In December, if you snooze you lose. While some might be filling up on cookies and chugging down the eggnog, others are preparing for the year ahead. Smart marketers and entrepreneurs use this time for business planning. They lay out their entire year; or at the very least, the first quarter. They settle on initiatives and brainstorm content. If this is sounding familiar, you’re probably looking for ways to make the most out of the rest of the year.
Let me help you maximize your 2017 with these 8 easy to use tools.
QUICKLY CREATE THUMBNAILS, COVER PHOTOS, BLOG FEATURED IMAGES AND MORE WITH SNAPPA.IO
In my opinion, Canva doesn’t even hold a candle to this tool. First of all, Snappa is much more user friendly. It’s easy to navigate and understand. Second, Snappa can help you create everything from ebook covers to YouTube thumbnails.
Beginner’s Tip: Keep your social media covers cohesive. Open up several different tabs in your browser, and make your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn covers all at once.
Works best for social media marketers and bloggers.
GET 700+ TITLE AND TOPIC IDEAS WITH TITLE-GENERATOR.COM
Honestly, I’m usually not looking for a genius headline generator. More often than not, I just need to bounce around some ideas. I love this website. It’s a bare bones title generator. You plug in a word, and get 700+ titles and topics to work with. Keep in mind, these are not all relevant or grammatically correct. Use your best judgement, and at the very least, this tool will assist in the content brainstorming process. Out of every tool, this is probably my favorite.
Beginner’s Tip: Pages two and three usually have the more obscure titles. Page one will showcase a lot of headlines you could’ve come up with on your own.
Works best for copywriters and bloggers.
DECREASE PAGE LOAD TIME WITH COMPRESSJPEG.COM
To go back and compress all your blog images might take a bit of time; maybe more than you want to spend. That’s totally acceptable. Instead, use this tool for images in the future. It will help you greatly decrease page load time, as your images are now compressed down to the lowest possible size. This is an easy to use tool that will greatly reward your site performance in the long run.
Beginner’s Tip: To save time, upload a handful of images at once, then download all after compression.
Works best for bloggers.
USE BITEABLE.COM TO CREATE VIRAL VIDEO CAMPAIGNS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Before finding this tool, I didn’t even touch video. Seriously, the idea of pairing homegrown footage, audio, music, and text together was completely overwhelming. I figured I’d leave it to the professionals, which more often than not, turned into me avoiding video all together. This tool has changed the way I view video marketing.
Beginner’s Tip: Develop a storyline before jumping right in to video creation. If you have a storyboard, your video will smoothly come together.
Works best for social media marketers and content managers.
WEBINARNINJA.COM IS A VIDEO CONFERENCING SERVICE THAT DOESN’T OVERWHELM
Current webinar software has its limits. In fact, even the most experienced webinar hosts struggle with current webinar platforms. I stumbled across Webinar Ninja a month ago. It took me less than five minutes to figure out how to navigate my account. I had my first webinar set up and running in less than 30. Save time with the new webinar platform to beat.
Beginner’s Tip: Run a test webinar before going live. Remember, make sure each webinar has a clear purpose. This isn’t like Facebook Live, where it’s ok to rant and talk without an outlined topic.
Works best for online personalities, content managers, and industry influencers.
SLICKTEXT.COM HELPS YOU EMBRACE THE NEW MAILING LIST.
You can probably agree; email is becoming a bit archaic. Will we ever terminate email lists all together? Probably not. But, the time has come to embrace a new communication tool: text marketing. Slick Text has dozens of easy to use features, such as text to win contests, drip campaigns, and picture messaging. On top of that, they offer message scheduling and drip marketing campaigns
Works best for marketers currently relying heavily on email and small business owners.
2017 IS ALL ABOUT CLICKFUNNELS.COM
If you would’ve asked me six months ago, the word “funnel” made me gag. It just seemed so cheesy and unprofessional. The only company doing a decent job was Infusionsoft, and their software was out of my price range and equally difficult to navigate. Enter Click Funnels. The back end takes some time to get used to, but once you understand the navigation, it’s a piece of cake.
Beginner’s Tip: Don’t create a funnel on the fly. Write down each step before even setting “foot” inside Infusionsoft.
Works best for anyone selling anything online.
GET THE HELP YOU NEED WITH UPWORK.COM
I resisted hiring for a long time. I tried to design my own websites, set up my own Facebook ads, manage my own schedule, etc. Let me tell you what; that gets old real quick. You get burnt out, and the quality of your work suffers. It’s not worth it. Especially when there are affordable experts out there, ready and willing to help. Get all the things that overwhelm you and hinder your business growth off your plate.
Beginner’s Tip: Look for the rising star freelancers. They are usually the most affordable, but still offer premium quality. Also, when looking to hire, get as granular as possible about what it is you actually need. For example, if you want to build a new website, map out some ideas and share examples of what you like. The clearer you are, the better.
Works best for product managers, team leaders, and department heads.
Don’t just cruise through the rest of the year with these work enhancing tools. Instead, kickstart 2017 with a better sense of how to rule the digital world. I will be taking every single one of these tools with me into the new year. They’ve helped me exponentially grow my online presence.
