Here I’ve listed all of my favorite platforms for anything business-related. You can click on each of them to learn more. This is just a list of programs I like, but for a detailed description of each of them and how they work with each type of business, sign up for my Business & Marketing course here!

Websites

  • GoDaddy: click here for $2.49/mo web hosting!
  • GoLiveHQ for beautiful, easy Squarespace templates
  • BluChic for beautiful WordPress templates (my most recent blog layout was a Bluchic template!
  • Bluehost: The easiest platform to use with WordPress in my opinion. Plus you get a free domain for a year and a free SSL certificate, and their support is really good.

Organization and Task Management

Email Service Providers

See my blog post about email here.

Constant Contact

MailChimp

Klaviyo

Campaign Monitor

Legal, Invoicing/Billing, & Taxes

  • FreshBooks (time tracking, expenses, billing and invoicing)

Freshbooks actually just released their new ACH feature as a method of payment! This takes the time, cost, and headache away from physical checks, while being a more cost-efficient resource than other online payment options. You can learn more about the ACH payments here.

  • Corp Net (will help you incorporate your business and get all your ducks in a row for $79!)

Analytics

  • Google Analytics
  • Power my analytics (call tracking from Google Analytics, best for a brick & mortar or service-oriented business that wants to get calls)

Social Media Tools (Growth, Scheduling, Content Calendar, etc.)

Paid Advertising

Graphic Design Tools

Colors   

Inspiration   

  • Melyssa Griffin (love her & everything she does) 
  • Elle & Co. (Lauren has made a business off of design & her resources are beautiful) 
  • Pinterest (I use it all the time to search for design inspo) 
  • Behance  
  • Creative Market (they send you 6 new freebies every week!) 
  • Love Plus Color (I’m sure you coulda guessed it, but everything Jessica does is colorful & gorgeous. Her blog is filled with helpful design tips)  

Stock Photos

  • Unsplash
  • Pexels
  • Gratisography
  • Death to Stock
  • Negative Space
  • pixjumbo
  • Insta Stock
  • Life of Pix
  • SplitShire
  • HubSpot
  • The Stocks
  • Startup Stock Photos
  • Stock Snap

Copywriting

  • Hirewriters.com: for the times you just can’t do it! It’s not too expensive either.
  • Grammarly: instant grammar checker

Employees, Benefits, & Time Tracking Software

  • Gusto is the ultimate! I can’t recommend anything else other than Gusto. 

Outsourcing Freelancers & Developers

  • Envato Studio
  • Upwork

Customer Service

Lead Generation & Booking Software

Business Supplies + Printing & Marketing Materials

Blogging

  • The Blog village SAS

The Best WordPress Plugins

  • Askimet to block spam comments
  • Yoast for SEO
  • Sumome: for email acquisition
  • Contact form 7: to embed a contact form
  • Social warfare: to make it easier for people to share your content on social media
  • WP SUPER CACHE: Caching our sites is a MUST to make your site load faster. But manually caching is way too complicated ain’t nobody got time for that — which is where WP Super Cache comes in. This plugin automatically caches our site and makes it load faster, no coding required.
  • Monster Insights: Google Analytics for WP
  • EDITORIAL CALENDAR: The Editorial Calendar plugin gives us an overview of all the content scheduled on our blog and allows us to drag-and-drop posts, move them around, or make changes and edits — all in an easy-to-navigate calendar platform.
  • Google Analytics
  • Simple Social Icons: an easy way to customize clickable icons on your site to connect readers to your social accounts. You will be able to choose which social profiles to link to and customize colors so that the icons reflect your branding.
  • Tablepress: With Tablepress you can embed clear and concise tables into your blog posts.
  • Instagram Feed: allows you to embed your Instagram posts straight on your site.
  • Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms is a great tool for beginners that allows bloggers to create forms quick and easy using a super user-friendly drag and drop tool.
  • Soliloquy: This is a fast AND user-friendly plug-in that will allow you to display slideshows on your site that you can build within minutes that will not slow your site down and will boost your SEO.
  • Duplicate Post: This plugin clones posts and pages if you are writing posts with similar structure. Makes writing new posts a breeze if you have custom elements in each blog post – but be careful not to have duplicate content, Google does not like this!
  • EWWW Image Optimizer: This plugin compresses images instantly to reduce site load time. That way your site loads fast for people even if you’ve accidentally uploaded a large image or two.
  • Rel Nofollow Checkbox: If you use affiliate links or any links you want to make Nofollow, this puts a checkbox in the link adding section of the dashboard so it’s as simple as clicking a box to make sure your links are no-follow.
  • WP-Optimize: Clean up cache and post revisions–this one is a must because did you know every time you revise your post in WordPress, it saves a copy of the entire post? So if you revise your post like 26 times which I always did, it would save 26 copies of your post and make your site loading time really slow!
  • Pixel Caffeine: The simplest and easiest way to manage your Facebook pixel on your blog for FB Ads.

General Business Tools

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I may make affiliate commissions on some or all of these links, which allows me to keep blogging and provide free content like this for you!