Laura Benjamin

I’ve been a fan of Shutterstock since 2006. They’re the best library for stock images – quality, pricing, variety, license terms… Checks all the boxes.

While you should never overuse stock photos in your projects, it can be a great way to fill gaps, add interesting elements, or find the perfect background for your design. Give Shutterstock a try and get 20% off a subscription plan with the link below.

One of the best ways I’ve found to stay on top of what’s trending in the world of small businesses and marketing is to stay on top of specific news categories. Flipboard is the best tool I’ve found to aggregate and deliver me relevant news without a lot of extra work on my part (and it’s free).

There’s a desktop version if you want to access it on your computer, but the easiest way is to install it on iOS or Android. It’ll bring you a personalized magazine every day from the sources you select, and help you find new and relevant ones you can subscribe to.

Hubspot’s Free Sales Hub CRM is seriously powerful. Whether your business relies on a longer sales cycle or you’d just like to centralize info about your prospects and customers, Hubspot can help. And it integrates with almost everything.

I use it for maintaining my contacts and my to-do lists, and to get daily email reminders about sales and relationship activity.

We also use it at one of my companies as a literal hub of all information throughout the lifecycle of our contacts’ accounts.

I’ve used MailChimp for years. Every few years I try another platform but just keep coming back for MailChimp’s simplicity and streamlined use. This is your best starting point for small business email marketing and automation.

(I’d still recommend using Hubspot’s CRM over Mailchimp’s CRM feature, and there is an easy way to integrate them.)

If you’re wondering how you can get an email address that has your domain in it, this is how. Now you can stop using your @gmail.com address for work and gain immediate credibility.

Beyond that, I love Google Workspace for collaboration on docs and spreadsheets, and although it’s not quite as good as Zoom for quality, the inclusion of Google Meet is a plus too.

The $6/user/mo plan is great for most small businesses to get started. You can always scale up if you need more cloud storage, or use something like Dropbox for a more efficient price point, depending on your team size.

Not a designer? No problem. Check out the best free design app for non-designers and get things designed fast.

If you’re looking to use the best-of-the-best and have design skills, then Adobe CC and Photoshop are the premium option.

Otherwise, it’s hard to go wrong with Canva. The free plan is easily going to suit the needs of most small or early stage business owners and marketers.

Bare minimum, Google Analytics is a must add to your website. Along with tools like Hotjar and Google Search Console, it will give you a complete picture of your traffic and audience behavior on your website.

We only improve that which we measure – so start with Analytics to start measuring and learning from what your traffic is telling you.

Budget solutions like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace are good starting points. When you’re ready for the next step forward, WordPress is the best way to build and manage a growing small business’s web presence and blog.

It’s open-source, extremely customizable, and powers more than 35% of all websites. The only catch? You’ll probably need a developer to set everything up for you. After that, it should serve well as your primary content marketing and lead generation source for years.