My Top 20 Productivity Tools of 2019

Hey gang, this is a bit of a Christmas bonus for you. As we are all winding down for Christmas, I thought I would share an extra podcast Talking about the 20 best tools that I have experimented and now use on a daily basis to help me run my business more effectively. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. So as I say, I wasn't planning on doing this podcast, but I thought it would be a good way to end the year as you guys are all winding down by sharing with you the best 20 tools that I have used this year. Now, we're all striving to get more efficient and use our most valuable asset, our time, in the most effective way. And we need to achieve this by being as productive as possible whilst focusing on the things that will actually move our agency forward. And all the other stuff can be a distraction. So we either need to ditch it, delegate it, or automate it. Now, when I'm working with my clients, I always Talk about the 4DS, which you may have heard of the concept of when you have a task, you start off by asking yourself, do I really need to do this task or can I actually ditch it and just not do it at all? And if the answer to that is no, I can't ditch it, then the next question should be can I delegate it to somebody so that might be a member of your team or a virtual assistant or freelancer or whoever. But again, if the answer is no, the next question is can I defer it? So can I do it at a later date? Is it something that's important to do but I don't have to do it right now? And if the answer to that is still no, then I have to do it. However, I've added a fifth element to that which sadly doesn't start with a D. So it kind of spoils the 4D concept. But the fifth element is can I automate it? And that's what this blog is all about, really is some of the tools that I've used this year to help automate some of my business. Now, trust me, I have spent ages and wasted lots of time and followed the Promised Land and the Shiny New object. And for every one tool I'm mentioning here, I've probably tried four or five other tools and that they promise a lot and didn't deliver much. And of course I've also spent wasted money trying those tools out. So I want to help you avoid that by telling you about the 20 tools that really have helped me. Now, attached to this podcast is a downloadable cheat sheet that you can use that lists my top 15 favorite tools out of the 20 I'm going to share with you today. You can grab a copy of this by going to www.dacostacoaching.co.ukdownloads1 so I broadly put these into categories to kind of help link them together. So the first category I want to talk about is Broadcast Tools. So as you will know, obviously I do my broadcasts and my podcasts, but I also have a bunch of online content that I use as part of the Agency Accelerator program. And I've been running more and more webinars and also some Facebook lives in 2019. So here are the tools that have helped me get more slick in my online broadcasting. So the first tool I want to talk about is Live Webinar. Now, I actually purchased this through AppSumo, and I'll mention Appsumo later, but Live Webinar is a really good tool for doing live webinars. Not surprisingly, now, I spent ages trying different webinar tools and broadcasting tools, and I've settled upon this partly because of its cost. It was really cost effective, but also because it's a fairly new tool. Its new functionality is growing every day. So for example, since I started using it, they've already introduced an evergreen function, which means once you've run a live webinar, you can then broadcast that for people to watch anytime they want. So it's not live, it's evergreen. Basically. Now I predominantly use Live webinar for my agency accelerator program. So that means every week all the people come on the call, we can see each other, I can share documents with them, I can hand over to them, they can ask questions, they can put in the chat, I can use a whiteboard, and so on. So it's got the typical functionality that you might find in other products as well, and I find it really, really useful. I also want to give a mention to Belive that's Be Live, which is a great tool if you want to do broadcasts live on Facebook or on YouTube. So that enables you to do some really great things like put subtitles, share content like PowerPoint, SL, have a guest on there and interview them. So you can be in two different locations. So that's another really great tool as well. Now the next tool I want to mention is Loom, and I think Loom is probably my favorite tool. This is saving me so much time. Now, I don't know about you, but in My job, I have lots of clients sending me emails, asking me questions, asking me to review documents. The members of my agency accelerator program also asking me questions. So instead of having to spend ages typing an email response to them, I now simply start Loom. And I have the email in front of me. And LOOM basically gives you the ability to record your screen plus put a little picture of yourself on there as well. And so I can answer their email almost in real time. Rather than typing a long response, I can just speak the response, have their question in front of me or their document that I'm reviewing in front of me, and then I can just simply click give them the feedback. And I reckon this is saving me about 50% of my time when it comes to responding to client emails. So Loom is free. I think you can, you can store about 25 videos before it starts deleting them. And obviously if you want more than that stored, then you can buy a paid subscription. Now you'll see a lot of people use Loom when they're doing product reviews because again, they can have the product running in front of them, plus a little window with circle with their face in so that you can create engagements with your