My yearly review of the best tools & apps to run your agency

Hey everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. It's that time of year again when I share with you my favorite productivity tools, applications and pieces of software that I've used this year. And it's been quite a big year of change for me. So I'm excited to share with you what I've done. Now, if you go right back to the beginning to episode two, you'll see what my tips were for this year and, and you'll also see that while some of the tools and apps I'm still using, I've also had a big change as well. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you in today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. If you're like me and you're a one person business or you have a really small team, and actually regardless of any of that, you want to work as efficiently as you possibly can. And that means finding the best productivity tools and apps to help you be more efficient and help you get some of those reoccurring, mundane tasks as automated as possible. Now, you'll know that I'm a big fan of the 4DS. So that's when you look at a task, the first thing you say to yourself is, can I ditch this? And if the answer is no, you can't ditch it. Then you say, can I delegate it? Is there someone in my team or a virtual person that I can outsource this to? And if the answer is no, then you say to yourself, can I defer this? Can I do this at a later date? And if the answer is no to that, then you say, okay, then this is a task that I have to do now. And I've also added to those 4Ds, the Automate piece as well. So you want to think yourself, are some of these tasks things that I could actually get automated so that I can get them off my plate? So in today's episode of the podcast, I want to share with you some of the tools that I've experimented with and spotlight the ones that have made a real significant impact for me that I've adopted. And as I say, this is all about finding ways of becoming more effective and efficient and automating tasks rather than getting distracted by, you know, shiny new objects. As I record this, it's Black Friday, so we're bombarded with so many promises of tools and stuff. So I'VE spent a lot of time playing with lots of tools to come up with my list of the 17 favorite tools that I've used in 2020 and I want to share those with you because I don't want you to waste a lot of time. Now, to make this really easy for you, I have produced a cheat sheet like a short PDF that outlines the 17 tools, tells you about pricing, and gives you links to them as well. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes and if you haven't got time to write everything down, then don't worry. Just download the PDF and you will have all of the tools that I'm talking about and the details of how to find out more about them. So in Episode two last year I talked about the various platforms that I was using to create and host my online training for my WordPress, my website development for my email marketing, video hosting, and so on. And this year I thought, is there an all in one platform that I can use that means I can parse data intelligently between all the tools and that I can take some actions dependent on certain things? So for example, if someone watches less than 30 seconds of a video, can I send them email A? Yet if they watch the whole video, can I send them email B? And it was really difficult to do this with a disparate set of tools. And like I said, I ended up sort of taping these together by using something like Zapier to pass data from one tool to another, and it was less than satisfactory. So I started looking around to see if there was such a thing as an all in one tool that I could use. And I looked at things like Kartra and Kajabi and builderall and most recently Groove Pages. And in the end I settled on Kartra and I'll put links to all of these in the show notes because I felt like Kartra could do most of what I needed it to do and it was cost effective. And what that meant was that I was able to consolidate all of the various disparate tools I was using and pay one annual fee for Kartra instead of six or seven different fees. So that meant I was able to incorporate ConvertKit for email marketing, Teachable for online courses, Calendarly for scheduling, Thrive Architect for web design, and lastly Vimeo for video hosting. And collectively these all add up to a higher monthly fee than the one that I'm paying for Kartra. Now it's worth giving a mention to Groove Pages because it's also a tool that I have invested in, but it's in its beta stages at the moment, so a lot of it is still in its early functionality, but it looks really promising. And what's interesting about Groov Pages is that it's been created by the founder and some of the original staff that created Kartra. And right now you can grab a copy of this for free and I'll put a link in my show notes. I sound like I'm trying to sell it. Well, I'm not. But I just wanted to say, if you want to play around with a tool that can build your website, host your email marketing, host videos, create a membership site, then Groove Pages is worth a look. Although I don't think it's going to be fully out of beta until the summer of next year. So you need to be patient and realize that when something's in beta, everything doesn't quite function. It's a bit clunky, and there's some functionality that's actually missing. Okay, so that's the big change that I made this year, moving to an all in one integrated tool. And I really have to say that I have no regrets about that. I think the issue about an all in one tool is it is a jack of all trades and a master of none. But that is a compromise that I'm willing to take. And as I learn more about Kartra, I can see some really clever things that it can do that I'm not actually using at the moment. So I will be continuing to explore that and enhance my output that I give to my audience. So let's move on to talk about some of the specific tools. Some of these you'll know. Some of them you may not know. So