I often describe Canva as the graphic design tool for people who suck at graphic design. And you can use it for so much! Need something for an email marketing campaign? You can type the word ’email’ and get tons of templates you can look and choose from.

You seriously can get so much out of the free version, you can get away with using it for a very long time; at least until you start to build up your income.

Oh, Asana. This free business tool is one of my favorites. Seriously, some days I can’t believe it’s free. I intend to do a full review of this but it is for sure in the top of the list when it comes to a great resource for a small business.

If you’re a blogger, it’s a great way to collaborate with your team members. If you’re a VA and have multiple clients, this is an incredible way to maintain what you’re doing for who and make sure you’re hitting your deadlines.

I call this free business tool organized digital sticky notes. You can organize your notes into categories. For example, you could have a board called ‘customer service’ where you put in all your ideas for better customer service or even customer service fires you need to put out.

If you’re a blogger like me, you can create your entire content calendar in here. You can use it to house future blog post ideas.

If you’re a VA also like me, you can create a board just for your clients and you can see at a glance what you’re doing for who which can help you organize and prioritize. My favorite is that you can just drag and drop everything as needed which is awesome for speed and ease of use. Trello is a great win for small business owners, regardless if you’re selling a physical product or service.

Although social media is a necessary evil, you don’t have to drive yourself crazy knowing what to post when. You can also see what your feed will look like in advance if you’re going for a cohesive design.
I use this every single day to plan my content. I was honestly very against a social media scheduler because I’ve always felt like posting in the moment was better, especially for my home design and DIY site.

But since I’m trying to actually have a good business plan and start a business the right way, I wanted to make sure that my social media was at least pretty to look at. I wanted it to be colorful and fun and reflect my personality.

Moving on to more of the blog and website tools that I use, TinyPNG. First of all, how cute is their little logo mascot?!

There are many plugins you can use on your site that will compress large images for you which helps with your site speed. Having large images means your site is slower to load which means people are more likely to click off of it because it’s annoying when you need to see something and it takes forever to load. Because, duh, I’m lazy.

There are some limitations with the free version, but I’ve used it well over 2 years and they’re really easy to work around!

Now, guys. This should be a no brainer. I shouldn’t have to even say this, but you absolutely need Google Drive. This is one of the most valuable business resources around and it’s completely free.

Whether you’re sharing a file with a client, tracking your time in Sheets, or my favorite way to use it – housing your opt ins and freebies! I’m a real big advocate of not having your freebies live ON your post, ON your site somewhere because all you have to do is right click on it, save the image and people can take your intellectual work and it’s awful and heartbreaking and let’s just face it – super annoying.

Speaking of Google….

I know you’re not supposed to live and die by the numbers, but Google Analytics is so helpful in not only planning content, but seeing how people are coming to your site, how long they’re staying on your site, and what content they like the most.

While this is not a tool I use every day (because you can easily obsess over it and either be really happy or really sad), I visit this weekly to look and see how people are coming to my site and what content they seem to like so that I can write more of that kind of content.

Think about it, if you’re writing about business strategies all the time but Google Analytics shows you that people love that one post you did one time of how to handle small business administration tasks, then it makes sense that you would want to create more posts that revolve around small business administration things.

Last but not least, Pinterest. This one I could talk for hundreds of hours about, but it is a must-have marketing tool for businesses of any size, but especially us small business owners.

When it comes to free business tools, Pinterest takes the cake. Yes you can “pay to play” just like you can on all the other platforms, but Pinterest can give you lots of free traffic to your site and ultimately it’s a huge marketing platform.

Hear me say this if this is the first time you’re hearing it: Pinterest is not social media. Pinterest is a visual search engine. Which means you need good SEO practices on your pins just like you do if you were writing a post.