Top 10 Business Start-Up Tools

There are all sorts of laws and rules when it comes to emails and some of these laws are set to get tougher next year. Personally, I’m hoping it will stop or at least reduce the huge amounts of spam I get every single day so I’m all for it. But when you start building your email list make sure you use a service such as MailChimp and ensure that every single person on that list has opted in correctly. Spam anyone at your own peril.

 

The biggest excuse I hear for not maintaining social media accounts is that you don’t have time. I’m sorry but that excuse stopped being viable years ago. With tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite you can pre-schedule all your social media posts, curate a ton of content ready to go out and then just do the social bits. I use all 3 tools in different ways to ensure that my social accounts remain active and have a constant flow of relevant material.

 

I use Buffer to curate other people’s content to share with my audience. This will be blog posts and articles from trustworthy sources and reliable publications. With buffers queuing system it means that I can just click on something I like to add it to my Buffer.

 

I use Hootsuite to set up time specific posts. For example, if I post a new blog on a Monday I’ll then set up specific times that I want that blog post shared again to my social accounts, in 1 week, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months time etc. I also use it to set up my Instagram posts.

 

Both HootSuite and Buffer offer a free service if you are a light user with a couple of accounts.

Another great tool is Social Jukebox. I use this primarily for Twitter and only for my own evergreen content. I load up my own blog posts and nice motivational quotes (with my own images, not the contrived rubbish some pre-programmed tools offer) and it tweets them out at the rate per day that I set it to. Just remember to turn off the setting that sends out auto thank you’s and how many people followed and unfollowed you tweets. It makes you look like an amateur and it’s a social faux pas you should avoid.

 

Using these tools means that my business content is taken care of and I can then deal with replies and tweet about the stuff I’m interested in, like what’s on the tv or football.

 

When you’re just starting out in business hosting probably isn’t something you put too much consideration into. Chances are you just go with the cheapest or one that has loads of advertising. But bad hosting can cause all sorts of problems for your business. Been there done that and didn’t like the t-shirt either!

Bad hosting can mean a slow website. This will hurt your search engine rankings. It can also put people off viewing your website and they’ll bounce off just as quickly as they’ve arrived. It can reduce the functionality you have on your own website. If you don’t get cPanel access to your hosting then perhaps look elsewhere. And make sure your mailboxes function properly. My last hosting company used to have a lot of outages, whilst still advertising a 99% uptime (rubbish!). Every time they went down so did my website and more importantly, so did my emails. It really doesn’t look professional when a client or worse still a potential client emails you and you don’t respond for a few days. Regardless of the fact you aren’t getting your emails because your damn hosting is down (again).

Likewise, stay clear of these build your own website packages some hosting companies offer. They usually come with very limited functionality and reporting tools. You may find you have very little SEO control and can’t add any custom CSS code. That may sound like a foreign language to you now, but further down the line, you will drive yourself mad when you can’t fix your rankings or add proper open graph data. When starting out, stick to self-hosted WordPress and you won’t go far wrong.