audience. But I'm using it in order to respond to client emails and just really speed that process up. Now, I can't talk about broadcasting without talking about video hosting. And obviously YouTube is a free place that you can host your videos. And I use YouTube in terms of search engine and putting some public videos on there. But it's not so good when you want to have private videos or you want to embed videos in other places and you don't want all of the gubbins that says YouTube and all the rest of it on there. So tried a few different places. I ended up settling on Vimeo and I use Vimeo for all my private videos for my courses, and I use YouTube for my public videos. And as I said, the advantage for Vimeo for me is how you can control what the user sees, how you can actually embed call to actions into the videos. And of course the other thing is that Vimeo offers higher quality video and I mentioned earlier, it enables you to remove all their branding and gives you other customized opportunities as well, such as password protection and some good analytics. So Vimeo is my hosting platform of choice, but of course there are lots of others like Amazon and so on. Now I do a lot of videoing. I do videoing for my agency accelerator course content, but I also produce videos connected to my blogs and Some of my podcasts, and I've tried lots of different ways of shooting the videos. So first of all, I just tried winging it. But that was really frustrating because A, I'd go off track and B, I would spend ages editing. So then I started just creating little bullet point notes for me and putting that just beneath the camera. And that's all worked better. But I found that my eye level was often drifting from the camera, so I wasn't engaging with my audience as much. And I spent a lot of time editing because I had to get rid of all the ums and ahs, the hesitations, the let me do it again kind of takes. So in the end, I decided to try an auto cue. I have actually tried an auto cue many, many years ago and really struggled with it. I had a big appreciation for news readers because I realized how natural they make it sound. And yet when you're reading from an auto cue, it ends up sounding like you're reading and you can see your eye movement and all the rest of it. But anyway, I decided I was going to give it a go again. So I purchased a auto cue from Amazon for about £160. And I use that in conjunction with a free app on my iPad called Teleprompter. It has revolutionized the way I shoot videos because now I can record them much more rapidly and spend way less time in the editing process. Now, the flip side of that is that you've got to invest more time in writing a script. And the trick I found is if you want to write a script that you can speak and sounds natural, then you need to use some form of voice to text translator. Now I use a Macintosh, and if you press the function key twice on a Mac, you can get the voiced text editor up. So you literally just speak and then it translates what you're saying. And it does a pretty good job with it. I would say sort of an 85% accuracy rate. So I speak what I want to say. I can then obviously edit that to make it flow and, you know, remove all the superfluous things that I say. And then I take that, put it into the iPad app, the Teleprompter app, and then stick it on my auto cue. I put my camera behind the auto cue, and now I'm looking straight at the camera and I can read the text. And if you sit far enough away from the camera, then it doesn't show the eye movement that I was talking about earlier. And with a bit of practice, you get better and better and better. And so I think if you're going to shoot videos, which is a fantastic way of engaging with your audience, you need to remove as many of the barriers as possible. I've got quite a few clients that I really encourage to use video and they're always telling me, yes, I know, I'll do that, but I need to get the gear. First of all, I need to get the lighting right. I need to make sure that, you know, I've practiced it and they put all these barriers in the way. So I want to tell you that you don't need an expensive camera, nor an expensive microphone or lots of fancy lighting to get going. Now, if I'm honest with you, for most of my videos I simply use my iPhone, which is a fantastic camera if you learn how to use it. I also use a rode microphone, which is a lapel microphone that costs about 45 pounds. To get some decent quality, I use a backdrop and I actually have a couple of backdrops. I've got one that's white and I've got a new one that's a brick wall and I have two lights and the backdrop and the lights and all the tripods cost about £100 from Amazon. So it's really affordable. And most recently I bought a circular light and I also bought a really decent quality webcam and I use that when I'm doing my group coaching sessions in the agency accelerator or I want to record a quick video that I'm going to upload to Facebook or some other social media platform. But when I'm doing more formal videos for my content, then I will use the lighting and the backdrop. So don't let yourself put barriers in the way. Try the auto cue approach, even if you just try the app first of all, that's a good starting point and see if it works for you. And then you can then go and invest in the autocue. Okay, so that's the broadcasting tools. Let's move on to talk about some design and layout tools. Because when we're putting content online onto our website, into social media, or even on printed materials, we want to make sure that everything looks as professional as possible. Yet we don't want to have to keep spending tons of money outsourcing to a designer. And so here are a few of my favorite tools to solve this problem. And I'm sure you've probably heard of these. So the first one I use is Canva C A N V A, which I'm sure