I just wanted to categorize them by groups. So I'm going to start off by talking about broadcast tools, and it would be remiss of me to not start with that by talking about how I'm actually recording this podcast. So I use GarageBand, which is a free app on your Mac, to record the podcast where it's just me speaking, such as this one. And then I use Zencastr when I am interviewing guests. And the great thing about zencastr, which is also free to a certain level, is that it records the soundtracks locally, each destination. So I can download two separate soundtracks and I can get good quality with that. So that's that. I use a blue Yeti mic for my recording and I have a filter in front of the mic and I also use a sound muffling box, which Kind of deadens the sound and hopefully improves the quality of my output. I use Podcast co to host and distribute my podcast and then of course I use all the usual channels such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify and so on to actually distribute my podcast to you guys. Okay, so that's all my podcasting information. Now let's talk about video. So like many people, I use Zoom to do all of my one to one coaching. I also use Zoom for my group coaching program. And most of us will know Zoom. It's a super reliable platform which is really important and it makes it easy to interact with people, record, and so on and so on. Another one of my favorite tools that was in my top five last year and still is in my top five this year is Loom. So that's L o o m Loom. And this enables me to record short videos, either capturing a screen or a screen on my face or just my face, depending on what you want. And I find it a really good quick way to respond to emails. And it's also fantastic if you've got a prospect who's reaching out to you if you, if you record the screen with you, talking, looking at their email. It's just a brilliant way of building empathy much quicker with your audience and also showing them that you're taking the time to record a personalized video for them. So Loom is a really great tool and I use it all the time for both answering client questions and answering prospect questions. And you know what, it's just much quicker than writing an email. Probably saves me about 50% of my time. And of course you create more engagement when someone can actually see your face. So that's my next favorite tool, which is Zoom. Now if delivering webinars is part of your marketing strategy, then one tool that I use that I really like is a tool called Webinarjam. And this is part of the same ecosystem that makes up the Kartra world. And what that means is it's really easy to integrate. So for example, I can send emails to people who attended the webinar, who didn't attend, who left after 30 minutes or stayed to the end, and so on. So I can do some smart things based on my viewers behavior. Now WebinarJam enables me to deliver my webinar. I can integrate PowerPoint presentations, videos, put polls and quizzes in there, there's a chat feature and I can make offers in the webinar as well. And of course you can then record it. So that's all about delivering live webinars. But you might have also heard of the concept of evergreen webinars. And I use a tool called EverWebinAR and again, that's part of the Kartra universe. So it makes it very easy for me, for example, to really hone the my delivery of my webinar during live webinars. And then once I've delivered that a few times, take that webinar and turn it into an on demand webinar. So that means I can have people watching my training, you know, at any time of the day, set registration for certain times or make it just an on demand training. And that is a really great part of your marketing strategy. Just remember that when you are delivering value added content via something like this, it's a really great way for you to build empathy with with your audience. And the concept of delivering it live. First, honing in, getting feedback from an audience before turning it into an evergreen webinar is a really smart way of doing it. And you can use webinars to train your audience to sell a service, to encourage people to book a strategy, call with you, and so on. Now, of course we can't talk about video without talking about hosting. And obviously one of the popular platforms is YouTube. But the problem about YouTube is it's a bit challenging with some of the privacy issues. For example, if you want to embed a video in that live training you've recorded, then it's difficult to do that with YouTube without people seeing that it's YouTube and then getting to your channel, which you may not want them to do. So I have used Vimeo and I currently use Vimeo until my license runs out when I will shift all my video hosting to Kartra. But at the moment, Vimeo is a great platform. It's not too expensive. I pay about 192 pounds a year. And the good thing about Vimeo is it enables you to remove all of their branding. It offers you more features and customization such as password protection or putting call to actions embedded on the video, and so on. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, once this license has expired, I won't be renewing it because I'm removing all my video hosting onto Kartra. So that's the key platforms I'm using for all sorts of video hosting and delivery. And let's move on to the next category, which is all about design and layout tools. We all want to make sure that we are presenting ourselves in the most professional way. However, we don't all have the money to constantly outsource all our design needs to a graphic designer. So the first tool that I use, which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, is Canva. And you can use Canva for free or you pay about 100 pounds a year for multiple users and some additional functionality such as removing backgrounds from images and so on. And I use Canva for creating all my social media images, for creating ebook covers, and for some of the Facebook ads and Google Ads that I run as well. Super simple to use and it saves me a