5 Website Tools To Help Run Your Business Under A Budget

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan. Having the right website tools is especially important online, where we have access to a myriad of tools and what others think about them. You’ll only be as effective as the tools you use. Even tasks that take a lot of time and effort will be effectively simplified if you have the right tools.
Here are 5 website tools to help you effectively run your online business under a budget:

# 1. Easy WebContent

We all know how important having great web design is. For its simplicity and its capabilities, everyone uses WordPress. After all, the majority can’t be wrong – especially when they’re 70 million+ people. Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t necessarily for everyone, especially if you’re a small business operating on a budget or a startup without much to spend.
While the WordPress CMS is free, it costs a lot to have a professional look and design for your website; you don’t have control over the free themes unless you’re good at coding and you can only get a design unique to you by going for a custom webdesign; with some web design firms you can easily see yourself spending in excess of $5,000 to get a custom WordPress design.
While there are premium themes being sold for less than $100, the same themes are being downloaded and used by thousands of other people so it doesn’t really help you stand out. If you don’t have the $3,000+ to spend on a custom design, Easy WebContent also has a site builder and a host of premium templates you can customize to your taste to have a great blog. This is also supported with an HTML editor in case you already have your HTML website hosted on another server.

# 2. PostJoint

No business can thrive online without effective marketing. One of the best ways to market your business online is by guest blogging; you give a blogger free content in exchange for a link back to your website and some exposure. This alone can be more effective than most forms of advertising.
With guest blogging, writing the content can be very easy but reaching out to bloggers who will accept your guest post takes time and effort; PostJoint simplifies this by serving as an intermediary between the blogger and the guest blogger. You select the blog of your choice, submit quality content that meets the criteria of that blog and that gets published.

# 3. KissMetrics

Analytics is something very important and powerful that most online businesses ignore. Building a successful business isn’t just about having a clean design and marketing. Most importantly, it’s about testing every action and every change you make to see what is giving you the best return on investment.
Unlike basic analytic tools like Google Analytics, KissMetrics helps you monitor important metrics that can influence your business growth; it can monitor anything from how many leads you get as a result of a particular campaign to what traffic source leads to the most conversion. It also ensures each user is properly tracked and as a result makes sure you don’t waste your marketing efforts.

# 4. Informly

This newly-launched tool gives you access to almost all of your online stats in one dashboard. Whether you want to monitor your Google search positions, your Kissmetrics data, your AWeber or Mailchimp subscription growth and email analytics or the performance of each article you publish, Informly is for you.
With Informly, you have all your online dashboards in one place and you don’t have to worry about logging in to various dashboards and accounts every day before you know what is happening with your online business.

# 5. Bufferapp

Bufferapp makes it easy for you to streamline your social media marketing. Instead of having to spend hours managing your social media profiles every day, Bufferapp gives you a platform that allows you to do it all in one place.
Every online business not using social media is making a huge mistake; irrespective of the size of your business, social media can work for you. Take Cisco for example; Cisco was able to save $100,000 in product launch expenses and still break previous records by focusing on social media as opposed to doing things the traditional way they used to. Bufferapp makes social media easy for you without having to spend the huge bucks.
What tools do you suggest for your website?

Why Social Media Are Not a Strategy

Are you in business to be popular? Connected? Engaged? You are, or at least you should, be in business to make profit. Because that is what business is about. You may have chosen to be an entrepreneur for many reasons, but if you don’t have a profit you don’t have a business. It really is that simple.
There are many compelling blog posts and snazzy videos that strongly promote the notion that social media are imperative to the success of business. These posts usually incorporate something along the lines of “Social Media, can you afford not to?” Well, I want to put it on record that yes, many businesses can absolutely afford not to “do” social media. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for some businesses, engagement in social media is actually damaging.

The Personal Hygiene Analogy

If personal hygiene were an analogy for marketing, then social media would be perfume. To put this bluntly, perfume is no substitute for the fundamentals of personal hygiene. You need a 365 bathing plan, and perfume is no substitute for that.

What are social media?

The answer is partly in the question. Media, being the plural of medium, are ways to store or communicate information. There are many flavours of media:

• Newspapers ~ print
• TV stations ~ broadcast
• Social media ~ digital

Social media can, like any other media, be used to achieve certain personal or business objectives. And used wisely, these media can work very well for business, but only as part of an actual marketing strategy. It will not work for every business and it is time to be honest about that. A radio advertisement will not work for every business, and it is ridiculous to presume that social media will work for every business. You need to pick the media that is most relevant and appropriate for your business. Sparkplugs on Facebook? I don’t think so.

What Social Media is not

1. A Business Plan
   There are many components to a business plan, but frankly some businesses are so busy faffing around with social media that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.  How does your business make profit? What products or services should be sold to optimise profit? These are some of the big questions that need to be answered before you can develop a business plan or a marketing plan or even dream of engaging in social media. For a business, there are really only two business numbers that matter – Cash and Profit.
2. A Marketing Plan
   You need to define your brand and identify your customer before you even begin to draft a marketing plan or select marketing media.
3. A substitute for relevance
   The number of followers you have in any social medium is not an end in itself. Neither is building a community, engagement levels or indeed, (social media aside), the  number of website visitors you have. So many businesses focus on their social media metrics that they forget about the cost of acquisition of a customer or about the profit margin that they should be making. Social media needs to be relevant to your business objectives. There are many worthy and relevant business objectives for social media other than sales, such as brand building, awareness marketing and customer service. These all contribute indirectly to profit. What you and your followers do when they engage with you or visit your website is what is really relevant, not the number of followers that you have.
4. Free
   Social media are not free. Even if you do not allocate an employee or outsource this function, it takes time to create and collate content, to broadcast it and to engage with your community. Time spent on social media can have a massive opportunity cost, if it diverts a business owner from focusing on making profit.

The Social Media Mantra

The bankers’ mantra is well known:
“Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is reality”.
Here’s my adaptation for social media, which I’ll call “The Social Media Mantra”:
“Followers are vanity but profit is sanity.”

What do you think?

Social media are not a strategy. They are, well, a collection of mediums. It seems likely that social media are here to stay. The popularity of individual social media networks may wax and wane, but people have an inherent desire to be connected and social media fills that personal need. However, when it comes to business, relevance is the name of the game. What do you think? Is it really relevant to every business to be using social media?