Heather Porter’s 5 outstanding Business Tools

Laura: Heather, what are five tools that you feel like every online business owner should have and use on a daily basis?

Heather: OK, and these are ones that I do use every single day. So the first one is a great project management system, and those are like Basecamp, Trello. There is Slack. What’s the one you use again?

Laura: I use WunderList. I love it.

Heather: WanderList. So there’s a load of these systems out there and a good project management system just simply allows you to manage your team, manage your clients and all the different internal projects for your business that you have going on through milestones, through to-dos, through internal messaging back and forth in your team, and also through… Gosh, some of these even have timesheet so you can actually track time to the projects to know if you’re blowing out a bunch, for example. So project management system is number one.

Number two is known as the CRM, which is also simply just a database tool that oftentimes now has email marketing component of it. So what are those? We have InfusionSoft. We have Ontraport, which is what I use. There’s MailChimp. There’s some more basic ones like, you know, MailChimp and AWeber, and yes, there’s lots of others out there as well. What this system allows you to do is it allows you to build your list and take care of your clients and do reporting as well. So you basically have the component of the lead generation which is web form that you stick on your websites. You collect emails. You have auto responders that go out, but you also have a list of all your clients, people that opted in whether it’s from your website or you manually enter that, you know, if you have more of a proposal-based sort of business model.

So it’s just your one-stop hub of your entire business, your list, your asset, you know, and again, I use Ontraport because it’s a little bit more advance like InfusionSoft, which allows you to do lots of more advanced rule. So if somebody ends up buying something from you, then you can easily segment them and bring them into a new email list and do, you know, special things with your teams at tasks and things like that.

I always say though if you’re just starting, start with MailChimp because it’s free, and then move up from there, and you can easily kind of export list from one platform to another platform as you grow. So that’s number two.

The third one is analytics and stats. So I have tracking in all of my different websites and collateral. So for example, my website, I use Analytics, and you know, I have multiple websites so that’s where Google Analytics comes in handy. It shows me what are my most popular pages, you know, where people leaving my site from, how long are they staying on my site, that sort of stuff.

But then I also have Analytics in my podcast. So I can see how many episodes people are listening to. What are the most popular episodes? All that is really good because that helps you understand where to create more content, which topics to use because the market is telling you. Your viewership, your listeners, your readers, they’re telling you what they want more of just through your stitch and sticks.

Let’s see. The next one is social media scheduling. Now for scheduling, I still do use the Hootsuite for Twitter, but I actually… In Facebook, I use the Facebook scheduler for that. So whatever you use in your business to allow social media to happen for you behind the scenes. I absolutely jump in manually every day as well a little bit and I’ll just post stuff that way and engage, but to keep things happening behind the scenes, look at having a scheduler as well that will help you with the automation site.

Then the last one, brand management, not only for you but your competitors, and I use something called Google Alert. There’s also a cool tool out there called Talkwalker and Mention, and it allows you to put in a key word phrase, so whether that’s your business, your name, a competitor’s business or their name, personal name, and these systems then automatically send you alerts when something has happened, when there’s something new has come online.

So you can see what people are saying about you and where your business is mentioned like there’s bizarre things where we’ll have a video that we have on our blog and it’s picked up and embedded from our YouTube channel in some really bizarre website. I would never know that unless I had these alerts, but I also love it for tracking my competitors because I can see oh look, so and so just released a new product, or you know, they have a new website, or they have a press release that went off. Google Alerts is great. If you have a Google account, you go in and you just literally set up multiple alerts and it will just email you.

So those are the five key tools. You’ll notice that there’s a combination of project management, taking care of my clients, and keeping an eye on that, but also statistics and market research all combined throughout those tools.

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