Startup Guide
Table of Contents
Daily Operations
Email
Passwords
Copy Editing
File Storage/Sharing
Contracts/Forms
Lead Capture
Must-Have Plugins
Project Management
Creating an amazing online presence takes work. I mean, a lot of work!
And if you want to dominate the digital landscape and get ahead of the competition you’re going to need a huge competitive edge.
Just like any big job, having the right tools can make all the difference.
But with so many tools out there, where do you start?
Worry not, my friend!
Rather than spending hours and money you can’t spare to lose testing and researching tools to find the right fit, we thought we’d just compile a comprehensive list for you!
Content Guide
Beginner Easy to understand and master
Intermediate Not difficult to use, but may require time to learn
Expert Requires a high level of technical expertise to master
These are recommendations based on things we’ve tried and found success with. For certain categories, we’ve listed multiple options to allow you to try and see which best fit your style. Most of these tools are free; however, some have paid and premium versions. While certain items are affiliate links, we never recommend anything we don’t personally use ourselves. If you find you’d like assistance with any of these tools or marketing techniques feel free to Contact Us.
Daily Operations
Alright let’s start by tackling the essentials. Before you do anything you need to make sure that your day-to-day operations are as streamlined as possible.
Assistant.to syncs with your calendar to provide your client and team members a list of available time slots for scheduling meetings. It is a huge time saver because it eliminates the back and forth, getting things scheduled in a single email and automatically saving the chosen time to your calendar for you.
If you’re looking for a tool that allows you to schedule emails, receive reminders on old emails, add professional email signature, add beautiful templates, and so much more look no further than Right Inbox. Need to send an email late on Friday, but want to make sure it doesn’t get lost in your recipient’s inbox over the weekend simply schedule the email to send on Monday. And if you have an important email that hasn’t gotten a response you can ask Right Inbox to send you reminders to touch base with them after a few days so you don’t forget.
Although a simple plugin, it makes a world of difference. Gmail Sender Icons adds logos or favicons beside each senders message in your inbox giving you a visual component to easily identify different senders within the clutter.
When it comes to a domain hosted emails you can’t go wrong here. Gsuite gives you an @yourbuisnessname.com email which gives your brand more credibility, but since it isn’t tied to your hosting you don’t have to worry about it hogging server resources and slowing down your website load speeds. Best of all if you upgrade to a Business Account you get unlimited GDrive storage which is great for backing up important files. Bonus: Certain non-profit industries (such as educational institutions) can get GSuite for free.
PAsswords
LastPass 
LastPass securely stores all your passwords and remembers them so you don’t ever have to worry about forgetting them. Simply create a single master password to easily and securely access all your accounts. You can also share them with your team.
Copy editing
Grammarly is like having a copywriter
File Storage | Sharing
WeTransfer allows you quickly and easily transfer files that might be too big to attach in an email. For security purposes, you can also set an expiration date for when your files are no longer available to the recipient.
Contracts | Forms
If you need to send client contracts, signup forms, or surveys JotForm really is the way to go. They even offer HIPAA compliance at certain premiums levels.
Branding
If you’ve ever found an amazing font or colour you wanted to use in your own brand, but then found yourself lost on where to find them these tools will help you do just that.
Layouts
We get it, Adobe Creative Suite has quite the steep learning curve, but if you are a beginner on a budget rying to create unique designs for your marketing and social media posts Canva is a great alternative. It takes a bit of time to learn the interface, but once you do you can create anything you can imagine.
When you need a fair use icon for your website or online marketing this is the place to find it. We’ve seen too many people simply do a Google search and grab icons from the search results – the problem is you can’t guarantee you aren’t using someone else copyrighted work. Iconmonstr has an extensive database of fair use icons that you can use right away.
