Andrew McCauley talks about his 5 Tools every Online Business Owner should have

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

 

Andrew: Five tools. Well, one of them obviously is my Email Order Responder System, so you can build your list. So you want to make this as automated as possible. There’s nothing worse than having a bunch of names in an Excel spreadsheet that you’re going to manually deal with.

 

So an auto responder system can be as cheap as free. We like free sometimes. MailChimp is a free account. Or you can go all the way up to one of the big daddy’s where you’re using Ontraport InfusionSoft, which is a lot more expensive. However, you probably don’t need that sort of system. So find a system that suits what you need so you can collect email addresses for yourself. So it’s number one.

 

Number two. The number two tool that I like is Hootsuite, and I like Hootsuite not so much for posting to my social sites, but more for checking up and keeping up-to-date with what people are posting about. So if I need to respond to them, I need to go and check it out, Hootsuite is the dashboard that I can see all platforms at once came up-to-date with everything. So I know that if I need to respond to anything, I can do it from my Hootsuite platform. So Hootsuite is number two.

 

Number three is I really think that people, business owner should get a good accounting package. It may sound weird, but you want to make sure you know where your money is. What’s it doing? What are you spending your money on and how you are keeping that money basically? I know that from experience, when we took our eyes off the financials about business, things went downhill.

 

So speaking from experience, get yourself a good accounting package so that you can keep up-to-date with who’s paying you, who hasn’t paid you, what money you need to have and so on, and you’re going to find that if you’re keeping your eyes on financials, things won’t be so bad. So it’s number three.

 

Number four is an analytics account. We’ve talked about Google Analytics on previous podcasts, but Google Analytics, for me, is extremely important. You want to be measuring what you’re doing. Are you wasting time doing certain activities? Are you getting traffic from certain activities? And maybe you’re getting traffic from activities or places you didn’t know was sending you traffic, and if that’s working, maybe go and concentrate on it.

 

So for instance, one of my sites suddenly got a massive amount of spike in traffic, and I thought wow, it must be from the article I wrote. It had nothing to with an article I wrote. It had everything to do with a Pinterest pin that I created awhile ago, and suddenly, everyone was sharing it and my traffic went through the roof. So I’m like huh, that’s interesting. Pinterest is driving traffic that I didn’t know I had. So analytics was the thing that told me that. Nothing else. So analytics is number four.

 

And number five is – and this might sound funny – but a well-organized calendar. I use Google Calendar and I use the calendar on my iPhone. It’s synched with my iPhone and synched in my ipad. I have different people on my team share my calendar so they’ll know exactly what I’m doing. If they want to book an appointment or a meeting with me, they don’t have to... they don’t have to ring me and ask me or email me. They look at my calendar they’ll know what I’m doing.

 

And I also have the ability to synch it. If I need to make appointments, I use a tool like ScheduleOnce that let’s other people book time with me, and it books time that is available in my calendar so that we don’t have backwards and forwards meeting email, so they organized the time that suits them. They know exactly what time is free for me, and that way, my calendar is maintained without me even touching it.