Free Things for Small Business

 

If you are starting or running your business on a shoestring and don’t really know where to spend your hard-earned business savings, then there are plenty of free tools on the web which you can check out.

Once you’ve tried some of these free tools you can assess whether or not it’s a viable option to take out ‘pro’ plans.

Free websites

Paying for professional web design can be costly and can also be full of pitfalls, especially when you’re not sure what you want your website to look like or what you want it to achieve.

Try out some free options which have custom web builders, intuitive drag and drop and easy to create websites which practically anyone can manage on their own. Try out the free templates available on sites like Wix.com or weebly.com – websites can also be built on Google sites and on Wordpress.

All these sites have useful tutorials either through their own learning platforms or you can look up how to do certain things through YouTube.

Free images

You want to use professional looking images to illustrate your social media posts or on your website, but you don’t want to pay a fortune for them, then my go to is pixabay.com – millions of royalty free stock images, from photographs to vector graphics, videos and even music.

You can use their images in any way you like, add text to them, crop them, add them to other images and more. The site suggests you may like to attribute the image you use or even buy the photographer a cup of coffee, but none of this is compulsory. I use a lot of Pixabay images and give back to the community by uploading photographs I’ve taken from time to time.

Other free stock image sites include Unsplash.com

Free Graphic Design

You need a logo or other business design elements like a poster or a flyer, my first stop is Canva.com

Canva is a wonderfully intuitive graphic design site which allows you to create just about any type of material, from social media posts to logos. The free version is pretty versatile on its own, but once you’ve got the hang of Canva and if you use it a lot, I’d recommend upgrading to the pro version as it does provide some additional awesome features.

I always design my PowerPoint presentations on Canva and then download them as .pptx files. Canva pro will also create QR codes for you and you can use their scheduling tool to schedule your social media posts.

Free Video Meetings

Go to Zoom.com and create an account. The free version allows you to have unlimited one-on-one meetings for 30 hours at a time – although I’m not sure who’d want to spend 30 hours straight online! You can have unlimited group meetings for up to 40 minutes and you can host up to 100 participants in the 40 minute time frame. You also have access to private and group chat.

There’s more flexibility with a professional plan in Zoom, but if you’re using it to catch up with your teams, or are providing one on one client sessions, then the free version is perfect.

Free Email addresses

You can create a reasonably professional email address just by using your business name and creating a Gmail account. Most people are used to seeing a form of business name + Gmail and it’s better than, say, a Yahoo address or even your service providers’ email extension (ie @bigpond.com). When you can afford it you can purchase a dedicated business email address, but as a small startup you can get away with Gmail.

Free Social Media

Social media is free, but paying someone to look after it for you is not. As a startup, try to be smart about your social media use. Pick up to two platforms to be active on – experiment to find the best engagement for you. Don’t over-stretch yourself. Plan ahead and spend time one day a week to create enough content for the coming week/s. This will save you time. Use a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Meta’s Business Suite (only available for Facebook and Instagram) to schedule posts for you.

Lets have a chat

If you’d like to chat about how I can help you grow your business, book in for a FREE 15 minute coffee catch up.

Coffee catch upBOOK HERE


You can find out more about me here: www.wordsolutions.com.au

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