The Software Tools That Keep My Small Business Running

As a small, creative online business owner, I am often asked about the tools I use to run my business. Since I am a company of one, it’s crucial that I use the most powerful and reliable tools to ensure my products are well designed and that my business runs smoothly on the back end so I can spend more of my time creating and less of it managing administrative or technical matters. Today I am sharing with you the software tools specifically that I use to design, promote and manage my small business.

Adobe Creative Suite

As a creative business owner, I choose to use the industry standard for digital content creation, which is why I use Adobe Creative Suite 6. Within the suite, I use three main applications primarily. InDesign to create my shop printables, Photoshop to edit my images, and Illustrator to create unique design elements and vectors that are used across my business.

WordPress

For my website, including my shop, I rely on WordPress as my content management system. WordPress offers a wide variety of functionality and customization for my site, and since I designed and built it on my own, it was important that these features be easy to use and open source so that I retained complete control over the look and feel of my site.

WooCommerce

When it came time for me to develop and integrate my shop into my website, I was relieved to learn about WooCommerce, a free plugin that integrates seamlessly into WordPress to deliver enterprise-level eCommerce functionality. WooCommerce manages the back end of my shop automatically with very little input or time from me. Since I sell predominantly digital products, the automated system managed by WooCommerce makes the income I generate from my shop completely passive!

MailChimp

Although I don’t rely on an email list as a primary means of communication between my business and customers, I recently began dabbling with MailChimp to create some one-off mailing lists and so far, it’s working very well. I like that I can create individual lists for products or services I am working on and use it to capture information for the members of my community that want more information. That way, once my new item is ready, I can send a quick email to my list sharing the news and hopefully capture some quick sales!

Paypal

For me, so much of what I love about running a small online business is convenience, so when it comes to collecting payments for my products and services, I rely on Paypal. I know it may not be perfect, but it’s a great solution for a solopreneur who needs a low cost, automated method for collecting payments. Paypal integrates seamlessly into my WooCommerce enabled WordPress shop and keeps my income flowing in without my time or attention! I literally make money, even while I’m sleeping and there is no greater feeling than that!

Google Analytics

Since my shop acts as the primary source of income for my business, I like to keep a close eye on my site’s analytics. Although I try not to get caught up in numbers, I do believe that knowing about your site traffic can really help you as a business owner to understand the direction of your business and how to grow. Google Analytics supplies all the key information I need to know about my site traffic and shop conversions, and I highly recommend it.

Final Cut Pro

As a small business owner, I am always looking for new ways to improve the level of quality in my products and promotional content. Since I rely on YouTube as a primary form of communication between my business and my customers, I recently decided to make the jump from iMovie to Final Cut Pro for my video editing software. Although I firmly believe that iMovie provides a number of powerful video editing tools, I had previously always hit a wall when editing in iMovie that I was never able to break through until I upgraded to Final Cut Pro. Now, I can create all the stunning video effects that I need to help add polish to my brand and the experience I create through my YouTube channel. The change may be slight, but I believe the long term effects are going to be very positive for my business.

Scrivener

Finally, it should come as no surprise that since I create a great deal of content for my platforms on a regular basis, I would need a very powerful word processing tool to manage my thoughts, scripts and blog posts. For that large task, I rely on Scrivener. In a week I have three blog posts to write, two YouTube videos to concept and outline, and numerous other messages that my business sends out on social media. Scrivener manages and organizes all my written content and backs up to the cloud so I never have to worry about loosing my work. If you would like to read more about how I use Scrivener to organize my writing, click here.

So those are the top software tools that I use to run my small, creative online business. I hope you gained some insight from this information and perhaps discovered a new tool that you can use for your own business. If you have other software favorites that you use for your business, or just to keep your digital life organized and efficient, I’d love to hear about them, so please leave me a comment below!

xoxo,