you will have heard of, and I use a free version of this, and this is really great for creating social media images, creating ebook covers and other sorts of graphics that you might need on your website. It's really simple to use. It's very drag and drop and intuitive and it saves me tons of time. Especially when you start with one of their pre designed templates and you know, they're predecised sort of sizes for Facebook images or Instagram or whatever. And it's really easy to change those images and then export them as JPEGs, as PNGs or as PDFs so that you can use them wherever. And you can also save them as templates so you can reuse them in the future. The next tool I use is a thing called Designer that's D, E, S, I G N rr and again you'll see the link to these guys in the show notes. And I use a lifetime Pro version so it's no reoccurring monthly fees and that cost me about £90. So again, it's just for a couple of things that Designer does. It's worth the money. So it's really good tool for expediting the process of creating an ebook. Let me just share with you what I do each month. So usually I write two long blog posts on one topic and I then use Designer to create an ebook from those two blog posts so that the reader of the blog can choose to either read the blog as it is or download it as an ebook to read at their leisure or share with other people. And Designer makes this really easy to do. You literally create a new project and then you type the URL of the blog in, pick a template and it imports the blog into that template and it creates a rough design which you then need to go and edit to finesse, to put headers and footers in, to change colors and all the rest of it. But this makes the process of creating an ebook really rapid and very simple. And you really don't need any design skills to create freshly looking ebooks probably in about half an hour. I mean, to be honest, if you can use Microsoft Word or Google Docs, then you can use Designer. And the other thing that I really like about Designer is that I can create 3D book covers which I use on my website to promote the ebooks. And I can also merge two different PDFs together. I can import from a Word Doc, from a URL or from another PDF. So there's lots of flexibility in that. And I think that it's another newish tool and they keep developing it and adding more functionality and making easier to use. So that's worth going to check out. I think the basic price for that is about £27 for lifetime access, so it's a bit of a no brainer really. Even creating those 3D covers is worth the price of that alone in how easy and quick it is. And while we're talking about images, it's worth mentioning the fact that obviously on our websites we need to make our images as small as possible so that we don't slow the speed of our website down. So I use a website called Tiny Jpeg, so it's just tinyjpeg.com and that is just a simple way of dragging an image in or pointing to an image and it will compress it to make it as small as possible so that when you put it on your website you are not slowing the speed down because you've got a big JPEG on there. Talking of websites, let's talk a little bit about web development and one of my favorite tools is Thrive Architect. And Thrive Architect is a series of plugins that sit on top of your WordPress website that make it really easy to create lovely looking landing pages and pages for your website. If you look at my website dacostacoaching.co.uk, pretty much everything on there is now designed using Thrive Architect and is really easy to use. I am not technical at all, but it gives you lots of pre defined templates, it gives you lots of predefined blocks. And the key thing about Thrive is that it is all geared to lead generation so it makes things like lead capture boxes and pop ups really easy to put on your website. And this is really well one of my top sort of two or three favorite tools and I should get commission for this because I recommend it all the time. And so if you build a WordPress website and you want to easily make changes to the site yourself, then Thrive Architect is a great tool to use. I am still amazed in this day and age that some of my clients get their websites developed and designed by an external web designer, which is fair enough. Of course that's a WordPress site, but then they're still beholden to some extent to that company if they want to make changes besides minor ones. And that shouldn't be the way it is in this day and age. So now I appreciate some of you are web design companies and you might not appreciate me saying that, but you probably agree that it is true. The other thing I really like about Thrive is its price. It really is a low cost product in its category. So you can either buy the plugins individually or you can buy a membership, which I have, and that cost me $19 a month. So that is definitely worth using. So that's about £175 a year and that gives you access to all of the plugins. So that would be the designer. But things like the leads ovation to create and captured client testimonials, Automatum to create scarcity and countdown timers and so on. And the advantage of the membership is that you get all the upgrades for free and you also get really good customer support. And this is a fraction of the price compared to a lot of other software companies. So let's move on to the next category. I've just kind of called this broadly external communication. So this is everything that you do to communicate externally with your clients. So there is a few tools that I want to mention here. So the key one for me is convertkit and convertkit is my email marketing automation tool. Now over the years I've tried a whole number of them from Mailchimp to Mad Mimi and ActiveCampaign. But in the end I settled on ConvertKit because its functionality meets my needs. It doesn't