Surprisingly, there are a lot of free services and resources that can help you run your business. In this blog, we highlight websites, tools, and information that has been helpful to us in running our business. We hope these free quick wins will help you as well.
Quick Wins for Basic Business Needs
WordPress Free Version – did you know that you can actually have a free website/blog online? Freedom has its cost and in this case, you’ll be giving up on your own domain. Website costs can range from $4 a month to $40 a month. So it’s understandable why some people delay buying a WordPress plan till they feel they are ready for it. As mentioned, you can have a free website but the URL to your site will include WordPress in it. It will look like this: https://YOURWEBSITENAME.wordpress.com/. In cases where you’d like your website to have a personal URL, you’ll need to purchase a plan. Purchasing a WordPress plan is available at a more advanced stage.
Emails with Mailchimp – If you want to start growing your mailing list, sending out newsletters, and marketing emails, Mailchimp is a great partner. Mailchimp offers a free plan for up to 500 contacts and 2,500 email sends per month. This should be plenty for a business that is starting out. What’s great about this plan is that it includes the forms and landing pages. You can integrate their code on your website and collect subscribers directly into your Mailchimp account. This saves the hassle of moving subscribers from one platform to the other.
Google Business Profile on Maps – Google has a lot of free tools, sometimes it feels too good to be true. One that is easily overlooked is the ability to create a profile on Google Maps. Especially for location-based businesses, having your google business profile on the map can bring you up in search results locally. This puts your business ahead of others that are marketing on FB and Instagram only. We strongly advise to make use of the updates option. Upload new photos, blogs, or any other updates you would put on your social channels. This keeps the profile active and relevant.
Design with Canva – Canva can get so much done for free. It makes it easy for anyone to achieve their design goals and create professional designs with ease. For many of the premium designs, there are workarounds to getting a similar design for free by changing an image or a font. Businesses on a slim budget can certainly be satisfied with the Free version of Canva. If you want advanced functions such as background removal and premium fonts, a Pro version must be purchased. The Pro version is available for a free trial, giving you lots of flexibility.
Free Images with Pexels – Canva has a great selection of images, but some images have a premium fee. Pexels offer free stock photos, royalty-free images & videos shared by creators. When you download a photo or video by a creator, you may give a donation but it’s not a must. This site has tons of great free images.
Remove Background of Image – In many cases, we want to change the background of a headshot or selfie. In Canva this is a premium feature. Remove.bg lets you do this for free. The images are limited to 500px on the free version.
Advanced Free Tools
Google Analytics – Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for monitoring and analyzing traffic on your website. It provides data about site visits, paths, referrals, sources, and more. This information is invaluable in making business decisions. Analytics can help you decide where to promote and what channels to invest in. Additionally, you can see how your activities are affecting traffic. There are plenty of articles on google explaining how to set up google analytics so we won’t go into that.
Search Console – Another free tool by Google, Search Console helps index your site on google. When you upload a new blog, it’s good practice to enter it in the search console and tell google to crawl the page. Additionally, the console helps you understand what search queries people are using organically to get to your site. Lastly, if google crawlers had any issues when crawling your site like the page is not mobile optimized, or the page is not indexed, the errors would show up here and prompt you to go fix them.
We hope this list of free quick wins has been helpful. For any questions, please feel free to reach out on our contact page.