Episode 067 - The Top Free Tools For Your Business

Holy wow, it's Christmas. Well, it's not Christmas yet, it's December 24th. We've got some free gifts to give away.

We sure do.

Not that we are giving actual gifts, we are giving knowledge bombs to people. We came with the idea of each of us packaging up our top free marketing or productivity tools, business tools, whatever you want to call it, right? You can't see this, but we're sitting here with two notebooks purposely hiding them from each other.

Yes.

We have not compared notes. We have not shared ideas. There might be a chance they might overlap. I highly don't think it's going to.

Really?

Yes. But you have decided to take it one step further and give a countdown.

Exactly.

From least favorite to— why would you recommend something that is your least favorite?

No, but least favorite of my favorites.

Oh, the least best of the best.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yes, perfect.

All right, so who's gonna go first? Um, well, first of all, let's— before we get into this, okay, okay, it's Christmas.

Yes.

I need to know, oh, what is your all-time favorite Christmas song?

Oh my God, that's so hard. That's really difficult for me, but Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, that one just— it, it hits every time, you know? Like, it's just so good. Rockin' around the Christmas Christmas tree at the Christmas party hop.

Mistletoe hung where you can see every double-dressed star. What about you? I gotta go traditional with the Grinch.

Mr. Grinch, you really are a heel. You're as cuddly You're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.

The Grinch song, I don't know, it just gets me every time. But there is a new competitor that I just heard this year. Yeah, and it is, um, called Ho Ho Ho by the Chipmunks. It's got a good beat. Oh yeah, you cannot go wrong with those guys.

See, it's, it's Alvin and the Chipmunks and Michael Bublé for me. Those two albums on repeat all December.

There you go, there you go, you heard it here. All right, you're gonna go first.

I am, yes. So my number 5, okay, not that it's not number 1 quality. It's just, it's— I just have too many good ones. Okay, so it's gonna be Canva. Oh, which I think—

oh no, it doesn't. It's on my list, but it was— there was a caveat to that. I actually have 6.

Okay then, mister, because I knew you were picking that one. Yeah, so Canva, obviously there's the paid version, um, but it is worth noting that it is actually free for not-for-profit organizations. So if you are a not-for-profit You can just go on and apply and it's the—

But there is also a free version.

Yeah, but there is a free version. The only difference I believe is the watermark. So Canva will be written in the corner, which depending on how big of a deal that is for you, you can decide if you want to pay or not because it is fairly inexpensive anyways for the paid version.

And a lot of them use them as a stepping stone, right? You get in, get used to the interface, and then decide to upgrade. And it's inexpensive to go to the pro level.

Exactly.

$30 or not even that.

I think it's $20.

$20, right?

Yeah, and I mean, just to kind of give a sum, if you don't know what Canva is, it's basically a design tool. So it's design for dummies, I like to say, because there's so many templates. Any sort of design you could need, business cards, thumbnails, posts. There's also a new video editor version of it too, which they've just released, which has actually pretty decent considering it's not a video editing software.

And you can share your stuff out to the social accounts too.

Exactly, yeah, and you can— there's all sorts of integrations: Google Drive, Dropbox, like you mentioned, all, you know, your social media platforms, Facebook. I believe there's even YouTube now.

Yeah, there's a stock library in there of images, video.

Oh, that's another thing I wanted to touch on.

It's crazy good.

The stock library is so good, especially for the audio. There's all kinds of different songs. There's, I almost always just use the stock photos from Canva, and I don't even use our stock libraries now. So that is my number 5.

Okay, mine are not in order by any, 'cause they're all number 1s in my heart.

Oh, okay, I see. It was just too hard to pick.

It was, it was. So my, Fifth number one.

Okay.

I'm gonna follow your, your lead is Grammarly.

Oh, okay.

I am notorious for typos and has come a long way. I've used it for many years and what it is, it's basically just a browser plugin that you get. It's free. They do have a paid version, but the free one does 99.9% of the stuff that I need it to do. And anytime there's a text box, whether you're writing an email, filling out a social post or whatever, it'll actually correct your grammar and actually make sentence structure recommendations and will actually make you sound educated.

Wow, imagine!

It's amazing.

That is amazing.

It's— it was the coolest thing that has revolutionized my writing ability. But it's not on my phone, as you can see. If I try to write a post on my phone, I will get 5 messages from people saying, you should go edit that, you should go edit that. So no Grammarly on my phone. They do have an app, you can put it on your phone, but Maybe you should.

Yeah, maybe you should do that.