have huge range of functionality that you end up paying a lot more for, so consequently is more cost effective. And it's really easy to set up automations. And if you think about an automation as a sales funnel, then you can create automations which say if the user's done this or tagged with this, then do that. And it's easy to create email sequences as well as broadcasts. And the other thing I really like about ConvertKit is that it integrates really well with Thrive Architecture Teachable, which is my online learning platform and other tools that I use. And ConvertKit costs about 380 pounds a year. Another tool that I found this year that's interesting is a thing called Duck Soup. Now Ducksoup is a rubbish name, but that's D U X Soup. And it's a free tool that helps you do some LinkedIn outreach with some automation. You have to be careful with this because I'm not encouraging anybody to spam people, but you can do searches on LinkedIn, find a specific type of audience, and then say send out automated connection requests that you can personalize to that audience. So if I was targeting PR companies, I could send a very specific message to those people in PR companies. And it also enables you to then send some personalized messages to your first connection. So I might want to tell them about a new blog that I think will be useful for them. Be careful here because I'm not encouraging anyone to be spamming anybody. But it is a useful tool. It's free for the basic tool and it's a chrome extension. So it is those people to upgrade to Sales Navigator when you're using Duck Soup because it enables you to drill down really specifically when you're doing searches and create lists and tag contacts and so on. And talking of LinkedIn, another really useful tool is a tool called Rocket Reach. That's rocketreach Co this is a free tool and if you're trying to find more contact details for a LinkedIn contact, but they have no email or phone number in their LinkedIn profile, then rocket Reach helps you find that information. So you can just type in the URL of the LinkedIn profile and it will try and find the contact information for that contact. And continuing on the theme of trying to find contact email addresses, my next go to tool for that is Hunter IO. And you know, if you're trying to find the contact details of someone, you can waste loads of time searching the Internet. But start with something like Hunter I.O. because it lets you find email addresses in seconds. So you simply type in the domain name of the person that you want to find. So for example, dacostacoaching.co.uk and then it will identify all the contacts that work for that organization. And with the free version you get 50 searches a month, which should be more than enough because that shouldn't necessarily be something that you are doing all the time. Now, a couple of other tools that are worth mentioning here, so one that is really well known is Buffer. Buffer is a way of scheduling all your social media posts. And I use this really religiously with my va. So we try to work. Our goal is to get to three months ahead, but at the moment we're about a month ahead. So we try to work a month ahead. That means scheduling all of the social media posts that I'm going to post on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. If you use it, schedule them in advance and say when you want them published, where you want them published. And Buffer manages all of that for you. I use a paid version, but there is a free version of that as well. So that's definitely worth looking into. And another tool that I thought was worth mentioning to do with broadcasts is a free tool called Drip Scripts. So that's D R I P scripts. And Drip Scripts basically gives you a series of email sequences for different scenarios. So if you were setting up your ConvertKit, your email automation and you weren't sure what to write to those people. Go to Drip Scripts and click on the new subscriber and it will give you a series of sort of five or six emails that you can tailor and use to your own purposes. If it was someone registering for a webinar, you can get that sequence of emails. If it was someone buying a new product, you can get that sequence of emails. So it is a good tool and it gives you at least an idea. It's quite American, so if you don't want that style, you'll need to edit them, but at least gives you an idea of the, the type of emails that you can write. And that is a really good way of jump starting that process. Okay, so that's enough on broadcast tools. Let's move on to some of my favorite planning and organizational tools. Some of these are obvious that you will all use. So for example, one of the key tools I use is Google Drive and I'm pretty much using this as my central repository now. And it's free to use, I think up to 5 gigabytes of storage and then you pay if you want more. And as I said, I'm slowly moving all of my client work from my own drive into Google because it has the the huge advantage of being able to share docs really easily. And depending on what you want the other user to do, you can set permissions for them to edit or just view the documents. And so it's really great. And you can keep all sorts of documents in there, from word type documents to Excel to videos to images, design drawings and all the rest of it. And of course you can access those documents anywhere, which is super useful and that's why I use it. So Google Drive is an obvious choice, but it's a great one. Now I've tried all sorts of productivity tools to do list type tools and in the end I usually use just a note or a word doc on my computer. But this year I started using a tool called Marvin. So this is another silly name. It's called Amazing Marvin. And again, I bought this from AppSumo. Now, as you all know, I'm a big proponent of getting super organized. If you've