The Best Tools for Entrepreneurs

Tools and resources to help entrepreneurs, small businesses and side hustlers succeed!

Even if we call ourselves a solopreneur, we all know we don’t completely fly solo. Thankfully, there are many great tools for entrepreneurs to help us grow our businesses without breaking the bank.

Because your business is my business, as a designer who helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses through strategic design for print and web, I love to help you however I can. Over the years, in growing my business or talking to clients who are growing too, I’ve tried many tools for entrepreneurs.

The tools I’m sharing below are the best tools for entrepreneurs I’ve discovered. I hope this list will help you too!

ProWritingAid helps you improve your content and writing

Improving your content will help you grow your business, because your content is often the first thing your audience sees.

As a designer, my role is to help your customers see, understand, and respond to your message. Good design focuses on the message, the content and copy provided by my clients.

In content creation for my business or when creating content for clients, my favorite tool for entrepreneurs is an app called ProWritingAid

The RankMath Plugin helps you improve your search engine ranking (SEO)

Building your website is one thing.  Growing your website’s audience and traffic is quite another.

With Rank Math, I have seen a dramatic uptick in organic search traffic on my website. I’ve let the plugin teach me how to tailor my content for what my audience is searching for on the search engines. Plus, it takes care of the Schema markup for search rich snippets, which I explain on my blog.

Canva helps non-designers easily create effective graphics for social media

Canva creates graphics based on the common sizes for social media platforms and your custom sizes. For example, if I want an image for a pin on Pinterest, I can click on Pinterest Pin.

Canva will give me an artboard in the optimal dimensions for Pinterest (or whatever other platform I need a graphic for). Also, I’ll see templates for that size, if I want to use a pre-made template.

Canva isn’t just “graphic design for non-designers”.

This program helps solopreneurs create effective designs on the fly quickly. The easy workflow is helpful for social media graphics in a particular. It’s a must-have for entrepreneurs without on-staff designers available to them.

You're going to love the Astra Theme for WordPress

BrainstormForce-Store

Astra is a professionally developed theme that is constantly updated, improved, tweaked, and worked on. In fact, the top-notch support from Astra’s creators over at Brainstorm Force continues to impress me. 

The Astra theme for WordPress is easily customizable right inside of the WordPress Customizer, before you ever crack open a page builder like Elementor.

The Astra theme also plays well with ecommerce plugin Woo Commerce. In case you didn’t know, Woo Commerce is the most popular and versatile shopping cart system for WordPress, and not every theme works well with Woo. Astra does.

Click-Up keeps me, my business, and all of my ideas organized

It’s really hard to pick a favorite part of my favorite app. I suppose it depends on what I’m trying to accomplish.

But that’s the point.

I accomplish so much within ClickUp. I can organize tasks in whatever way I need to have them organized.

The first thing I do when I fire up my computer in the morning is open ClickUp. I open it to the “Today” page and check out what I have on the agenda. ClickUp remains open all day long, capturing notes from client meetings, ticking off sub tasks and checklists in my client projects, giving me the next bit of content to work through, letting me store crazy ideas that pop into my head so I don’t get distracted and waste an afternoon chasing squirrels.

I do EVERYTHING within ClickUp.

Get started with affordable web hosting and domains from Namecheap

Before you go live with your website, you’ll need a couple of things: web hosting and a domain name. For entrepreneurs just starting, or for smaller businesses, I recommend Namecheap for both.

Namecheap provides decent services for an excellent price, which helps entrepreneurs keep costs down when starting out. Here are some other reasons I recommend domain names and web hosting from Namecheap to my clients and other entrepreneurs.

This page contains affiliate links for different tools for entrepreneurs I love and recommend. What does this mean for you? The law requires me to let you know if I might get a small commission for recommending a product or service if you buy the product or service after clicking my link. This does not cost you anything extra. I only recommend products and services that I love to use.