The last thing you want to do is design a great logo only to find out that it’s too close to your competitor’s trademarked logo. To save yourself the headache (and lawsuits), run your new logo through Logo Rank. You’ll get a score to show you how unique your logo is and give you peace of mind that your business identity is one-of-a-kind.
colour
If you have ever wondered what colours to use in your branding and aren’t sure which pair well together than Coolors is our best friend. Simply pick a base colour you like and Coolors will show you the best secondary and tertiary colours that pair perfectly with it.
typography
See a font on a website and want to use it in your branding but had no idea what it is? This browser extension can tell you exactly what it is.
Much like pair wine with the perfect meal, pairing the perfect fonts is a science all its own. Font Generator makes it simple to find a great font pairing for your branding.
Printing
Whether it’s business cards, flyers, or pamphlets MOO creates high-quality, breathtaking print jobs for all your print needs.
When it comes to unique printing we just had to include Jukebox on this list. If you want to print a uniquely shaped business card to stand out you won’t find it anywhere else with the quality that they provide.
Websites
If you’ve ever found an amazing font or colour you wanted to use in your own brand, but then found yourself lost on where to find them these tools will help you do just that.
Domain Name
If websites are the digital equivalent to a building, then domain names would essentially be the address on the door.
Allows you to search your desired name and see if the social handles are available for all social media platforms.
Hosting
Unlike other hosting services we offer packages with dedicated care which includes updating WordPress Core, themes, plugins, and even SEO! Our hosting also gives you the flexibility to create backups offsite for extra security.
Hosting your site is basically like purchasing land to build property on and SiteGround is one of the best places to host your website. The major attraction is their great customer service.
Design
If you need a website but don’t have a ton of money to hire a developer, Divi is right up your alley. Divi by Elegant Themes gives you an amazing drag-and-drop customization portal to build beautiful sites with no coding required. And Divi comes with Bloom (a lead capture plugin) and Monarch (a social share plugin).
e-commerce
Woocommerce is a powerful shop builder for WordPress sites. It is extremely customizable, and while not as easy to set up as Shopify, gives you a bit more flexibility and control.
Shopify is great for creating an online store. Shopify is best when you don’t already have a website and just need a shop.
Stock Images
Unsplash has, by far, the best selection of stock photos we’ve found. If you are looking for an image for posts this is a great place to find them, but since Unsplash doesn’t require you to credit the author it can also work really well for stock images on your
Pexels is
Optimize Media Sizes
Nothing slows down websites like larger image files. Often simply minifying them causes a loss in quality, but Smush does it all for you without any noticeable difference.
Videos can be resource intensive and really put a stain on load times on your
Must-have plugins
WordPress is one of the best content management systems to develop a website, and with endless customization to meet your specific needs it can be difficult to know what plugins you need without worrying that picking the wrong one could wreck your site. The following plugins are specifically for WordPress sites.
Security
A child theme allows you to make changes to your website without ever touching the original theme files. Therefore, if an update ever corrupts the files in your code you can simply fix them in the child theme without worrying that you are going to mess up the main files.
Server crashes or security issues such as hacks, malware, user error, deleted files and running bad commands can cause you to lose your site forever. Backups are critical to your business website. Backup Buddy allows you to
Nowadays
Page speed
Caching plugins help speed up your website and decrease load times for better performance. WP Rocket is praised as one of the best caching plugins on the market.
SEO
SEOPress is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress. The real draw to SEOPress is its interface — it is so intuitive and actually helps you build up your essential SEO resources by walking you through the process step-by-step. You can alter all your SEO data including social media Open Graphs (the appearance of your posts on social platforms).
LEad capture (email marketing)
Marketing is a critical part of generating new leads. While it’s important to attract new clients, taking care of your current and past customers can help you get recurring business. Not to mention the best ambassador for your brand is a happy customer. E-mail marketing is still one of the cheapest and easiest ways to attract new leads and build rapport with old ones.
opt-in forms
social sharing
newsletters
MailChimp is a great way to grow a mailing list and continue to communicate with your loyal customers through newsletters and email marketing.
web notifications
business listing
Being discovered on the web may seem difficult, but listing your business on Google and Bing is the easiest way to get your business listing in front of people. And it’s FREE!
