9 Free Business Tools You Should Start Using Today(Copy)

As someone who struggled at the beginning of my multi-faceted business career, I decided to bring attention to some free tools provided by HubSpot which can help anybody start their marketing or sales career to learn some simple, yet useful, tricks and avoid some common pitfalls that can cost you in the long run.

Why These Tools, Specifically?

Being part of the SDR team offers us a unique opportunity to become familiar with multiple CRM and other SaaS platforms, HubSpot being one of them. Since the best features from HubSpot come from a paid subscription, obviously, that doesn’t mean that they don’t offer free tools anybody can use at any given time. Apart from the free version of their Sales, Marketing, Service, and Operations Hubs, which I won’t be discussing in this post, HubSpot has nine incredibly useful tools for digital marketing specialists and salespeople who are still honing their chops in their respective lines of work.

1. Website Grader  

At the number 1 spot, because of my personal appreciation for this tool, the Website Grader, as pretty much all the tools on this list, does exactly what the name says, it grades the overall quality of your website. The grading system is separated into four different categories: Performance, SEO, Mobile (implying mobile-friendliness of your site), and Security. Each of these four categories carries 30 points, save for the last one which carries 10. If your website is lacking in some of these categories the tool will score that category accordingly, but it will also provide advice on how to improve the mistakes that have been made. All for the purpose of making your users’ experience on your website as smooth as possible. A perfect tool for any business really and not just small teams, one-man operations, and ambitious upstarts who don’t have the funds to afford a specialist who would do an in-depth analysis of their website.

2. Email Signature Generator

The saying “The devil is in the details” is a perfect description for this tool. A lot of people overlook the importance of having an, at least, decent signature in use when writing cold emails and this can prove to be a pitfall for you in the long run. Why is that so? Well, it’s quite known that badly designed e-mail signatures can raise the red flag with some, if not most, spam filters, and leave you at a closed-door of what might have been a lucrative business deal for you. In order to avoid this, you can use the Email Signature Generator which can help you create a professionally designed signature from one of the provided templates. Furthermore, you can customize the colors of the signature to your liking, add your photo and logo of your company, add a custom field and a call-to-action button. Powerful stuff coming from an easy-to-use tool. However, if after designing your signature with this tool you’re still not satisfied with how it looks and would like to tweak it more, you can download the signature’s source code and modify it further if you have the know-how. The saying “The devil is in the details” is a perfect description for this tool. A lot of people overlook the importance of having an, at least, decent signature in use when writing cold emails and this can prove to be a pitfall for you in the long run. Why is that so? Well, it’s quite known that badly designed e-mail signatures can raise the red flag with some, if not most, spam filters, and leave you at a closed-door of what might have been a lucrative business deal for you. In order to avoid  this, you can use the Email Signature Generator which can help you  create a professionally designed signature from one of the provided  templates. Furthermore, you can customize the colors of the signature to your liking, add your photo and logo of your company, add a custom  field and a call-to-action button. Powerful stuff coming from an  easy-to-use tool. However, if after designing your signature with this tool you’re still not satisfied with how it looks and would like to  weak it more, you can download the signature’s source code and modify it further if you have the know-how. 

3. SSL Checker  

It’s quite known at this point that Google’s Chrome browser will warn you if you’re about to visit a website without an SSL certificate. I’m sure that it happened to you many times as it did for me. This is something you absolutely want to avoid when it comes to your website because it will negatively impact your website traffic. Personally, I steer clear from these websites as do most of you, I assume. But just to make sure that your website is encrypted with an SSL certificate, check this tool out as it will tell you whether you have one or not. It may be a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it can still cost you and your business valuable website traffic and exposure to your target market or audience.

4. Make My Persona  

This tool is perfect for creating buyer persona documents following seven easy steps, during which you will input the relevant info of your buyer persona. The end result is a sleek-looking document that you can further customize if you so wish. And if the seven-step setup isn’t enough for the needs of your business, you can add a custom section to this document containing additional info which is useful to you and your business.

Remember, creating buyer persona documents can help you understand your customers and target audience better and if you aren’t using them to boost your business, it’s high time you do, and this tool happens to be a perfect start for this if you’re inexperienced with the process and general concept.

5. Marketing Plan Generator  

As hard as it is, making a good marketing plan is of utmost importance for marketers who want to increase lead conversion and outreach to their target audience, but it absolutely should be done. The Marketing Plan Generator can help you with this challenge by allowing you to create a 12-month marketing plan in order to meet your set targets. This one falls into the category of HubSpot’s more comprehensive free tools, but it still just takes ten or so minutes to input the metrics that are of importance to you and your business in order to get your hands on a great marketing plan.

6. Growth Grader  

Another one of the more comprehensive tools, while still not taking up more than 10 minutes of your time, the Growth Grader creates a report on how good your business’ growth is currently based on the answers you’ve input. The report provides insight into the following four categories: Attract, Engage, Delight, and Fighting Friction, and each of these 4 carry a score of a maximum of 100 points so that you can get a general idea of what you’re doing better than the rest, or not that great. Apart from the grading system, the tool creates a Growth Plan for you, where you obtain strategies and ideas on how to generally improve the aspects of your business that are lacking.

7. Invoice Template Generator  

If you happen to be a small team or operate completely solo and don’t have the time or funds to create a branded invoice for your company, then the Invoice Template Generator is perfect for you. It allows you to upload your company info and logo, and switch between hours and rates, depending on how you actually operate. The end result here is an invoice that surely won’t make your clients think that you don’t put effort into your documents, because the document looks as professionals as can be.

8. The Next Five 

The Next Five tool refers to that big question: Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Some of you might consider this cliché or redundant for some reason, but you must think ahead and plan for the future because, at the end of the day, you absolutely don’t want to stay stuck in the same place for a prolonged period of time. This tool will give you an idea of what you could be doing to improve your situation if you’re stuck in a rut and how to get out of that situation. Be it learning a new skill or changing your professional focus entirely, it will, at least, provide some food for thought when it comes to your professional life.

9. Blog Ideas Generator 

Fellow bloggers, you’ve been there, I know it, because I have too. No creative juice left, but still having to perform at an admirable level and think of a killer blog topic and then put your hands to work. Luckily, the Blog Ideas Generator allows you to take the pressure off by allowing you to input nouns related to some idea of what you want to write about and then generate actual blog ideas for you based on those nouns. It offers a week’s worth of blog ideas based on the nouns you opted for, but you can go the extra mile and select the 12-month plan and download the blog ideas in form of a spreadsheet and not fret about blog ideas for quite a long time. Being quite a nifty tool, it may raise the question: Did I use this tool to come up with this topic?

Make the Most out of Any Given Resource

This entire list may be of use to some of you, or maybe some specific tool from this list, but the key point here is that there are resources out there, like these, that can help you elevate your business free of charge. And since resources like the ones I’ve mentioned here are readily available and very easy to use, there is little to no reason for you to miss out on them. At the end of the day, since it takes very little time to use them, you lose nothing by playing around with them, and you might get something useful out of the experience.