Checklist for planning a performance appraisal

Open Site Explorer is a great free tool for checking your website domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can plug your URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links. In addition, you can also check your competition. Note – the free version of Open Site Explorer gives you 3 reports per day, only. If you want more you’d need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Looking for a way to run your email marketing efforts without breaking the bank? There are a number of free email marketing services that let you send thousands of emails per month without spending a single penny. If you have lots of subscribers but you don’t need to message them all at the same time, our top pick is Sendinblue. If you want to send out email blasts to all your subscribers at the same time, a good alternative is Mailchimp. Mailchimp free plan includes 10,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 subscribers.

Sendinblue has a great free plan (unlimited contacts) along with support for SMS text message sending, SMTP, in-depth analytics, powerful marketing automation features all in the same dashboard.  The free plan lets you have an unlimited number of contacts, but you’re limited to 300 emails per day.

We could dedicate a whole website on choosing a CRM system as there are so many of them out there and so much discussion around which is best. Keeping things simple, if you’re looking for a better way to manage customer relationships, but don’t have the budget, our top pick is Hubspot free edition. It’s an all-in-one business solution with hubs for sales, marketing, and customer service.

HubSpot’s comprehensive free plan is better than many paid CRMs out there. You get hundreds of powerful features and the ability to manage up to a million (1,000,000) contacts without ever paying a penny. But it’s not always perfect and it doesn’t come without its share of drawbacks. Then again, no CRM does. Not even the most expensive!

Finding decent images for your brochureware, social media and or websites can be one of the biggest headaches and can eat into time you don’t have. You can spend hours (days) searching to then discover that perfect image you’ve found is not royalty free or it costs a small fortune. Thankfully, there are some amazing sources of free, royalty free imagery, in addition to Canva, which we mentioned in the design category. It’s knowing where to find them. Here’s a selection of some of the best resources for downloading free imagery.

Canva is another great time and money saving tool especially where you don’t have an internal design resource or budget to outsource. One of its best uses is to help create images for social media and blog posts, but it can be used for practically most basic design requirement and you don’t have to have any design skills!

Canva has a suite of built-in templates that you simply select and add your company logo, edit as required and download. If you fancy yourself as a budding designer or have someone in the business who is, there is also the option to create bespoke designs and resize to your requirements within Canva, so you don’t have to buy additional design software.  Canva also has a free suite of images built into the system which you can simply select and use. Plus, you can also upload your own images.

Canva is quick and easy to use and with over 2 million registered users there’s a wealth of free tutorials and tips you can find online.  We also love the upgrade if you do have some budget. It’s around £10.99 a month, so won’t break the bank, but it’s worth it for the wider access to images alone that you get.

The best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles, and Hootsuite is a tool that will enable you to do that.

It has a free plan that gives a single user a social media dashboard for three social accounts. You can set up a social media posting schedule with up to 5 messages scheduled in advance. Note – if you need to schedule content for more than three profiles you’ll need one of the paid Hootsuite plans instead, but for most, the free plan should cover your needs.

Currently, Hootsuite supports Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups), LinkedIn (profiles and pages), Instagram (business and personal profiles), Pinterest, and YouTube channels. It also supports Google My Business through the Hootsuite app directory.