Every now and then we sit down our growth entrepreneurs and ask them what’s trending in their industry and what they’re currently using. We take what they share with us and distill everything into an article that we think will be the best online pack for our readers.
From learning to design to web traffic and more, we explore as many different services that will add value to your journey as an entrepreneur.
For a 2020 list, please read our article about technology and startup resources for your startup.
Here’s what we came up with.
Education remains crucial
The industry changes every day, so staying on top of the changes is crucial to growing your business. From SEO rules and tips to growth strategies and customer trends, education remains at the forefront of being ready.
We have some free online resources for you to use:
- Search: Brian Dean’s YouTube channel is a great channel to follow or keep in touch regularly with Neil Patel’s YouTube Channel
- Free online courses: Both Udemy and Coursera have free digital and social media marketing courses, which will give you a good starting point. It is important to invest that time early on to get ahead of the game
- PR and content marketing: Look at SYNC’s free resources to find some interesting insights into the industry. Other sources we look at include PRWeek, Forbes and Entrepreneur.
SEO tools and everything search
Organic search is probably a web-based business’s best friend, so building your organic traffic is crucial.
Finding out how to get your domain authority up and create great content that generates traffic and converts is crucial.
- Search tools: Answer the Public gives you insight into what questions people are asking and helps you build your content or strategies around that. UberSuggest is a great free tool to generate keywords for your online content that will generate better organic traffic.
- Domain authority and backlinks: We use Moz’s SEO Review Tools, which helps us track our backlinks and domain authority. It is free and very easy to use, so we highly recommend it.
- Tracking traffic: There are a lot of tools out there, but Google’s free Google Analytics is easy to use and helps you manage all your needs.
Social media marketing
Social media has become one of the most powerful tools to utilise when growing your business online. From memes to sharing articles to building online communities of passionate advocates for your brand, social media has become the new norm.
How do you stick out of the crowd when you’ve got a budget that’s smaller than an average person’s daily lunch budget?
Free tools and smart thinking.
- Scheduling: From Facebook’s free scheduling option to using services like Hootsuite it is easy to schedule your social media posts ahead of time and freeing up your days and weeks for other work. Another great free tool is Postify, which is simple and easy to use.
- Templates: Images and video work best on social media, so using services like Canva, Placeit and Crello are great ways to save time and look professional.
- Content calendars: There are tools to help you build your social media content calendar, but most are paid. Using these templates from Smartsheet might have you save some time.
While we love free resources and these come from experienced marketers across the region, there are great paid tools which are really useful. We suggest free tools for you to try them out and get a better understanding of how it all works – you can choose to upgrade from then.
If you have any suggestions on tools we might have missed or services, which you would like to see listed, drop us an email and we’ll make sure to put something together for you.
This article has been updated on 4 June 2020 to include new resources.