ton of time. And I can have my team sharing designs and making sure that I'm creating consistent look and feel by creating like my corporate color palette. Now, a tool that I haven't used so much this year, but I mentioned last year, is a tool called Designer that's D, E, S, I, G N R R and I use a lifetime version which cost me about 30 pounds I think. And I use it to create PDF and ebooks. And it's a really good tool if you want to import, say a blog and turn it into an ebook or a Word document or another PDF. However, it's quite clunky to edit, so that's why I don't use it so much. But when I do want to create a new ebook, I will use Designer because it speeds up the process. Okay, so moving on to web development, I still use Thrive Architect, which is a platform that sits on top of WordPress and makes it super easy to create very sales oriented or lead generating oriented pages in your website. And you know that I'm a big fan of using your website as a core source to generate leads for your business. So if you have a WordPress website, then thrive is a great tool to use and it's really not expensive, about $19 a month. So I use that. But of course I also use Kartra and I am slowly moving some of my pages to Kartra. So actually at the moment my website is part WordPress, part Kartra. And the reason I haven't moved my whole website to Kartra at the moment is because I just don't have time. And I'm also slightly wary about page load speeds, which obviously can impact your search results. Okay, so moving on to talk about external communications and starting with email automation. Now again, guys, you know that I am a massive proponent of you focusing on building your email list and a really key part of doing that successfully and consistently is having an email automation system in place. And they're not really expensive to use, especially when you have say, less than a thousand contacts, they're usually free. So for many years I've talked about ConvertKit as being one of my favorite tools, and I've used that for a long time to build my email list. And that costs about 380 pounds a year. And all the other email automation systems, such as Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign and Mad Mimi are in a similar price range. But I settled originally on ConvertKit because of its functionalities, met my needs, it wasn't overly complicated to use, and it was cost effective and easy to set up. But as you'll know now, I've been slowly moving to the Kartra universe. And a big part of what's embedded in Kartra is email marketing. And so I use that tool now. And one of the good things about Kartra is its deliverability is really high. And that's really important. When you are sending out emails, you obviously want to make sure those emails are not being marked as spam when you send them. And Kartra really helps with that. And obviously you've got to make sure you have really good content as well. So that's email marketing. I've recorded podcasts on this topic before, so I just wanted to share with you the tools. But when we're talking about external communications reaching out to our audience, another really important channel for you is LinkedIn. And if you want to really hone in reaching your ideal Target customer on LinkedIn, then you probably need to subscribe to Sales Navigator. So you can create really specific searches to identify who your audience is. And then obviously you want to have an engagement campaign reaching out to them. And so one tool that I use, and I share this tool with caution, is a tool called LinkedIn helper. And that helps me automate some of the administration aspects. So, for example, I can search for my ideal target audience. I can then review that list and then automatically send out personalized invitations to those people to connect with me. Now, I say this with caution because never use it as spam and don't do that awful thing of reaching out to connect with someone and then the next minute trying to sell them something, because that is a surefire way of them unconnecting with you and having a dim view of you. But LinkedIn helper is a great tool for saving you time when it's running. It's almost like having an assistant sitting in the corner doing the outreach efforts for you once you've identified who you want to outreach to. Now, continuing the conversation with LinkedIn, if you have found a contact and you want to find their email address, but they haven't publicized it on LinkedIn. Then you can use a tool called Rocket Reach. And by the way, all of the links to all everything I'm saying are going to be in the show notes. But Rocket Reach is free and it will find their email address through their LinkedIn profile if that's at all possible. So again, use this cautiously because you don't want to be building lists to kind of cold spam people, but you might want to find the contact of someone who you want to personally reach out to. And Rocket Reach is a great way of doing that. Okay, another one of my big time saving. Okay, so another one of my big time saving tips is that when I'm writing I use dictation for almost everything. So if I'm writing an email, I will use the voice to text functionality in my Mac. You just go into preferences and turn it on. And that is pretty good. And it really speeds up my writing. And I use that for writing blogs, writing promotional emails, writing personal emails and so on and so on. You know, the whole concept of writing is to write fast, edit slow, and using the dictation really speeds that up. And another big advantage of using dictation when I'm writing marketing comms is that it's going to capture my tone of voice so that when a customer hears from me, whether they speak to me, they watch me on a video or they read an email, they're going to get a really consistent experience and a very consistent tone of voice. Now you can use dictation on your Mac, but you can also use it in other apps like Word or Google Docs has it. So it doesn't matter whether you're working on a PC as well. Just go find the dictation and turn