Every startup or company that has just started its journey needs a series of essential affordable tools to finally take off and achieve success. However, at the beginning, companies usually start with a rather tight budget and do not always have the money to hire some of the most expensive and powerful tools .
In this sense, we must first analyze what essential affordable tools are really essential for our business and then investigate a little to find the ones that best suit our needs and budget . There are more and more free tools or for an affordable price on the Internet and many of them can be extremely useful to boost our business. These are some of them.
List of essential affordable tools for startups
Ix, to create a Web page
Nowadays, every self-respecting company should have a presence on the Internet and that means having to create a professional Web page. We may not have the budget to order an incredible web design, but with Ix we can create a page for ourselves completely free of charge and without knowing how to program .
For this, the tool offers us multiple customization templates that we can adapt to our needs. We can even get a mobile optimized design , something extremely important since Google penalizes in its search results pages that are not adapted for these devices.
Nubile, to hire external personnel
In the beginnings of a company , personnel needs often arise at specific moments or for very specific tasks . In those cases, while the need is not consolidated, one of the most recurrent options is to hire a freelance or freelance professional , but where to find it?
In recent years there have been various platforms for hiring these freelancers, where we can not only find thousands of freelance , but also see their resumes, portfolios of work they have done and even the reviews from other entrepreneurs that have hired previously. We can search by profession, educational level, valuation, etc. Or simply post an offer and see who shows up.
One of the main platforms for the Spanish-speaking community is Belong . Internationally, Up work also stands out . In general, these platforms act as a showcase for self-employed professionals and as intermediaries in their hiring.
Write, for project management
Whether to coordinate teamwork internally, to monitor the performance of external workers or remote workers we have hired, or to continue managing ongoing projects while we are traveling, it is essential to have a project management tool , to be able to be based on the cloud .
We recently spoke of Base camp, a cloud-based tool that offers a free team work space with no user limit and whose interface is very intuitive and easy to use. However, today we would like to highlight Write , an advanced communication and project management tool based on the very interesting cloud . Its free version can not surpass Base camp, because it has many limitations, but the professional version, for only $ 10 per user, is more powerful, with many more functions and data views and more flexible in terms of rationalization options. the optimization of productivity and the accomplishment of tasks.
Click booth to advertise our company on the Internet
Unlike other services in which we pay a flat rate or a Cost per Click (PCP), that is, as advertisers we pay for clicks made by users on the ads, the Click booth business model is based on Cost per Share (CPA), that is, we will only have to pay for sales or leads actually obtained from each campaign . That way we can announce ourselves and start growing without our advertising budget skyrocketing.
Search metrics, for content marketing, SO and CHEM
When we create a new company it is important to attract more and more users to our website and for that we must try to appear well placed between the results of Google and other search engines. However, not only is it enough to attract new users, but it is also important that they spend time browsing our site and, above all, that they return. Search metrics offers us all the necessary essential affordable tools to achieve it, from a complete analytics, to optimization suggestions to improve the positioning in the search engines, etc. For € 69 we can hire the basic plan.
In any case, regardless of our budget, this is best not to skimp, since all experts agree that a tool of this type is essential to drive the digital strategy of a company . There are other similar essential affordable tools such as Bright Edge or Rushmore , but Search metrics, in addition to being the most awarded, has a Spanish version.
Genius Referrals, to publicize our website
One of the best options for spreading any information in the real world is word of mouth . And it is more than proven that it also works very well on the Internet. This type of dissemination to publicize our company and website on the Internet, known as referral program , is even better than ads , because an ad reaches a certain number of people who see it, but word of mouth and Recommendations are gaining momentum as they are transmitted. If a person speaks well of our company to several friends and those, in turn, do the same with their friends, the reach multiplies more and more.
On the other hand, studies indicate that customers who come to a website by the recommendation of a friend or acquaintance are more valuable than those who come by themselves or by an advertisement . And, as a user, we can not trust an information we see in an advertisement, but we trust our friends and, therefore, also in their recommendations.
Genius Referrals helps us to include this diffusion system on our website , creating an automated reference program adapted to fit perfectly in the interface of our website. The tool encourages users to recommend our website to their friends in exchange for various rewards , such as promotions, discounts, free products, etc. -Adjusting those rewards to our budget- and helps us keep track of the whole process. The application is available in Spanish, although they could greatly improve your translation.