MBA1126 My Favorite Business Tools in 2018

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show. Because a smart entrepreneur is a happy entrepreneur. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson I'll be sharing my favorite tools. In 2018, I'll be sharing the tools that I discovered that I've been using this year that have really made an impact in my productivity in my business and just been darn right useful in my book. These are must haves. These are things that have really helped me do better work. The things that I'm so happy I discovered, so much so that I need to share them with you. Can't wait to do it. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So I'll be sharing five tools that I've been using this past year. These are sort of indispensable tools for me now. Some of these are so simple yet are so powerful. Some of them really help me do better work. So speed up my work so they save me time, they save me effort, and some of them save me money and some of them make me money. So let me get into number one. And the first one is Cloud App. I use this tool probably more than any other tool every day on my computer. Cloud App is a screen capturing app that installs right on your computer. There's a little icon that just gets placed at the top of your screen and you can use it with shortcuts. But the point here is that you can take screenshots, images, you can do video capture with voice. And as well as sharing your screen, as well as sharing your camera and doing picture in picture, you can create GIFs or GIFs, whatever you want to call them, you can annotate them. And the best thing about it is that all your images get saved in the cloud. You don't have to fill your hard drive with screenshots. When you create a screenshot or a video capture anything, it automatically copies a link and you can just automatically paste it to wherever you're going. In Slack, in Trello, in an email, and when people click on that link, it opens up your screenshot in their browser. No downloading, no nothing. This is brilliant. I love this app. You might have seen people use the free version of this app, but I think that the paid premium version, it's only $9 a month. It's so worth it. Having used it for so long, it sounds silly for me to say that it's $9 a month. I use it for screenshots, to explain things to my team, to explain things to other people on email, to do tutorials. I use it to kind of create images for my slideshows, for a presentation, a keynote on stage, or even for a webinar. It's like the ultimate screen and video capturing tool. It's so good. You can check it out@getcloudapp.com not an affiliate. I'm not getting any commission for any of these mentions today or these recommendations. Just a happy, happy user, happy customer. You gotta get Cloud App. It's awesome. It saved me so much time in terms of screenshotting and sharing because of that link situation. Because when as soon as I screenshot, as soon as I create a screenshot, it automatically copies to my clipboard and I just paste it in an email. Anything in a Slack message, whatever it is, I don't have to download it, save it, upload it, none of that. It's awesome. And then I can go back to my cloud app account and I can search all my different screenshots. And it has this great AI where you can search by whatever it's in the images. So if you took a screenshot of a tiger. You can type tiger. It'll find it for you. Check out cloud app and thank me later. Tool number two, and this is a website and this is Unsplash. Maybe I'm late to the game, but I discovered Unsplash this year in 2018 and it's a website that offers royalty free, free images. Really high quality, beautiful images and there's thousands upon thousands of them. So if you're creating a presentation, a webinar, putting things together for your website and you need some stock images or images that look really nice, better than stock images, really, Unsplash is your best friend. You can download these images and you can use them safely. They're totally yours. You don't have to do anything. In fact, the subtitle of Unsplash or their like motto is Photos for everyone. These are photos that are gifted by photographers around the world. Love this idea. Now of course you can credit the photographer that took the photo, but it's not required. It says it right on the website. You're going to be amazed when you go to unsplash.com and see these photos. You know much money that I used to spend on stock photos to make sure that we were on the up and up. You know how hard it is to find the perfect photo for the perfect blog post. Unsplash solves all those problems. Love it. So worth it. Huge time saver and just a beautiful thing, a beautiful concept. Tool number three. You've heard me mention this tool over and over in the last few episodes or last month or so. Ad Espresso. Ad Espresso is a tool to make it easy for you to run Facebook ads and Google AdWord ads. We use it for Facebook ads. It's absolutely brilliant and it's so worth the price. The starting price is $49 a month, and that's if you spend up to $5,000 in ad spend, meaning you spend $5,000 on running Facebook ads. They charge you based on how much money you spend on ads. So basically you spend a lot of money, then your price will go up a little bit more. But it's so worth it. Why? Because adespresso creates all these different variations of your ads instantly and then does the split testing for you and automates the optimization. This