Solopreneurs have to deal with a lot. From the day-to-day tasks of running a business to having to do every stage of a business operation, there’s very little time to devote to marketing.
But marketing can be the difference between having one customer a month to growing to 100 customers a week. Sounds impossible? You can do all of it with the right marketing toolkit. The right solopreneur marketing toolkit needs to be cost-effective, easy to introduce to your business, and effective. With that in mind, check out our top picks for every part of a great marketing toolkit.
Marketing Toolkit Essentials
Squarespace
One of the most helpful online spaces for a solopreneur is Squarespace. It is a site builder and web hosting tool in one and includes a set of marketing features to help design, create and manage any site to grow traffic. Squarespace is the ultimate beginner-friendly tool for building websites for a beginner’s marketing toolkit. It makes website and brand building accessible without needing to hire a web designer or coder.
Squarespace simply allows you to create your site without knowing how to code. While Squarespace may be a paid tool, Solopreneurs can use the trial period to see if they would like to get the premium version.
WordPress
There are cases that self-hosted sites that can be very beneficial to help monetize and transform a profitable business. WordPress is the best option to build a self-hosted site with original content. You can use available plugins for any kind of style and content, both free and paid. There are also thousands and thousands of themes to choose from no matter the budget though the hostage of the site will come with an affordable price.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a popular web hosting service that gives you a free domain, free site builder, and a WordPress installation. Their customer service chat is available 24/7, and their pricing rates are very affordable. Bluehost is highly recommended for beginners as they have low rates and practice 30-day money-back guarantee.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is another paid social media marketing tool accompanied by an excellent editorial calendar tool. This program includes assistance with content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and automation, analytics, workflow management, headline analyzer, and even email title analyzer. For solopreneurs on a budget, they have a free 14-day trial period.
Tailwind
When it comes to helpful tips, guides, and templates, Pinterest is excellent assistance with its visual search engine. Need to schedule your pins? Tailwind is the perfect choice since it allows users to create clean and organized posting schedules (up to a week) with the help of an optimized calendar. Plus, Tailwind also has a paid yet very user-friendly dashboard that provides detailed analytics.
Later
Instagram is one of the best social media platforms to market on considering its reach, and Later is a scheduling app that makes it possible to plan, schedule, and auto-publish your Instagram posts. Solopreneurs can use a free version of this, though an affordable paid version can offer more utility and options.
Hootsuite
Next is Hootsuite, another marketing tool used for managing social media. It helps keep track of all kinds of social media activities through a properly structured dashboard. A bonus is that Hootsuite can also measure and report social media campaigns’ impact, all within a 30-day trial period.
Mailerlite
Those who are interested in marketing through email will benefit significantly from Mailerlite. The program offers a small email marketing platform, allowing up to 1000 subscribers. This engine can provide solopreneurs with a drag and drop email builder, automated landing page creation, templated crafted popups, and an email automation platform.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers an edge for high ranking success through competitor analysis, keyword search, technical site, SEO auditing, niche monitoring, and rank tracking. While one of its glaring cons is its inaccessibility due to pricing, bloggers looking for a strong pillar for success in the latter parts of their careers can look to Ahrefs.
Yoast
It’s possible to make SEO less complicated with Yoast, one of the popular and helpful SEO plugin tools. Yoast is available for free, but the premium option offers more features that make the hustle less strenuous. Solopreneurs will find that Yoast’s keyword optimization, social media page preview, readability verification, and categories control are only some of the technical background features that any budding and seasoned solopreneur should have under their belt for better success chances.
Google Keyword Planner
Keywords are often brought up when talking about digital marketing, and why wouldn’t it be when it’s how the internet works? Solopreneurs looking to find the right words to target in the journey of staying relevant should look to Google AdWords Planner. It gives a comparative analysis of the keyword trends for a solopreneur’s niche, narrowing down the list of keywords to those most critical.
Google Analytics
Alongside the keyword planner is Google Analytics, a free tool that keeps solopreneurs in the know about traffic volume and the most visited sections of their site. It also keeps track of sources and conversion rates, audience characteristics, and other highly detailed insights. This tool is vital to monitor traffic and conversion rates, thus turning insights into adjusted strategies and a profitable business.
Website Grader by Hubspot
Website Grader Hubspot helps solopreneurs when it comes to keeping an eye on their site’s performance. Not only that, but HubSpot’s website grader can also assist budding businesses with a detailed analysis and hints on areas that can be further improved, from mobile accessibility to SEO optimization and security.
MailChimp
To this day, MailChimp is still one of the most popular email marketing tools, if not the most popular of them all. It’s free to use for the first 2000 subscribers, with a monthly limit of 12000 emails.
MailChimp helps solopreneurs to create campaigns that will suit best their business and communication goals. It also provides many customization options.
Sumo
Sumo is a comprehensive suite of tools that help grow a solopreneur’s site’s traffic. Accounts with less than 200 subscribers can use Sumo for free. The tool offers an option of 10 tools to work with that best suits a business for around $25 a month.
