Behind the Scenes: My favorite Business Tools

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Honeybook

Honeybook is a client management system, which is basically heaven sent. They make it easy to collect your client information, send out invoices, track time, and so. much. more. If there’s one thing you sign up for from this post, Honeybook might be the best thing you could choose. There is so much goodness contained in this service that it really needs its own blog post. For now I’ll go over just a few of my very favorite things about it.

The questionnaire – this captures everything you need to know about your potential customer, and saves it for your reference. You can set it up to ask them where they found you, and all of the information you’ll need to get their project started.
Workflows – with workflows, you get to set up, step by step, what you need to do to go through every client experience. You can customize this perfectly for what you need, adding in steps where you can send a saved email, send out a contract to sign, or send an invoice and get paid. Above, you can see my super simple workflow, and how it automatically groups my customers into the step that we’re on. You can add as many steps as you need, I’ve seen workflows with over 100 individual steps!
A great mobile app – I really don’t like things that I can’t easily use from my iPad. I’m spoiled. Honeybook’s mobile app is great though, and has all the features

And I’ve got a deal that will make it even easier for you to make the investment for your business. Sign up here and you can get 50% off the regular pricing. For a whole year.

Still not sure? Don’t worry, you can always start by going through a free trial, with no commitments. After you’ve fallen in love, come back and get the discount!

Tailwind

Tailwind is one of my favorite social media related discoveries. I mainly use it to schedule my pins on Pinterest in advance, but really, it can do so much. Signing up for Tailwind was one of the best decisions I’ve made for my social media presence. I plan a month at a time out, and it only takes me a couple of hours. Just a few of the highlights that Tailwind does:

Schedule about a weeks worth of pins in under half an hour. Time is money, and boy does tailwind save me a lot of time. It’s easy to fill up your queue with a combo of the browser extension and board lists. Easily spread out your pins with interval pinning and a drag and drop calendar.
After you’ve got those pins going, the analytics included make it easy to see what’s working for you and what you should tweak. You can see how each pin is doing, and see your best performing pins.
Join Tribes! Tribes are niche groups of pincers that all support each other, and supply you with so much related content for your audience.
My very favorite tailwind feature though? It’s a newer feature called SmartLoops. Basically, Loops let you repeat your very best content over and over again, at calibrated intervals perfect for your schedule. They allow you to set board rules so that you don’t accidentally spam any group boards by adding the same pin to multiple loops. You can tell the board rules, okay, I only want to post to this board once a day, once a week, etc. Loops really are one of my very best time saving business practices.

Ready to sign up? Use this link for a free month for both you and me! After your free month, the pro plan starts at only $9.99 a month. And it really is one of the best investments I’ve made in my business.

Creative Market

I love Creative Market for so many reasons. They make it so easy to find handmade fonts, gorgeous art, and mockups that I can seamlessly integrate into my branding. Without Creative Market, I would spend hours doing things that I can now use for creativity. Plus, the money I spend there goes straight to other artists and small businesses. They have a certified product process that helps you guarantee that you’re getting exactly what you’re looking for. Check out the rotating free goodies you can grab right here.

I also sell some of the mockups that I make on Creative Market. You can find them here:

SiteGround

SiteGround is the company I use for hosting my website! I’ll admit, I’m totally clueless about what goes on to keep my website up and running, but I trust these guys completely. They’ve built their service using the best technologies, ensuring that I never have to worry about my website being fast, safe, and easy to manage. I would recommend them over and over, and I’m so glad that I switched over to them. They are:

built to provide an incredibly fast hosting service
consistently among the first hosting companies to provide their users access to the latest speed technologies
a website security dream, offering a highly specialized security team to address web security threats, a team that specializes in advanced, custom security solutions, and a team that is always on alert to monitor their servers.
EASY to use. This one is the most important for me. I have no idea what I’m doing a good deal of the time that I’m working with website things, I need something that’s going to be easy for me to bumble through. And if there’s a problem, their customer service is the best.