read my previous content, you'll know that I'm a fan of morning and evening rituals thanks to Michael Hyatt's Free to Focus book. And in that process of trying to be organized, as I said, I've tried lots of different tools. So this year I tried a free year long Membership of Amazing Marvin, which I got for free via the Appsumo website. I'm not sure that it's still there, but basically it's a task. And to do list manager, it integrates with my calendar, so it's really easily easy for me to sync those and create my daily and weekly to do lists and cross them off. Now, you know that I am a big fan of actually literally physically crossing things off and seeing your to do list getting smaller rather than just adding more to it. And it has some good functionality in terms of shifting things around and all the rest of it. And I appreciate that everybody has their own ways of doing this, but it's worth having a look at because the tool works well for me. And once my year's membership is up, I will continue using Marvin after that, which is obviously what they wanted me to do. The next productivity tool I want to talk about is tobii. And tobii is a Chrome extension. And this is a big game changer for me. So let's just paint this picture. If you're anything like me, you open a browser window and you end up having 50 tabs on that browser window, and then you open another browser window and then you can't find what you're looking for. And so you end up just closing them all and starting again. That is so what I used to do, and it really annoyed me and I kept thinking there must be a way for me to organize my tabs and my browsers and be able to find what I'm looking for much more easily. So enter Toby. As I say, it's a Chrome extension and it is really good for basically saving tabs that you want to go back to and categorizing them into different groups. So this so basically enables you to create a library of all the tabs that you use frequently and as I say, put them in different categories so that when I open my Chrome browser, the first thing I see now is this library of tabs and then I just need to click on one of them to open the particular tab so it stops me having hundreds of tabs open. And it certainly helps me find things that I'm looking for much more quickly. Now, I mentioned a few times during this podcast appsumo, and I want to recommend this one with caution because there's a danger of getting very distracted by this and also because of the way they sell things, there's a danger of being caught up in the shiny new object promise of this amazing time saving tool that won't always be the case. But Having said that, AppSumo is a great site for finding really good deals on software tools and apps. And often the software tools and apps are new to market on there. So they're developing them and that's why they're much cheaper than if you bought them directly from the company. So be careful because not all of the tools are as cheap as they seem because they give you a starting price, but you need to buy several stacks in order to get the real functionality that you need. So be careful about that. But it is a good tool. Now the last couple of tools I want to mention are to do with finance, and if you're a small business or a one man band or freelancer, then obviously part of your time needs to be spent doing finance. And we don't want to spend too much of our time doing admin. So anything we can use that will speed up that process we should do so. I just want to share with you the fact that I use Xero. I've been using Xero for many years and that was a big game changer for me and they've changed the marketplace and they forced all the old players to really change the way they operate. Obviously Xero is a cloud based piece of software that both my accountants and I use, so they have access to my Xero account. It kind of works more in the way of a layman working than having to have sort of basic understanding of bookkeeping. So I really like Xero and I'm sure you will use your own tool or you already use Xero, but in conjunction with Xero I also use Receipt Bank. And Receipt bank again is a bit of a game changer for me because I was terrible at putting receipts in my car and then losing them and not claiming for things that I paid for basically end up paying more tax and who wants to do that? So with Receipt bank you simply take a photograph of the receipt, submit it, and then it integrates into Xero and it will try to interpret that receipt and it will also try and match it against any outgoings from your bank account. So it's pretty clever. Sometimes you need to do a little bit of editing where it can't quite interpret the receipt, but it certainly is clever and it is another example of a productivity time saving tool, which is what this podcast is all about. So I'm sure you have some of your own favorite tools, but I wanted to share mine with you and I genuinely believe that they do save me a lot of time. And as I said at the beginning, be careful about playing with too many tools because they are really easy to get sucked in and distracted. And you have to ask yourself, are these tools really helping me run my agency more efficiently? Are they helping me be more productive? And if the answer is yes, then they're worth implementing. If the answer is well, they're fun to use, they're a bit of distraction and I'm not sure they're saving me time, then you need to not be using them. So that's it from this podcast. A bit of a bonus podcast, but I hope it's been useful for you. Look out for my podcast in January where I'm talking about Mindset in the first podcast and then interviewing Sally Alexander in the second from Amble Glow. Both of those are really, really interesting and I'm sure will add value to you. So I will see you in January and meantime, have a fantastic Christmas break and see you in 20.