The best online tools to help you and your business

The web is a wonderful place providing countless possibilities - especially for a business. But, therein lies the problem. The list of what is out there is quite literally endless. This can make it tricky to know what tools or platforms to give priority to. The truth is it's all about opinions. Someone will say one thing works well whilst another person will have a totally different view and recommend another platform which is supposedly better. It can be rather confusing at times.

At Payzone, we like to keep things simple. Rather than suggest a thousand platforms and confuse you even more, we have listed a select number of highly recommended ones that we think will be hugely valuable to you. Let's take a look at some…

Google Analytics

A fantastic tool that integrates with your site. It will give you a detailed breakdown of your audience’s online habits. Highly recommended for any business with some kind of website - and it's free!

Google Drive

Sticking with Google (because they are great) they also offer their own cloud storage system. This is excellent for small companies, because you can use it to not only to create documents but also share them with other members of your team - allowing for productive collaboration. Plus, your work gets saved automatically - so no need to stress about losing it.

Slack

Another great tool for harnessing a collective mentality (or something like that). Slack is known for being an excellent messaging app, but it’s also great for organising tasks between teams - so everyone is clear about what they need to do. You can also integrate google drive documents into Slack which is great for aligning both the tasks and the work itself into one place.

Mailchimp

The most well-known email marketing tool out there. Mailchimp allows you to build templates to send to your customers in a way that suits you best. And as it’s automated, you won’t need to manually send individual emails to each customer - a huge time saver.

Moz

If SEO is a big deal for you then look no further than this ‘little gem’. Moz will allow you to gauge the SEO friendliness of each page of your site, so that you can see which pages need attention. MOZ is also extremely good at spotting which websites are linking to you (Backlinks). And of course, you will be able to see which keywords your site is optimising for in search engines

Wordpress

A fantastic content management tool which you can use to build your website. Or if you have already done this, you can integrate Wordpress into your site for the purpose of creating blog content. Wordpress is used by millions of people just for blogs. So, if you are looking to create consistent engaging content for your audience then Wordpress is one of the best sites around for doing this. And with its various plugins (such as Yoast SEO) your content will become even more visible to search engines.

Buzzsumo

This is an amazing tool in terms of content marketing. With Buzzsumo, you can see which of your content is being shared most frequently across social media channels. If you are looking to target influencers in your industry you will find that this tool makes this task remarkably simple to do. So, if content is something you are giving priority for then Buzzsumo should be considered as an essential part of your strategy.

Google Adwords

This was mentioned earlier and is yet another tool provided by Google. Adwords is excellent in terms of utilising paid search and bidding for advertising space under key terms that you want your business to be found on. This will require a level of investment and commitment on your part, but if done correctly then your business could stand to benefit enormously.

Hootsuite

Assuming you are active on social, then this platform could be ideal to help you harness and organise all your activity across your social media accounts. Hootsuite is used by over 15 million people and for good reason: it allows you to curate and monitor your social media accounts, in a simple user-friendly way. There are many social media management tools out there, but we think this is probably the most reputable one of them all.

Survey Monkey

Want to know exactly what your audience think of you? Survey Monkey will help you do this. So, if you are wondering what your customers think of your site then this tool will be able to directly ask your audience questions, and in turn, you can get real sincere insights in terms of what you are doing well and not so well.

Skype

Don’t have time for face to face meetings because you are busy in the office? No problem. With Skype you can have video meetings from your office. It’s a better alternative to a phone call and negates the need for having to travel for a face to face meeting. If you want to meet an important client or speak to a supplier, but need to stay in the office, then a Skype call is the perfect medium for this.

Intuit

How about keeping track of your finances are there tools that do this? Of course, there are plenty of these. But Intuit is a particularly good piece of accounting software. Intuit enables you to track key aspects of your business such as unpaid invoices, sales, profits and even expenses. This piece of software also allows you to send invoices - particularly useful if you are looking to be paid quickly.

Time Doctor

Want to know where and how you spent your time while working? Time Doctor can give you accurate data on this. With all that data on a useful dashboard, you could easily evaluate how productive (or not) you have been. Perfect for managing teams and increasing their productivity.

Here at Payzone, we're proud to support small to medium-sized businesses within the UK. Find out more about us and take a look at how our card payment solutions could help your business grow.