Jumping right into it: these are Sparrow Websites’ favorite tools that we use to grow traffic onto our website… and they’re FREE!
1. Canva.com
https://www.canva.com/
If you’re a new company, you probably don’t have money in your budget to hire a graphic designer; but with Canva, you can begin designing things yourself. All you have to do is pick a template, drag/drop photos and change fonts into the template you chose and you have a designed file in 15 minutes. This is good for business cards, flyers, presentations, etc and you can do it all yourself for free.
2. SparkToro
https://sparktoro.com/
This tool allows you to research out top trending topics on social media posts, websites, YouTube channels, and podcasts. You’ll get to see which influencers are talking about topics that are important to you which can give you a shortlist of people to contact and try to team up with so you can start getting your name out to those who would be interested in your company.
3. Anchor.fm
https://anchor.fm/
Once you’re already hosting podcasts, you can use this tool to host your podcast for free. It’s a powerful tool that allows you to broadcast through Apple podcast or Google podcast and has basic audio editing and interview capabilities built-in which will easily serve a new company’s needs for quite some time before needing or wanting to upgrade.
4. DaVinci Resolve
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Here at Sparrow, we have used DaVinci Resolve to edit our videos and have appreciated how powerful a tool it is for being free. It is comparable to Adobe, which costs $70 to $80 a month, but for more basic videos for your website or YouTube channel and will accomplish all you need for video marketing.
5. Hubspot CRM
https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm
This tool is a great one for the first few years of being in business. It tracks all the leads you’re gathering into one spot for you to followup. When developing your marketing strategies and experimenting with how to drive traffic to your website, you’ll collect lots of valuable leads and customers reaching out for quotes and offers. It’s a lot to organize and things could easily fall through the cracks. This tool will help you respond in a timely fashion, gather names and contact information, and even tracks your leads and compares them month-to-month.
6. Calendly
https://calendly.com/
As your company grows and you get busier and busier, you’ll realize that your wall calendar may not be the best option to keep everything straight anymore. This tool helps you schedule people with no hassle and back-and-forth conversations about what times are good for you vs. them. Calendly gives you a link you can share with people so they can see which days and times you’re available to meet with them and can sign up immediately to reserve their spot on your busy schedule. This also links directly to your Google calendar and all you have to do is show up!
7. MailChimp
https://mailchimp.com/
This is an excellent way to create email newsletters to your customer base and people that have signed up for your lead magnets (another blog post to go check out!). This gives you a simple way to create a series of emails containing your special offers or new content on a regular basis. MailChimp provides a free setup for your first 2,000 subscribers which will easily get you to the point where you’re business is large enough to afford the $20/month.
8. Hemingway
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
As we’ve been exploring lately here at Sparrow, writing blog posts, emails and basically all written communication is vital to growing your business. It’s a challenge to get important content out of your head and onto paper. This tool is great for showing you grammatical and spelling errors, but also will highlight certain portions that may be difficult to read and gives suggestions on how to improve.
9. BuzzSumo
https://buzzsumo.com/
When you’re researching your specific area of expertise to write about, there are so many perspectives to choose from or questions to answer. This tool helps you see which topics and questions are performing well on social media and trending. You would put a topic you want to research into the search bar and it will show you which questions you could answer and expound upon in your writing.
10. Pexels
https://www.pexels.com/
As you begin writing more blog posts and designing your website, you’ll realize very quickly that photos bring a vital visual splash to engage your audience’s attention. This tool provides thousands of stock images for you to freely use as you desire with no attribution required. These images can be customized by size and provide a clean, professional, and visually attractive look to your pages.
Here at Sparrow, we don’t keep secrets from our clients. We use all of these tools ourselves and give our wholehearted approval at their usefulness and money-saving qualities. We want you to have the same level of success with ease.
