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Software Tools I Love and Recommend

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:41:17 GMT

When building the online brand of your small business, it can be hard to know where to start.

I pulled together a list of tools that I love and recommend (and use personally!) and I'll be keeping this list up-to-date with new resources I discover.

Most small business owners I know wear many hats. The to-do lists seem endless and it's essential to make the most of your time! And when you’re just starting out, having a solid grip on some DIY tools to make your life easier can help you grow to the point where you don’t have to do-it-all-yourself anymore.

Here are my top recommended tools:

For easy and quick Graphic Design

Canva is an easy to use Graphic Design software that millions of people use for a reason! I love their Brand Kits feature and templates, to help keep a cohesive look throughout all your designs. The sharing, commenting and revisions suite is robust and makes it easy to work with a team and go back and forth on a design, without exporting and emailing various versions back and forth. Boy do I know how annoying that can be to keep track of.

For Website Building

I use and love the Snapps website builder . It’s based on Duda which scores highest on Google’s Core Web Vitals, it’s great for SEO and uptime. The interface is very easy to learn and use, and has a lot of power and flexibility.

Of course if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can always reach out to me for help :)

Event Planning

If you’re planning an event, I use and recommend Ticket Tailor! (It’s better than Event Brite in my opinion…) Sign up with this link to get 50 free credits.

CRM and Invoicing

My sister recommended Honeybook as an all-in-one CRM, so I started using it at the start of my business. I can see why she recommended it (and why so many others do too!) It brings together a customer database, contracts, invoicing, payments and project management. Use my referral link to sign up and get 25% off your first year .

Social Media Scheduling

I have used MANY social media scheduling tools throughout my career and I haven’t even tried them all. It would be hard to pick a top recommendation because they each seem to have their strengths and weaknesses, but I would have to land on Buffer for my pick of the best all-around social media scheduling tool.

I do really like the Link-in-bio feature from Later though.

For Facebook and Instagram, the Meta Business Suite has some scheduling tools which are okay if you’re only small scale, but I find it lacks the ease-of-use that other tools offer. Meta seems to be changing how they organize Facebook Page Settings all the time though so I try to do the bare minimum in there, haha.

Business Email

For business/domain emails and workspace storage - Google Workspace would be my top pick here. The full suite of Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, etc, is too hard to ignore. And if you’re a non-profit, they offer a free tier of their Google Workspace plan!

Task Management

Asana is my ride-or-die task management software. You can do a lot on just the free version as well. It’s great for teams and also just for managing your individual workload.

Team Chat

Slack would have to be my pick here. I love the app integrations they offer, on top of a great chat and channel set-up. Plus you can make your own emojis for the whole team to use. It counts as work right?

Digital Asset Management

Organizing your photos and assets is the secret to using them effectively. How many times have you not been able to find the photo you want for a social media or blog post? Pics.io is the winner when it comes to the happy medium of price, features and functionality in Digital Asset Management, and trust me, I called almost every big name DAM provider that’s out there. The cost is reasonable for individuals or teams, and it can work on top of existing storage you use (like Google Drive) rather than having a big cost increase because you’re paying them for so much storage. Their inbox feature is really nice, but if you need a lot of upload links, you may want to look elsewhere (Filecamp seemed to have more options there, but I didn’t like their layout and interface overall.)

Social Media Influencing

If you want to start making it as a social media influencer, a great place to start is with social collaboration and free products! Apply at Stack Influence and get started today.

It's Both: Big Picture Vision AND Attention to Detail

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:50:46 GMT

Is it too much to ask for a website that's just... not broken?

It shouldn’t be too much to expect a functioning website. It really shouldn’t be.

Yet there are people out there passing themselves off as SEO or web experts and building out websites for service providers that are LITTERED with broken links and inaccurate information! (True story… I am so glad the service provider trusted me to redesign and fix his website after so many bad experiences with other marketers.)

But what really gets me riled up is when I’m browsing a website that is literally for a website consulting agency, and it is broken. WE ARE THE EXPERTS, friends. Let’s set a better example for ourselves and for the people we are trying to serve.

I know it gets annoying to my colleagues but what I expect of myself and those who work for me is to always follow a post-launch checklist -

Check the webpage looks good on desktop, tablet and mobile
Check the social meta and page title
Test any contact, signup or donation forms on the live site and ensure all the information is passing through as it should

It’s the marriage of big picture vision and attention to all the details–both matter.

Three Things You Should Never Do on Your Website - Part 1

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:43:18 GMT

It's more than just pet peeves... when I come across these problems on a website, I'm genuinely concerned!

One mistake I run into ALL the time, when I’m just surfing the web, is coming across websites that just don’t work on a phone.

Oftentimes more than 50% of your web traffic is coming from mobile!

That's why the number one thing you should NEVER do on your website is :

1. Never build your website on a desktop computer, and forget to check it on mobile size browser or on your actual device.

A good website builder, like Snapps , will create a responsive design automatically, but you can easily toggle to the tablet or mobile size window to verify your page layout and functionality still is 100% on smaller screen sizes.

2. Never abuse H1s, or Heading 1’s.

SEO best practices say you should only have 1 element defined as an <h1> per page. You should use all the headings appropriately in descending order.

Following SEO rules properly like this will help Google rank your pages higher in their search results.

3. Overdesigning to the point where you are sacrificing user experience and hindering your readers.

If the line height is on brand but makes your content difficult to read, you’re forgetting the whole point of creating web content!

