My Small Business Toolbox – 13 online resources that will make your digital life easier

In this day and age, the majority of small business owners have an online presence either on social media, a website or both. This means most of us have a computer around and need to use it for many different tasks during the day: creating digital content, planning a marketing campaign, keeping track of statistics, etc. There are a ton of tools and tutorials out there that can help us with all these processes but it is difficult to keep track of all the new possibilities as they come up. Today I want to share with you some of the things I have on my toolbox. I hope you find them useful! If you regularly use other handy resources, please, share them on the comments. I’d love to discover some new ones :)

 

Where to find free stock photos

They are great for improving blog posts, ads and other marketing materials. The ones I use the most are Death To The Stock Photo, Unsplash and Pexels.

 

How to set up an email signature on Gmail

When I work on an email signature for a client, the very next question after delivering the final files usually is “Ok, but what do I do with this?”. I always send them this quick tutorial.

 

Where to get press coverage

These are subscription services that will send you regular emails filled with source requests that fall into the categories you have signed up for. Take a look to HARO and SourceBottle.

 

How to add content lockers to your blog posts on WordPress or Blogger

Have you ever seen those blog posts in which you are required to Like a Facebook page or follow a Twitter account in order to read the full content? Here you have a list of plugins that will allow you to do that on WordPress. Including this functionality on Blogger is a bit more complicated but I’ve found this step-by-step tutorial for you.

 

Where to find custom dashboards for Google Analytics

Head over to Google Analytics Solutions Gallery to find lots of pre-made sets of metrics that can be easily integrated in your Analytics account.

 

How to create online surveys

If you want an easy (and free) way to create surveys and integrate them on your website or social media, give SurveyMonkey a try.

 

Where to download free fonts

Perfect for adding that special touch to your digital content. I recommend you to take a look at FontSquirrel and Dafont.

 

How to backup a WordPress website

If use a website to promote your business you should be making one of these at least once a fortnight, depending on how regularly you update your content. I talk about self-hosted WordPress because that is my case. Keeping a recent backup of your files and database allows you to quickly restore your website if there are any problems. Here you have a really good step-by-step tutorial.

 

How to create a single PDF document from separate pages or viceversa

If your files aren’t too heavy you can easily work online with PDFMerge and SplitPDF.

 

Where to find interesting content to share on social media

I’m sure a lot of you are already familiar with Medium but if you don’t, go check it out. You can either browse the site to find amazing articles or receive them regularly on your inbox.

 

Some color-related tools

• To get the code of that color you have in mind: Color Picker.
• To transform a color code from any system to another: Color Converter.

 

How to create a custom newsletter signup form for WordPress or Blogger

This is definitely the most difficult tutorial I am including in this post but if you have some basic HTML/CSS knowledge, it is totally worth it. This is the tutorial I used when I was learning how to do it for my client websites.

 

How to add watermarks to images

Being graphic designer myself I don’t normally use online image editors for my work but I think a lot of your will find this useful so I wanted to add it as a bonus. PicMonkey is one of the most commonly used free services but I’ve also found this other one called Watermark.

 

 

Find more interesting resources at ‘5 apps and resources you need as a small business owner‘

 

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