Okay. All right. So yeah, so, so far we've got Canva for all your design. You got Grammarly so that you don't write like a caveman. Mm-hmm. We are not— no offense to any cavemen that are out there. We don't want to get any hate mail, but—

Actually, speaking of mail, my fourth is Mailchimp. Mailchimp.

Okay.

Now I know this one's kind of basic, you know, so I didn't want to include it, but it does— it gets a special shout-out, okay? Because obviously email marketing, extremely important, and they also have additional features in the free version of Mailchimp. So the only limitation of the free version is 2,000 contacts, and you can only have one audience, so essentially one list.

Which for most businesses starting out, Yeah, I mean, to get 2,000 people opting into a list and having a single audience is a very basic way to start.

Exactly. And a lot of the, the downside of these email marketing and the reason why people don't have CRMs and those sorts of things is because it costs money. So, you know, looking at it from the fact that it's literally free, there is no cost to it, everyone should definitely at least have one email list that they're sending out emails at least once a month. And they also have one-step automations. So obviously very basic stuff, but if, you know, if they sign up for something, they can get an email, you know, that just that very basic one-step automation that you don't have to think of, which is really nice. And obviously I kind of spoiled it, but they have signup forms.

Yes.

Which is also really convenient if you're, you know, just starting out trying to build an email list. I definitely recommend Mailchimp.

And there's a lot of tools out there that integrate with Mailchimp, um, you know, WooCommerce. So if you've got an online store, um, you know, you can have that all feed into that list. And so when you get to that point, we start to grow, and you can either upgrade to their paid plan, which very, again, inexpensive but gives you some more functionality, um, or you can move to a more robust system like a Keep, a HubSpot, ActiveCampaign. And actually, all of those systems, when you go in, they have direct imports from Mailchimp because they know Mailchimp is very much an introductory stepping stone for people to get into that. So they make it a lot easier for that. Good choice.

Oh, thank you.

And I love when a client explains to me that they have Mailchimp and they call it the monkey one. I've heard that many times. The monkey one, right? Okay, you want to hear mine? I know you won't have this one.

Oh.

So big fan of podcasts, obviously you're listening to this. This one is called Headliner. Headliner.app is the URL, and what it does is it allows you to connect your podcast to the free account. Again, they have paid accounts as well, but the free one does everything that we need it to do. And you can take your episode and chunk out an up to 10-minute audio version of it and make it into a video, and then you can share it out on your social. So for that free account, you get 5 watermark-free videos per month. And then an unlimited amount of watermarked ones that are there. But I mean, if you're putting up 5 podcast episodes a month, I mean, if you did one a week, that would be enough to do that. So it's, you know, it's a great way to create that social content, whether you want to even embed it in blog posts or your social accounts. But that's my, my second number 5 is headline.

Second number 5?

Yeah, my second number 1.

Yeah.

That's what it was. All right.

Yeah, and with Headliner too, it's like dummy-proof, right? It's ridiculously easy to create really cool looking videos and audio clips, so.

Yeah, I had a client.

I'm a big fan of that too.

We have a client that has a podcast and they said, well, you know, we want to go into our account because he absolutely loves playing with the Headliner app. He loves making the clips. So it's very easy and user-friendly. Your next one.

This is gonna surprise you.

Uh-oh.

It surprised me.

Nothing surprises me with you.

I don't know. I think this might.

Okay.

And you know, it's even a surprise to me. It has only been within the past month, month and a half that I have gotten back together with this, this, this tool.

Good thing this isn't a guessing game because I'm lost.

So it is Facebook's Creator Studio. Now before, before you immediately shut off this podcast because you're like, anything Facebook, no.

Yeah, if you've commented on my YouTube video from years ago on Creator Studio and complained excessively about it, you need to listen.

So that would have been me, I'll be honest. However, there is no other tool out there that can legally, because of Instagram's strict sharing laws.

By design.

Yeah, by design. Share IGTVs and stories automatically. You actually have to physically go into the app and post them. That is like 100%. If there is an app advertising that they can automatically post stories, they're doing it illegally.

Got it.

So with Creator Studio, it has been a lifesaver being able to schedule IGTV. Stories. I don't believe they can do Reels yet. I'm actually not 100% sure on that one. But IGTV and Stories enough, or IGTV and Stories is enough for me to use Creator Studio on a weekly basis for every single client, especially when those videos are like 10 minutes long. You can schedule up to an hour on IGTV. Just not wanting to go in and having to either send the video to my, phone from my work email and then having to wait for it to load and it's just, it's a big pain and it ends up taking a lot of time. It's kind of like those, those, that episode we recorded, the Cancer of the Two Minute Task. That's what it started to feel like to me. So Creator Studio's been a lifesaver and I mean if you're just starting out with tools too, it's a really great place just to get that content schedule going in that content calendar, having that overview. You can post to Instagram and Facebook, obviously they're connected. There's also pretty decent insights and a cool thing about them too is you can— about Creator Studio is you can see past, all the past posts and, you know, compare analytics and stuff as opposed to some other tools that we've tried where you can't really look back on past content. And, you know, draw it forward again or whatever.