means that you're saving hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on getting the right ad, the right mix, and getting your cost per acquisition down in Facebook ads. Just really quickly. This is how adespresso works. You just basically give it various information. You give it like Two or three different headlines, two or three different descriptions. You can test different links. If you want different landing pages, you can test different images that go with each. And then adespresso does its magic. It creates all the different scenarios, all the different combinations. So you can end up with like 200 different ads after putting in maybe 30 minutes of work. And it split tests all the different combinations to make sure that you only use the ads that work. So it knows how to basically optimize your best chances of getting the best leads. I would not use Facebook ads without it. Since I discovered it, it's fantastic. I haven't even gone into the Google AdWords side of things. I can't wait to jump into that as well. Well worth the money. Tool number four. This is a very small little software, small little app. But I just found it to be really helpful, really cool. Especially if you do tutorials, any on screen videos like help tutorials for your products. If you run webinars and you're sharing your screen, showing your members area, the products you're selling, whatever. This is a great tool and it's called mouse pose. Basically it creates a spotlight out of your mouse. If you ever try to explain something when you're sharing your screen on video or on a call or on a webinar, it's really hard because they don't see where your mouse is. Your mouse is small. You might move your mouse quite quickly so they can't see where you're going. Mousepose solves this because it creates this spotlight. Everything else is kind of dimmed around the mouse and you can make the spotlight big or small in different colors and all that kind of stuff. It's a software that you install right on your computer. And I installed it for my Mac. It costs $10, 9, 99. But it's a one time purchase and it's really cool. It makes things so much clearer, makes you look really pro. When you're doing presentations where you're sharing your screen, it's not super fancy, but at the same time it's simple and it's clean and it does the job. It allows people to follow along what's going on in your screen easily because you're highlighting where you're going. Love it.

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All right. My fifth tool that I really enjoyed using and that really saved me a whole bunch of time is a tool for WordPress. If you run a WordPress site, there's a great plugin called Elementor. Now Elementor is a plugin that basically allows you to edit any aspect of your website I'm talking about even your blog format, your blog posts. You basically make a custom website from scratch with Elementor, without any coding experience, without any coding skills. This is the most robust editor I've seen in WordPress. Plus it's super light, which means your site is going to be super fast. Now there's a free version that is pretty good on its own. I got to say the free version is amazing. But I really think the Pro add on the Pro version is well worth the money because it adds on some really, really great features. You can check it out@elementor.com but if you've ever been kind of frustrated with your builder, your page builder, your page creator, it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do. You have a design in mind, but it doesn't allow you to do it. Elementor allows you to do it all. Everything. There's not anything I can't do. I've tried to do all crazy things with this editor if you can dream it up, you can make it happen in this plugin. It's amazing. It takes full control over your site and best of all, they do it with clean code. So if you ever uninstall the plugin, your content still is intact. Plus they have over a million installs, which means they have a lot of people using it. There's a big community, so there's a lot of people reporting. If there's any issues, it gets fixed quickly with updates. If you're a WordPress user, you have to get Elementor. I love it. It's just. And I've used a lot of software with WordPress, a lot of different editors, a lot of different plugins, a lot of different them, theme builders, all that kind of stuff. This one is the best. I'll be recommending it from here on in. Well, that wraps up my five tools that I recommend that I've learned about in 2018. Number 1 Cloud app. Gotta get it. Number 2 Unsplash unsplash.com Great photos for free. Number 3 Add Espresso, don't run ads without it. Number 4 Mouse Posay, a great tool for on screen presentations. And number five elementor. Great WordPress plugin. The best one I've seen. Actually, this is the best plugin I've seen, period. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you have stumbled upon a great tool, a great new software, a great little thing that helps your life, helps your business, share it with others, share it on social media. That's the best thing you can do for that company is to spread the word. That's how they stay sustainable. That's how they stay alive. That's how they continue to, you know, produce great things for you and maintain that product for you. So share, don't keep it to yourself. Let people know. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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