it on. Okay, so that's all about external comms. Let's move on really quickly to talk about finance, probably a topic that none of us particularly like. I can't say I enjoy doing my bookkeeping or my reconciliation or my invoicing. But of course it's absolutely vital to keep the lifeblood of your business going and to make sure that you don't have any cash flow issues. So I use Xero for my bookkeeping, which I really love. Used it for years and years and years. It connects directly with my accountants. It's cloud based and it's kind of intuitive to use. So it makes life really easy. And I'm sure you are familiar with Xerox, but another tool that is a kind of companion tool to Xero is a receipt bank. And this was a game changer for me because I was really bad at keeping all my receipts and making sure I was claiming everything I should be claiming. So what Receipt bank does is, enables you to take a photograph of a receipt, or if you get an electronic receipt, just email it to Receipt bank and it does some clever stuff in the background to interpret that. Work out what the receipt is and then connect it directly into Xero. And if you've got a bill in Xero and a receipt that's been paid, it will match the two things together. So really smart tool costs about £120 a year, but it is definitely worth doing because I'm sure I am claiming way more than 120 pounds in receipts that I would have otherwise lost. Okay, so the last section we're going to talk about is planning and organization tools. And another really obvious one that I'm sure a lot of you use is Google Drive. And I pay about £1 59amonth for about 100 gigabytes of storage. And I actually use Google Drive for my client folders because obviously it makes it very easy to share content with your clients. But you know what, it also means that you are putting storage in a fairly safe place. I've had a couple of situations in the past where I've used a external hard drive to back up all my content and then the hard drive has died and I haven't been able to retrieve it. And at one point I had a lot of my online course video content on this drive that died. And so that was pretty catastrophic for me. So I learned my lesson and I moved my storage into the cloud. And of course you can use OneDrive or a host of other external cloud based storage systems. But when we're talking about organizational tools, one tool that I really like is a tool called Amazing Marvin. Crazy name. But basically it is an organization, a to do list. And it just works really, really well for me. It's. It works on my computer and on my phone. I can schedule my day. It connects into my calendar, so it pulls things through from my calendar. And every morning I have my morning ritual where I start my day by planning my day and then I can just focus on the next task at hand. And you can tick things off as you go and they get crushed out and disappeared, which is extremely satisfying. Gives you a sense of accomplishment. You know, my goal with my to do list is to make sure that every single item is crossed off every single day. And Marvin helps me with that management. And it also helps me not over schedule things, which of course is one of the reasons why we end up with to do lists that never get any shorter. So you may well have your favorite one. But for me, I started using Marvin. It costs about £12amonth and again, it is worth using. And when we're talking about organizational tools, something that I couldn't live without, which is completely free, is a Chrome extension called tobii. Another stupid name, but this one was truly a game changer for me because I don't know about you, but during the day I open way too many tabs on my web browsers and then I struggle to find what I'm looking for. So I end up opening yet another tab and then of course it gets in a right mess. Well, thankfully I found a solution to this and I'm now much more in control and and I have fewer tabs open. And that's all thanks to this Chrome extension called tobii. And what this does is it enables me to create a library of frequently used tabs and put them in different categories. So when I open a new Chrome browser window, the first thing I see is all of these categories of the different tabs I use and it makes it really easy for me to organize myself. And a big game changer costs nothing. So if you're not using it, go check it out. Look for the link in the show notes or you may already have your own one. Okay guys, so that's my favorite tools of the year. I would love to hear if you feel like I missed one out, that is one of your favorite tools. I'd love to hear from you. But I think in summary, if I had to pick my top favorite five tools from that list, I would say Kartra. I've obviously gone all in on this platform I'm using for my email marketing, for my page building, for my course delivery. I'm using it for webinars both live and pre recorded, so I'm really committed to that. So Kartra is a great tool. Not cheap, but of course it saves me a ton of money because I don't need to buy all these other tools that I've been talking about. My second favorite tool is Loom, which is the tool for shooting really quick videos. And as you know, I use that to respond to emails. I think the next thing that is super helpful for me is the voice to text dictation tools that I use. Again, completely free. And then my last two honorable mentions would be Canva for creating professional looking designs and LinkedIn helper just to give me like an admin assistant to help me with some of my LinkedIn outreach. So hope you found this episode useful. I'm doing this every year and in the show notes I'm going to include a link to a downloadable PDF that covers everything I've talked about today in a lot more detail and gives you all the links. So go grab a copy of that. So I hope you found today really useful. And as ever, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with your colleagues, and please consider leaving a review and I will see you next week for our next interview on the Agency Accelerator Podcast.