Get your free business listing on Google and increase your reach. Google My Business also offers Google Post — which are like free ads that show up in search feeds and attract people to your business.
bing
Get your free business listing on Bing and increase your reach. Bing Places offers a whole host of options to help your listing be discovered on their search engine. Bing may not be as big as Google, but it’s still very big. Truth is most computers come with Windows OS — the default browser is Edge, and the default search engine is Bing. Many people don’t change their default browsers so optimizing your site on Bing will give you a huge audience.
seo
By now you’ve probably heard about Search Engine Optimization, but you may still not be sure how it works. Basically SEO is just the digital breadcrumbs that lead others to your website. The more engaging content you generate the more likely people will visit your website. Getting more people to visit you than your competitor will help you rank above them in search results.
Web MAster tools
Google provides a free tool to rank higher in their search engines. Tools we’d like to highlight: Sitemaps and Performance. Performance allows you to see a query of all the
Bing also provides a free tool to rank higher in their search engines. Bing may not be as big as Google, but it’s still very big. Truth is most computers come with Windows OS — the default browser is Edge, and the default search engine is Bing. Many people don’t change their default browsers so optimizing your site on Bing will give you a huge audience.
Content creation | Keyword research
Technology and society are constantly changing so doing continuous research is key to being competitive in your industry. But research takes time — luckily, Google Alert automates it. Choose a topic important to you and Google Alerts will send you an aggregated info sheet with all the best articles about your topic.
Find topics that are trending, when they are the most relevant, and where. Knowing when your content is most relevant can help you strategize how to get the most views and conversations upon release. It is also great for comparing topics to see which might perform better than the other.
This might seem an odd choice to include, but finding relevant, trending, up-to-date content is key. Formulating your content around what’s happening now is a great way to stay current and have more people click on it.
schema
It’s probably important we unpack what Schema is since you’ve probably never heard of it. It creates visual representations in search engines of the content being presented on your site. This is a tool almost no one is employing, so if you use it you will navigate above your competitors to the top of a search engine. Below is a list of tools to help you build one, but we should mention that SEOPress Pro helps you do this easily as well.
There are multiple version of Schema to employ and Google not only shows you what each one does and how it will appear, but also helps you create each type to put on your site. This option requires that you know where to put code snippets on your site so make sure you know what you are doing.
If you want Schema, but are not a developer, this plugin will do it for you and help you implement it.
Once you’ve employed your Schema Markup into your site you can use this tool to test to see if you’ve done it correctly. Simply type in the page URL and it will show you if it’s working or if there are any errors that need to be fixed.
page speed testing
Pingdom provides a page speed analysis, but adds to that the perspective of how long your site takes to load for users in other regions across the US and the world. This is great if you are conducting business outside your local area and want to ensure you aren’t losing possible customers because your page takes too long to be received by their servers.
GTMetrix offers up an
seo auditing (testing)
SEO audits help test your SEO performance, allowing you to know if you’ve implemented the best SEO techniques. All these SEO audits offer slightly different features, compare them for your best results.
Risenrank is an extremely simple tool to test how well your brand presence is performing online. By analyzing your content you can see how it is performing with search engines and what steps will help you take it to the next level.
project management
successfully managing operating tasks and collaborative projects all comes down to great communication. A good project management system will help you streamline internal communication with your team and operate smoothly.
small teams
Not everyone needs a complex project management system. If you’re one of them, Slack is the way to go. It is essentially a team messenger system for projects. For small teams this is a very good option.
large teams
When it comes to project management you can’t beat Monday.com. Their interface is intuitive and easy on the eyes. The visual aspect makes project management easy to stay on top of and their developers listen to feedback and are constantly improving the functionality of the interface.
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