They say nothing in life is free, but for small businesses many services are free.
Below, listed in alphabetical order, are my favorite free online tools for small business owners. Keep in mind, that most of them will move you to a paid option once you reach a volume threshold for their services.
Accounting Tools
Keeping track of receipts, mileage and invoicing can be a hassle. Simplify the process with some automated tools. Wave offers a variety of small business accounting tools for free or very low cost.
Email Marketing
MailChimp is my favorite for small business email marketing. Their free account allows 10,000 emails a month with up to 2,000 email addresses in your database. If you do decide to use their paid account you can create email automations, which is a wonderful time saver.
Form Templates
Entrepreneur has a variety of forms you can download for your business. You can choose from an Employment application, Marketing Plan, Non-disclosure, Performance Review & more.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/formnet
Graphic Design Software
I’ll be honest, I’m a big-time PhotoShop and Adobe user. But in the last few years I’ve grown to LOVE Canva for it’s user-friendly platform and sheer variety of templates. When it first came out, I wasn’t a huge fan, but they have improved so much it’s a no-brainer. Play with the templates and change colors to match your brand. Use animation to jazz up your social media posts. They have great free photos and templates, but you can always upgrade to a paid plan if you need even more flexibility.
Online Marketing
There still are free tools for small businesses to use to help market their business. My favorite by far is Google My Business. I also suggest listing sites such as Manta and Yelp. Just be sure to keep updating and using the platforms so your page stays current.
Phone Number
Did you know you can get a free phone number through Google? If you need one number for personal use and another for your business, add a second number through your Google account.
Privacy!
Online privacy is and will continue to be a big topic of discussion. If you collect customer data online you need to have a privacy policy posted on your site. You need a policy posted if you collect email addresses for a blog, newsletter or more detailed customer data for online purchases. But, how do you even know what to say? Below is a a link to a free privacy policy generator. When you answer the questions it can come up with a policy tailored to your business.
https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/
Security
The FCC has a wonderful online resource to help small businesses create customized cybersecurity plans. They have everything from facility security to email and website security.
https://www.fcc.gov/cyberplanner
Social Media Automation
Hootsuite has a free account that allows you to schedule 5 social media posts a week to 2 social media sites. The only caveat to any automated social posting service is that Facebook/Instagram prefers you to post organically. It effects how your post shows in feeds if you use a 3rd party automated service. So, I post in Facebook/Instagram manually using the Business Suite and use Hootsuite for any 2 other social accounts.
Stock Photos
Need free photos for your social media or blog posts? Pixabay and Pexels have an immense variety of wonderful images at no cost and no need for attribution. As a note: Please use a professional photographer for website images and photos for marketing materials. Professional stock photos are fine to use sparingly, but when you want to make an big impact nothing beats personalized images.
https://www.pexels.com/ & https://pixabay.com
Video Conferencing
I’ve been using Zoom for years. But as we now know, it’s been very handy when meeting in person can’t happen. Zoom has a free account that has tons of flexibility. You can record meetings, switch from video to screen sharing and have multiple end users on a meeting. The only limitation is if you have more than 3 people at a meeting you are limited to 40 minutes. Holding longer meetings with lots of attendees requires a paid account.
Websites
WordPress is my top choice for a web platform. They have teamed with Google on accelerated mobile pages which help with SEO. If you host through WordPress.com you have built-in security, site statistics and a spam filter. With WordPress.org you have access to a wide variety of plugins to make your dream website. It is the biggest open source web platform out there. Keep in mind that other free website platforms are not as “growth friendly” as WordPress. So, if you use Wix or Weebly to build a site, you might find yourself re-building it in a year or two. See this article for more comparisons.