What You Need to Know about Backlinks and SEO: A Starter Guide

Tue, 02 May 2023 14:43:18 GMT

If you’re a small business owner, wrapping your mind around the topic of SEO might feel a little daunting. It seems easy enough to figure out what your main ranking keyword should be - take the most common descriptive word or phrase about what you offer, and if you’re a service based business, add your location - “bounce house rental Forney TX” for example.

But what is the secret sauce behind why some businesses and websites land at the top of page 1 on Google (or in the first 10 results, since Google introduced infinity scroll), and others end up buried among other seemingly less-relevant search results?

That, my friend, is the power of Search Engine Optimization.

The Secret Sauce of SEO: Backlinks

My goal today is to fill you in on some of the ingredients of that secret sauce: the first one we’ll focus on is Backlinks.

Everyone knows what a link is, right? You click on a link in an email to read a blog post, like this one. You click on a link from Facebook to read about the Met Gala on Buzzfeed and rank the celebrities outfits from best to worst. You tap a link on Instagram on an ad for boutique baby clothes. Your friend texts you a link to the restaurant you’re meeting at tonight. Or, you take to Google and search for “coffee shops in Highland Park” and browse through the top results to pick a place for next week’s coffee date, unaware that those top ranking sites are harnessing the power of SEO to get to #1.

What is Backlinking?

At its most basic, backlinking is websites linking to other websites.

A wedding photographer might link out to all the vendors they worked with at their most recent stunning wedding in Saratoga .

A local guide might link to their top Nashville recommendations if you’re visiting the Music City.

The recommendations of those trusted voices – the photographer, the blogger (especially if you’ve been following them for a while) – probably mean more to you than just something random you stumbled across on the internet.

It’s like some “trust” from the photographer or the blogger’s website drips over to the other website that they’re linking to. Just like YOU as a reader would trust their recommendations a bit more because of who it came from, the Google algorithm sees that trust flowing over because of the sites being linked together. A site with a lot of links from authoritative sites seems a lot more legit to Google than a site with 0 backlinks, for example.

In a nutshell, that’s why it’s important to get quality backlinks for YOUR site. If it doesn’t make sense, read it over again. It’ll sink in!

What Do Dofollow and Nofollow Links Mean?

A key thing to understand with backlinking is that every time you link out to someone, it “gives away” a little bit of the trust that YOUR website, your domain, has established. You want to use linking where it is strategic to help meet your business goals, as well as help your potential customers, but not getting screwed over in the process.

Some sites choose to implement a tag on certain links that marks them as “nofollow”, which means the trust won’t follow over to the other site that’s being linked to. Your site user can still access the content being linked to, but it won’t have the same impact on that site’s SEO that a “dofollow” link would.

Both nofollow and dofollow links are important. In the words of marketer Greg Bukovatz , “Google has their own special algorithm for determining the quality of a domain and thankfully it is not based solely on how many DF (dofollow) links you get.”

Some small businesses seek out getting good quality backlinks to improve their SEO and web presence. It’s a good strategy to follow; one of the most foundational building blocks of the art of search engine optimization. Businesses can even work together and link to each other’s websites, providing benefits to both parties!

How Can You Tell if a Link is Nofollow or Dofollow?

In most internet browsers, you can simply right click or double-tap on a link on any webpage and select “inspect” and view the HTML of the page which gives you a peek at the link properties. If a link is normal it’ll just follow the normal <a href=”...”> structure, but if it’s a Nofollow link, it’ll have a special parameter added into the <a> tag, it looks like ‘rel=”nofollow”’

Browsers like Google Chrome also allow special tools to be added onto your browser, called Extensions. I use an extension called “Nofollow” and adds a small red outline to any link that is a “nofollow” link, saving me a lot of steps and time on repetitive tasks like checking backlinks.

More Secret Sauce

Just like in Kung Fu Panda, where Po learned that the secret sauce was “nothing” – I hope the resources Dreampop Creative offers, like this blog post, can help you understand some of the secrets of SEO and how to build your business online, even better than before.

Why Hiring a Web Agency Can be Like Hiring a Contractor

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:51:40 GMT

You’ve probably heard how hiring a general contractor isn’t strictly necessary. You can Do It Yourself and hire subcontractors to do plumbing, electrical work, drywall, and on and on. A quick Google search “how to be your own general contractor” shows up 166 million results in just milliseconds.

But there’s a lot of stuff left for you to figure out. You may be on your own facing blueprints, load bearing walls, permits and tenant improvement allowance . How do you estimate a project budget for finishing out a shell space and moving in your small business when it’s your first time doing anything like that?

You can start to see how it just makes sense to work with someone who knows what they’re doing, in all aspects of your project.

If you’re getting started building your company’s online presence, you can go to a site like Fiver or Upwork and hire someone to design a logo. You can find someone else to write content for a website, someone else to design a website for you. But how do you figure out what pages you need on a website? How much do you have to teach yourself about content strategy and making your brand stand out? What sets you apart from all your competition?

Do you have to become an expert on search engine optimization? How do you figure out domain hosting and which DNS records to edit? Where do you learn what gets you to page 1 of Google search? Which YouTube expert do you trust as you try to teach yourself?

I’m not saying it’s not possible. But I am saying, there is an easier way to do it! You don’t have to make yourself learn all of that if you don’t want to.

A quicker path to a successful online brand is often working with experts. People who have spent years perfecting their craft and who know the ins and outs of websites, social media, branding, search, and all the rest.

In both general contracting and hiring a web agency–It really comes down to how valuable is your time and your mental capacity.

And if you're looking for a reputable commercial painter in Houston , I recommend Prestige Painters Houston.