Good one, good one. Yes, Creator Studio. And that reminds me, I need to do an updated video for YouTube to appease all of our subscribers. I think that video's had thousands of views, but it's— anytime I do a Facebook YouTube video and the feature is just not up to par, people let me hear it. Yeah, they're like, it's like I'm tech support for Facebook on there. It's great. Okay, so which one of my last 3 shall I go with? I'm gonna leave these last two for after this one. But I'm gonna use this one called Tidio.

Okay.

And it's only recent that I use this. Now what it is, it's a live chat for your website. I've gone through pretty much every free live chat and paid version of different ones. But this one I'm starting to really like the free version. And so, you know, we know that live chat is very beneficial on a website if you're able to monitor it. The reason I like Tidio, T-I-D-I-O, you can Google it, is that it's very aesthetically pleasing. You can pick your colors that match your brand. You can put your headshot in there. Um, it, you know, allows people to ask a question. You can actually put the pre-questions in there. But the biggest thing is the map. The map— the app is flawless. Like, anytime that there's a notification or somebody chats, you always get a notification. That's always been a hiccup with some of the other ones, is, is the app seems to go dormant and then you miss all these these chats that are there. But a secondary cool feature was the ability that every time somebody hits a page, you can turn this off if you don't want, if it's annoying, you can get a push notification that says you have a visitor on your site and you click on it and see what page they're on. So it started to give me real-time insight into which one of our blog posts are getting a lot of traffic. And I started to see a continuing trend, so I went on to those pages and I updated like some of our lead gen stuff on those pages because it was another opportunity to get awareness, put some updated videos and everything like that. So really cool if you want live chat on that, on your site. If you want to upgrade to a paid version, then you can get into like chatbot type stuff on there. So TIDIO.

Yeah, I think it's really cool how you mentioned the aesthetic part of it as well because I've certainly been on sites where they've had the chat feature, which is awesome, but it doesn't match the interface at all, you know. So like either it's completely different colors or it just really stands out and it kind of gives you, you know, it's kind of off-putting in a sense because it just doesn't seem—

A lot of them seem very archaic, right?

Yeah, exactly. So I think that's, that's something really cool about it that you can personalize the colors and brand it. All right, my second.

Oh, number 2.

Number 2. So you kind of already gave this one away by talking about its integration with Mailchimp, but I wanted to touch on HubSpot, the, the free plan. So another big reason people don't have CRMs is because they think it's really expensive, they think it's really time-consuming, confusing, but with HubSpot, again, it's a really great place to start out. If you're just starting out with a CRM. So it has everything that you, you really need. There's unlimited contacts in the free version. There's also unlimited users that you can add, so if you want to add employees. There's contact management, which is obviously one of the most important parts of a CRM and the main purpose. You can build automations to manage customer data. You can view website activity and see the insights on that. There's also email integration, Gmail, and a lot of different versions of Outlook as well. There's form follow-up, meeting link, booking links. This is all free. Landing pages. You can even segment your lists, your customer lists, or sorry, contact lists based on custom fields. So they even allow that in the free version. So like I said, it's just a really great place to start with CRM, and it's definitely something that if you don't have a CRM already, you should at least look at trying to incorporate that.

You know, when I went through my HubSpot certification 2 years ago, we were utilizing HubSpot free for quite a while, and a lot of clients go in, in that way. You know, there's obviously a limit on the amount of emails you can send out is a broadcast and they're branded and all that kind of stuff. And one thing to also know is that how they work is they have like sales and marketing hubs. So those are your add-ons, and they can, they can get pricey if you want to then grow into a paid model with it. But all your data can be exported and brought into something else. But again, I think, you know, that was one that I looked at when I was researching this list to put on there. So good thing that you got it on there. Excellent. Now, this next one is probably not for the faint of heart.

Okay.

