media.
Slack - a better way to communicate and collaborate with others. Also, there are a lot of great public Slack channels you can subscribe to if you want to connect with other entrepreneurs; one of my favourites is my Canva Ambassador group.
Toggl - is my favourite time-tracking tool, which I use for client projects. As a business owner, tracking the time allotted per project or task is helpful so I can best manage my time and identify the ones I need to delegate or eliminate. It is a simple online timer with a powerful timesheet calculator.
PandaDoc - a great tool to help entrepreneurs streamline sales proposals and business documents. Creating a client proposal will prove helpful as the templates are editable and can be shared with your client via email for an easy sign-up option. While the app isn't free, you can use the trial to create templates. The paid version starts at $49, which is pricey depending on the business size or how often you will use the tool.
Google Keep - easily one of my favourite notetaking apps, which I use to create a daily checklist of to-dos and reminders. It offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio.
Bit.ly - a URL shortening service and a valuable link management platform for content marketers. It creates short URLs that can be easily shared, tweeted, or emailed to friends.
Hunter - find all the email addresses you need with one click. The tool allows you to find a list of contacts behind the website that you are on and comes with an evaluation if they are still active. I have used it to find email addresses to send cold emails.
Grammarly - if writing isn't your strength, this tool is definitely for you. The tool automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in your writing. The tool flags potential issues in the text and suggests context-specific corrections for grammar, spelling, wordiness, style, punctuation, and even plagiarism. It has a free browser extension for the web and an option to download for Windows. However, you can opt for the paid version for more detailed analysis and correction.
Asana - a project management tool that helps you easily organize and plan workflows and projects to keep on schedule. Many small business owners use it as a work management tool to share project progress with clients.
Notion is a productivity app where users can write and plan. It is a one-stop space to jot notes, blog, create your calendar, and even plan your business.
Finance Apps
Wave Accounting - an excellent choice for small businesses with excellent invoice and transaction management.
AndCo - save time with pre-made templates and systems designed for Invoicing, Contracts, Proposals, Expense Tracking, Time Tracking and Task Management.
Paypal - send and receive payments via your mobile. With its Paypal.me feature, you can create your PayPal.Me link and share it instantly with anyone: customers or partners. It is free, and you can instantly start accepting money from anyone.
HelloSign - is a tool that lets users sign documents with legally binding e-signatures. It is a web-based program that allows users to upload documents with a drag-and-drop interface.
Social Media Management and Scheduling Tools
Flick.Tech - Flick is my preferred social media tool to schedule posts on multiple social media channels, including Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook. The game-changing hashtag tool makes finding the best hashtag for my niche easier, as I can now better target and reach my audience online.
Buffer – schedule updates across all popular social media platforms and use it to manage all incoming communications.
Later - is a social media scheduling app; you can also use it for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. It allows you to schedule a month’s worth of content. The tool can be used for free; its free plan provides you with 30 posts per month per profile.
Planoly - visually plan, manage and schedule your content with this tool. It’s perfect for Instagram users, as it allows users to create calendars to plan their content, curate the content of others, schedule posts, analyze engagements and even grow an Instagram team.
Hootsuite - one of many tools called a "Social Media Management System" tool. It helps you keep track of and manage your many social network channels, and it can enable you to monitor what people say about your brand and help you respond instantly.
Visual Design, Photo and Video Editing Tools
Canva - create beautiful designs and documents easily with Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics for your business, from social media graphics, media kits, sponsorship decks and other quick graphics. With little to very basic graphic designing skills, you can create graphics on a budget. Learn how to use the tool.
In recent times, Canva has included efficient features that help users save time and become more efficient in their business with the Magic Write, Content Planner and Content Scheduling tools.
Inshot - quick use app for videos; it’s perfect for editing your videos, from adjusting video speed to adding voiceovers and music. The app is free. However, you can purchase the paid version for more features like filters.
VSCO - a photography app where you can create an account and upload or take photos, edit and add filters, and share them with other VSCO users or on other social media sites. With VSCO, you can unlock your creative potential with powerful presets and editing tools on mobile to make beautiful photos and videos.
Snapseed - a photo-editing application produced for iOS and Android that enables users to enhance photos and apply digital filters.
Crello - a visual editor that simplifies the design process for everyone- similar to Canva. It is mostly known for its animation features. You can design anything from social media posts to posters.
CreativeMarket - is perfect for pre-made templates for social media, flyers, presentations and ebooks. It helps busy entrepreneurs to save time and money. You also get free graphics and graphic assets every Monday once you sign up and become a member.
Loom - an easy-to-use and free screen recorder, which you can use to record your camera and screen with audio directly from your Chrome browser and share. It is perfect for tutorials, product demos or video walk-throughs for clients. You also have the option to download, email and share the video. The app also has a desktop version, which works equally well, and I suggest you sign up for it!
Like Loom, Soapbox is a free screen recorder that you can use to record your screen with audio.
