As promised, below are the next 10 in the list of 40 of the best tools and resources to help grow your small business.  Hopefully you’ve had a chance to review and make use of some (or all) of those mentioned in last week’s post!  To recap, as a small business owner whose mission is to help other small businesses grow, I’m constantly on the lookout for these kinds of resources, not just for my clients but for my own business as well.  I’ve bookmarked so many over the past year that I thought I’d share them by creating one master directory.  To make your life easier, if you subscribe to my blog you’ll automatically be notified when the next 10 are posted (just a thought) – https://foleymarketingadvisors.wordpress.com.

11.  OUTSOURCING: Fiverr  – Marketplace for goods & services starting at $5. Fiverr is a tremendous resource for small business owners – I’ve heard you can get WordPress help, articles written, graphics created, ebook covers made and more.

12. FAXING SERVICES:  Faxzero  –  Allows you to send 3 free pages via fax and up to 5 faxes per day. The catch: there is an ad placed on your cover page. To receive faxes for free try:  eFax

13. CONFERENCE CALLS:  FreeConferenceCall.com  –  With your free account, you get unlimited HD audio conferencing with up to 1,000 attendees, Online Meetings with up to 25 attendees, in-call controls, record and playback, detailed reporting, site customization, device compatibility, our highest level of security, and more!  Your phone carrier may apply normal long distance charges, however, most attendees will be under an unlimited us long distance plan and will not incur additional long distance charges. We also have paid but optional premium features.

14.  AUDIO RECORDER & EDITOR: Audacity  –  Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.  They also have numerous effects including change the speed or pitch of a recording.

15.  EMAIL MANAGEMENT: Unroll Me  –  I wanted to try this one out for my personal email account but unfortunately it doesn’t support my carrier (yet).  That said, conceptually I think this is brilliant. They identify your subscription emails and neatly list them for you. Then they give you the option to unsubscribe to all or as many/little as you want. One click and they’re gone.  Next you can easily combine your favorite subscriptions into a beautiful daily digest email called the Rollup.  You choose what gets rolled up and when you receive your Rollup. Like to browse email with your morning coffee? You can get all your newsletters and social notifications at 7 a.m. each day.  Please let me know if you have used this service, I’m very curious to see if it works as well as it sounds!

16.  CREATE YOUR OWN APPS: IFTTT (If This Then That) – This is yet another freebie that sounds incredibly interesting and potentially helpful if you have the time and patience to set it up!  It allows you to create powerful triggers that when one thing happens (you take a picture) then another thing happens (post it to Facebook).  It functions like a computer program repeatedly uttering if/then logic all day long. You set up “recipes” to assist you with task automation. For a recipe to work, you have to have a channel, a trigger and an action. Examples of channels are Facebook, e-mail, Evernote, Weather.com, LinkedIn, just to mention a few.  For instance, if you’re tagged in a photo on Facebook, you can create a recipe that would automatically download the image into Dropbox.  Below is a screenshot which illustrates what IFTTT recommends for me (Would love any feedback from folks who have tried this service):

17.  SUBMITTING PRESS RELEASES:  PRLog.org  –  I’ve used many of the free press release submitting websites and find that this one is the best.  If you’d like a list of the other free services I use, send me an email and I’ll get them to you.

18.  CONTENT CREATION TEMPLATES: Hubspot  –  I think it’s safe to say that by now you know that content creation and deployment plays an important role in generating traffic to your website as well as enhancing SEO.  However, content creation is time-consuming and since your competitors have ramped up their content marketing, it’s even harder to create new, enticing content that stays ahead of the curve.  Hubspot’s kit of content creation templates gives you a head start so you don’t have to start from scratch. These templates will let you fill-in-the-blank so you can quickly create the content you need to fuel your inbound marketing machine.  The content marketing kit includes:

·      10 infographic templates

·      18 ebook templates

·      65 social media image templates

·      4 SlideShare templates

·      5 blog post templates

·      1 press release template

19.  SEO-TOOL: SEOQuake  –  SEOquake is a popular and handy analytic seo-tool for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers (I use it all the time and love it). It helps to obtain information about any site for a wide range of parameters such as page rank, Google index, Alexa and many others. Keyword Density tool serves to demonstrate a number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. It also has a diagnostic feature which allows you to see critical technical and design errors of your website.

20.  FREE VECTOR ART:  Freepik  –   Freepik helps you to find free vector art, illustrations, icons, PSD and photos for using in websites, banners, presentations, magazines…  Large selection of very nice work!

Any questions?  Please shoot me an email at:  dfoley@foleymarketingadvisors.com OR visit my website for more valuable information and insights:  www.foleymarketingadvisors.com

Danielle Foley, President ~ Foley Marketing Advisors

Full credit of featured image on this blog posting goes to Freepik.com for designing yet another fantastic image…Thanks Freepik!