Milotree
Milotree is a cost-effective tool that’s the quickest way to grow one’s social media following and email list for subscribers. It makes it simple to convert site visitors into followers. Not only that, but it cuts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest, among others. It has analytics, therefore, enabling a monitoring system for business growth.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a free writing tool that is useful to have zero-error rates for typos and grammatical errors. A solopreneur can always use this engine in order to make sure that they only produce the best content. It’s compatible with all web browsers, applicable to most if not all sites that allow writing, and is highly accessible to those with internet connections.
Recommended reading: 3 Proofreading Steps to Ensuring Perfect Copy
Convertkit
Convertkit is one of the best tools to utilize in order to start monetization from online pages, blogs, and websites. This tool mainly helps with the organization of mailing lists and mail campaigns. Convertkit was wholly made and designed for creators and their needs. Convertkit helps with not only the mail design and test email content, but it also helps with measuring the performance of online campaigns.
TemplateMonkey
Solopreneurs should also know the importance of using traditional marketing toolkits even in the tech era. Brochures, business cards, flyers—these documents help businesses connect with potential colleagues, clients, and customers on a smaller scale. Hence, it’s best to keep them handy.
Those who aren’t confident in their design skills or simply don’t have the time to design traditional marketing tools can look to template sites for ready-made designs. TemplateMonkey is one such example, boasting thousands of design templates, both free and premium, ready for use.
Leadpages
Leadpages is a landing page builder tool that will help create a conversational-driven and effective landing page. A solopreneur can easily convert page viewers into followers and customers through good landing pages.
Statistics sustain and even guarantee a more than 55% increase in sales with the effective use of landing pages. Leadpages is a paid tool that gives multiple and vast selections of drag and drops templates.
Trello
Trello is one of the best project managers for its free usage, with many templates to choose from. Solopreneurs usually have a lot to work on, and keeping everyone on track and up to speed can take a lot of time.
Trello helps with monitoring, task designation, to-do lists, and others with its great project managing templates. Trello is a free tool that reduces email strings, keeps timelines, and monitors productivity, perfect for your first marketing toolkit.
Really Good Emails
Really Good Emails boasts a giant collection of over 2000 email templates, mainly transactional and e-commerce related. All the templates have been attentively curated by the team that manages the site and are available instantly.
Smart Insights’ Marketing Planning Templates
Smart Insights‘ Marketing Planning Templates is one of the most popular templates together with other 26 sample guides. These readily usable templates help create and readapting marketing plans for small and large businesses, such as business frameworks and integrated marketing plans.
Good Email Copy
Good Email Copy is a selection of carefully drafted emails to assist with email creation through available email templates for any type of mail a solopreneur might need. It is also the most upvoted email marketing template directory.
How to Start a Money-Making Blog
First on the list of free marketing courses and tutorials for your marketing toolkit is “How to Start a Money-Making Blog.”
Beginner solopreneurs gain access to an outline detailing the early steps to success, from starting a successful blog featuring content for specific niches to finding the perfect platform to use to select a domain name and website hosting. It also teaches how to navigate WordPress and shows various tools to use.
Snackable Free Writing Course
Enchanting Marketing blog by Henneke comes up with a free yet mandatory course for all bloggers that will teach how to enchant and delight one’s chosen audience. Having a packed schedule is no problem since Enchanting Marketing is split into short emails that are filled with tips that are easy to follow.
HubSpot Academy
HubSpot offers for free the possibility to learn and get digital marketing certifications widely recognized in the industry. Certificates are being provided for Inbound Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Growth Hacking Design, SEO, and more.
Legalize Your Blog
Solopreneurs need to know how the law affects their work. Jackie of Jade & Oak is a US-based attorney that shares insights regarding blogging legalities. While it isn’t mandatory to study it, it will help make life easier in the long run. Solopreneurs can always use a good knowledge of the reader’s privacy protection, taxation, and tax exemptions, protecting business information from internet theft and illegalities related to blogs. Plus, it’s free.
Linked University
Everybody knows LinkedIn. What most people aren’t aware of, however, is that it also owns Linked University. This course teaches solopreneurs how to generate leads through this global network of professionals. The course aims to empower solopreneurs as experts in the industry and generate high-quality leads for any business.
Marketing toolkits such as those that are stated above can be the missing puzzle piece in a business. As a solopreneur, whether your business is still about to launch or already going in for a couple of years, there is no harm to seek assistance from various sources, tools, templates, and other knowledge in the field through online courses and tutorials in order to advance business plans, improve the overall business management, and even upgrade advertising and marketing methods.
Furthermore, parts of a marketing toolkit such as templates, free online courses, SEO optimization tools, content tools, and the like can boost ways that can help the business grow. Not only that, but these can also help solopreneurs in their personal journey in this vast field that only keeps on expanding.
