22 FREE (Or Almost FREE) Tools Every Lean Entrepreneur Needs NOW

You CAN Bootstrap Your Business Without Being Second-Rate

They say, “You get what you pay for,” and that’s still true, but today money is not the only currency for a lean entrepreneur. The search for visibility in the form of reputation, share-worthiness have all influenced “free tool” providers to ensure their solutions are actually robust. As a result, there are some remarkably powerful free tools available to startups to enhance their branding, marketing, productivity, and professionalism.

Within mere minutes any entrepreneur can look like a seasoned pro with these tools. I know, because having launched my third business last year, within just 90 days, I had clients scratching their heads when they heard my recent inception, saying, “Your website and materials look so incredible.”

Here’s how I did it:

BRANDING:

Unsplash : Image is everything for the lean entrepreneur, and quality stock photos help define your brand, ensuring you are seen and remembered. Unsplash has the highest quality images from photographers who are growing their brand, and only ask you provide them credit when you use these spectacular images. The work great on your website, business cards, brochures, and social media.

Pixabay: Besides free photos, Pixabay contains short videos, effects, textures, and illustrations any entrpreneur will love. All are free, and some require attribution, while others do not. Signing up for a subscription eliminates the Captcha window popup, but if you don’t mind confirming you are not a robot, then free downloads are unlimited. Shutterstock images are shown and can be purchased via the redirect, but there are plenty of non-Shutterstock images to choose without going that route.

Canva: For the non-designer who needs an easy-to-use, pre-loaded tool for social media graphics, logos, business cards, stationery, proposals, newsletters and nearly every possible business design deliverable. You can modify any template’s fonts, colors, imagery, and content, then download your design for use or output. If you want access to more resources, including over 300,000 free photos, and automatic resizing of graphics for other uses, you can sign up for a paid subscription.

Logojoy: The design snob in me offers this site up with a lot of internal conflicts. Make no mistake, it is not a replacement for a designer’s skill. Still, I get it. Not everyone can afford the investment in a designer, and this is better than letting your cousin’s sister’s next-door neighbor’s kid design your logo. While this free offering is not for everyone, due to its rather simplistic set of fonts, icons and color palettes, it is a great basic logo generator. Unexpectedly, Logojoy also provides a similarly basic brand style guide and downloadable files for all future use.

Fiverr: Just like the name says – designs start at $5. Many designers are located overseas, but if Logojoy is too basic for you, Fiverr designers take it up a notch – or two – for an extremely affordable price – many as low as $25. Other offerings include video, music, writing, business names, taglines, mission and vision statements, and a host of other business-related services.

Upwork: Like Fiverr, Upwork is not free, but it is wildly affordable when you know what you are doing. In the highly competitive freelance market, Upwork provides a service that pairs starting designers, writers, editors, virtual assistants, programmers and other freelancers with startups who need lower priced resources. It is a buyer-beware situation, where low-cost SEO resources overseas claim to provide SEO that actually utilizes black-hat tactics that can get a company in trouble later. That being said, like with Uber, Airbnb, and other crowd-sourced offerings, the rating systems in place are vital to ensuring a great experience from the outset.

FontSquirrel: When it comes to expressing your brand’s personality, fonts are extremely powerful. They also can be extremely expensive. Font Squirrel curates top commercial fonts and makes portions of font families available for free. It is a great solution if you want to go a little deeper into your own logo design than Canva or LogoJoy allow.

Google Fonts: Free, web-ready fonts that can be used without a license. What could be better?

Creative Market: This site is my guilty pleasure. Occasionally I will just buy something IN CASE I need it later. It’s that good. Fonts, photos, curated scenes and branding packages are all available for as little as $3 each, with bundles offered regularly for free, or nearly free.

WEBSITES

Wix: There has been a lot of debate about Wix is a viable resource if a business ever intends to perform any meaningful SEO. While it is not on the same level as WordPress, the SEO professionals’ choice, it does have the SEO basics finally, and when you pay for the premium service it provides even more. Wix does truly allow a business to have an instantaneous website for the price of hosting, which is required outlay regardless of the web solution.

WordPress: WordPress is free and just as simple to set up as Wix. The cost, again, is in the hosting. If you plan to host via WordPress and use one of their designs, then it requires little technical savvy – but be certain you use the WordPress.com offering.

Google Analytics: Why wouldn’t you want to see who is coming to your website, how often, in what numbers, and from what source?

Yoast: For the blogger and business owner who wants to check their content against SEO standards, Yoast is the most accessible tool in town. It is a WordPress Plugin, that reviews all your meta tags, your word use, sentence structure, and other best practices to ensure your content is SEO-optimized.

Google My Business: To aid in visibility for your business, online reviews (where Yelp! Doesn’t apply) and showcase images of your business, hours and pricing – Google my Business cannot be beaten. It does require a physical address, so if you are operating out of your home, you will need to acquire a physical address to use this option. Google does not accept PO Boxes as an address, and they will send a postcard to verify you actually are receiving mail at that address.

COMMUNICATIONS

Free Conference Call: The name says it all. In today’s virtual world, the ability to easily connect with more than three individuals in multiple locations, a dial-in call line is vital. You also have the ability to record the call, which is also helpful for those who couldn’t attend or, for writers like myself, to capture the important ideas as fast as they are being spoken.

Zoom: Using your laptop or your phone you can video conference for free, much like Skype’s offering. Zoom offers screen sharing, annotating, and, if you use it often, you can upgrade to multiple video feeds. The unique thing about Zoom is that only the host needs to download the software, which is free. All other participants can just click on the link.

Grammarly: We’re all perfect typists – or maybe not. Grammarly is great for every business communication, looking over your shoulder in Word, email messages, social media posts, and every application where you are writing content. It performs some minimal context checking along with spelling, capitalization, and syntax. It even searches for plagiarism by others online. Download it for free, and never again worry that your communication is unprofessional.

Wisestamp: If you want an easy, simple email signature to share your information with every recipient, Wisestamp has several design options you can create in just minutes.

SendInBlue While there are features, such as autoresponders, that SendInBlue lacks, if you are just getting the ball rolling, sending fewer than 9000 emails a month, SendInBlue is a powerful, free tool. It includes pre-built templates and customer support.

PROCESSES

Asana: Asana is a beautifully simple time management tool. It provides the ability to break goals into manageable sets of tasks with timelines, accountability assignments, and file sharing. It shows projects in a spreadsheet format or in a calendar view, depending on your preference. It also provides you or your team with the ability to track their time on a project as well.

This list is certainly not all-inclusive but provides a solid foundation for the lean entrepreneur. If there are free (or almost free) tools you have found extremely useful, please share with the lean and always hungry entrepreneurial community. Our wallets will thank you.

#branding #businesstools #freebusinesstools #freelogos