By that I mean not for the entry-level, like, newbie that's going out there. Okay. You know, we're big on creating content, and the biggest thing is like, what type of content should I create? What are people looking for? Um, and if you can give people what they're looking for, there's a higher chance it's going to be found and viewed and read and all that kind of stuff. So my other one is Google Trends, trends.google.com. What that is, is you can go into this site owned by Google and you can put in a search term or a phrase or a word, and it's going to tell you the amount of searches in the last year for that term, broken down by country you know, province, state, city, but then also give you— and this is the other key thing— other relevant searches that people have searched for around that term. So now it starts to help you frame your content creation, or if you're going to start to create YouTube videos, you want to do it on, you know, like skincare or marketing, you can put in those terms and start to do your research with Google Trends and see what's happening. So a really cool free tool to use.

Yeah, and you know, also giving you content ideas as well, because you might go in typing in one thing and then you see that there's a popular search that's related that you didn't even really think of.

Yeah, and there's, there's a difference between like the, the topic, right? So if you're going to do a topic on how to create a YouTube video, but if you're going to title your video how to create a YouTube video and, um, you know, you find that somebody's searching for a whole different search string for that same term, That's the one you want to use, right, to come up. So it's, it's how do you frame, frame everything.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh boy, here we go. Number 1.

Number 1.

Number 1.

Drum roll.

The number 1 most in-demand free tool this Christmas of 2021, and it is Pinterest.

Pinterest, which I know—

you're thinking Jodi, the digital photo collecting shoebox thing.

Why Pinterest? That's so strange.

Well, enlighten us.

I will. I'm about to. It is, in my opinion, the most undervalued social media platform, not for sharing content, but for consuming it as a business owner.

Tell us why.

Because anytime you have any sort of block when it comes to creativity, whether that be with blogs, social media posts, format of social media posts, captions, copywriting, organization, formatting, templates, anything. You can simply do a search on Pinterest and have thousands of results come up for inspiration. I have— I, I've been through phases with Pinterest, you know, like sometimes I really love it, sometimes I really hate it, and I have been on a year-long Pinterest kick. I have my work boards, I have it all divided up and organized.

Digital hoarding is what it is.

Yes, call me a digital hoarder. No, but I, I, anytime I'm stuck, especially with social media, even client social media, I will just go to my board, have a look at some of the posts that I've saved that, you know, it could even just be to a blog post, um, for, you know, 10 types of social media posts for financial advisors, or there's, there's literally everything on Pinterest. And I think that it's just so great to be able to go to a place that is solely for inspiration, um, to kind of get you back into that groove when you have a creative block.

For sure. You know, and we've never done an episode talking about Pinterest.

No.

Um, but I mean, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't actually explain how you could utilize it. Yeah, on the other— especially around content. So let's say you're creating a blog, you've got your free Canva account, you're creating some really cool images or graphics in there, and you know, you post your blog post. What you should have is a Pinterest account. Use the Pinterest Pin It extension on your Chrome browser and then go to your blog and pin the image to one of your boards. Because how it works is when somebody finds it on Pinterest and they click on it, they, if they click on your actual image it'll link back to your post, right? And that's how, you know, products and everything work. So it's a really easy way to just put those two things in place for sure. Well, again, mine's not top to bottom number one, but this is my— no drum roll, no. Probably like a tin can kicking down the street more so. But, um, this one is medium.

Medium.

Okay, so medium is a, a content directory, I guess you would say. And there's two reasons why I said this is if you are a content creator and you're writing blog posts and relevant educational content, you're going to want to go to have a Medium account free and post your articles on there, right? It's not like you just post a link, you actually post the content in there like LinkedIn does. But the second part is if you want to be up to speed on everything in a certain industry, like the most current stuff you want to go and look on Medium. You base it on keywords, like, so you want marketing or lifestyle or entertainment or whatever. And because it's curated by people versus a news outlet, you're getting very relevant, like, up-to-date content, right? So I have marketing terms tagged in there, and you can see, like, the most current marketing trends that are coming up, and you can consume that content really easy. So I think if you want to be an educated marketing person, or at least have a knowledge of it, doesn't necessarily mean you have to do all the work. Medium is a great place to, to get that, and a lot of people don't even know it exists. Yeah, so, so that was our top 5, top 10, top 10, top 5 each as well. So we know your favorite Christmas song, we know my favorite Christmas song. Tomorrow is Christmas if you're listening to this not on December 24th. I hope you had a great Christmas. And our next episode that you're going to hear from us is the top things that we feel should be on your radar for next year, 2022. So we are going to sign off and wish you all the best this holiday. Yeah, right. Any, anything you want to say?

Just Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and enjoy your time with your family.

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch, with a nauseous soup and moss. You're a crooked jerky jockey and you drive a crooked horse, Mr. Grinch. You're a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce. Aah!