Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:07] Hi there. Welcome back to the Confessions from the Home Office podcast. I'm your host, Wendy Hill and I've been working out of my home office for 20 years, running my marketing agency, Market Momentum. Today I'm talking about a question that I get pretty regularly.
[00:00:22] I don't have the budget for expensive software or tools, so how do I make my work look polished?
[00:00:29] I love this question because the truth is you don't really need a big budget to come across like a pro. You just need a smart system and a few really good tools.
[00:00:40] So today I'm going to walk you through five no cost tools you can start using right now to elevate your business, impress your clients and just feel more organized and in control, all without spending a dime.
[00:00:53] So here we go.
[00:00:55] Number one is Canva free.
[00:00:58] This is designed without the big designer price. If you know a designer or you are a designer and you've used Adobe before, it's expensive and they have some online subscriptions now that aren't quite as much, but it's still a lot if you're just starting out or if it's something that you don't use all the time.
[00:01:16] So, so Canva is great because just about anybody can use it. And even on the free version, you can create really nice social media graphics. You can build out deliverables like proposals, media kits, branding guides, thumbnails for YouTube, email marketing graphics, and lead magnets, just about everything.
[00:01:36] You can save all your brand colors and fonts and create brand kits. You don't have to keep looking things up for different clients or yourself.
[00:01:44] And you can use free templates to make your content look pretty much professionally designed. There's some good things out there even if you're not a designer.
[00:01:52] So the way that I use Canva is I have a ton of templates saved for client post, holiday graphics, episode promos, podcast promos, proposals, and so on. And I can just swap in the text and the images.
[00:02:07] It's done in just a few minutes and it always looks cohesive. And then when I to build more, I just sit down, block out some time and create more. And it just, it the options are unlimited.
[00:02:19] So what I would suggest is when you go into Canva, just set up a couple of templates you like and reuse them across platforms. And consistency a lot of times shows that you're credible. You keep showing up.
[00:02:34] So tool number two is Grammarly and Grammarly is really for clean copy. That makes you sound confident.
[00:02:43] It's a tool where after you write something you can Drop it in and it will catch all the things that your brain skips. So like when you're proofreading something, you may not realize that you've duplicated a word or you've skipped a word or you've messed up the punctuation somehow. It's like having an editor over your shoulder.
[00:03:06] So you can use Grammarly to proof emails before you send them out to proof proposals, click Clean up a blog post, Clean up website copy, and really kind of helps you avoid typos, which we see a lot of those on social media.
[00:03:22] And what I love is it helps your writing sound clear. It doesn't sound as robotic or canned as like an AI program would, and it keeps you from second guessing every comma and semicolon.
[00:03:34] So what I do is I write something, drop it into Grammarly, and it'll give you a score like a 87 or 94. And then it'll show you all the things that you can change to improve your score. You may not want to accept all those, but it's a good way to.
[00:03:49] It's helped me learn to be a better editor now that I see what it's doing.
[00:03:53] So it's a small thing, but it makes a big difference.
[00:03:56] When you send something to a client, it doesn't have any errors in it versus sending an email and then saying, oh, sorry, I know that was full of typos. I was doing that from my phone.
[00:04:06] Don't do that.
[00:04:07] So Grammarly can be your friend. Tool number three is loom L O O M.
[00:04:12] And that's more of kind of a show what you know tool. And if you need to explain something to someone and maybe you're on different time zones or they're out of the office or it's late at night, record a quick loom video. If you need to walk them through something or train them, you can walk them through a report or something that you've produced.
[00:04:32] You can explain the process step by step and you can give feedback maybe like on a website or a piece of content, or if a client has sent something over to you, you can send them a loom and give them your feedback on everything.
[00:04:44] So why I like loom, I think it's a really powerful tool. It just saves time, it avoids miscommunication, it makes you look helpful and confident and you don't need a zoom call and set something up and work on around everybody's schedule all the time. You can just send it over and, and they can watch it over and over again. And the good Thing is, is you get an email when they look at it. So if someone says, yeah, I got your video, you can tell if they've looked at it or not, which I think sometimes is good.
[00:05:13] And it's free for up to a five minute video. And you can store 20, up to 25 videos with a free account, which I think that's good for most things. You can always go through and wipe out some stuff and keep the free.
[00:05:25] So tool number four is Trello and this is the one I'm most excited about. It helps you organize your workflow, pretty much your life. Like a professional. It is my go to for keeping everything organized. Some people use ClickUp or Notion or Asana for their project management. And I've tried Asana and ClickUp before. I always get back to Trello. I'm a visual learner and it's easier for me to see everything and see how much is going on. And I've used Trello now probably eight or nine years.
[00:05:58] So with Trello you have boards for everything. Like you could have a client project board or content planning board, or your own internal business task board, or you can even have a personal to do list.
[00:06:09] I even have boards for like all the home improvement stuff we're working on. I have a board for meals based on what type of meat or vegetarian that we have with the ingredients. I know that's extreme, but here we have a board for every client with the business and then I have an overall business board with all the billing and contracts and everything. And Trello is just the sky's the limit with that.
[00:06:38] So each card can hold checklists, due dates, links, notes. If I ever have to go into a meeting and write notes because I don't want a computer out, or it's just a quick impromptu meeting, I'll take pictures of the notes and drop them in Trello. So I have everything from that client meeting recorded. I don't throw away anything. It's kind of like a visual command center. Once you start using it, you may not go back.
[00:07:03] So start with one board, maybe like a client work board with columns like to do in progress, waiting on client completed.
[00:07:12] And then you feel more buttoned up, you look more buttoned up and you won't have to think about which notebook you put your to do list in that week.
[00:07:20] So I use Trello with my team. I tag them on boards and cards. They have usernames and so they get an email when they're tagged on something. So they can just kind of go through their email and check off all the things that they've been assigned. I also use Trello with one of my clients and their internal team. When they finish a project and take photos of it, they tag me, it emails me, and I can grab the images and use them for their marketing. So fantastic tool.
[00:07:47] And then tool number five is Google Workspace. And I feel like Google Workspace is kind of the underrated workhorse in business.
[00:07:57] It does so much. I am not a Microsoft fan and I will tell you that every day, but I love Google.
[00:08:03] And if you have a Gmail account, you already have access to Google Docs, sheets, slides and more, which is like Microsoft word, Excel and PowerPoint.
[00:08:15] And you can use it to share, copy drafts, get feedback. You can track deliverables projects in a spreadsheet. You can even share spreadsheets. I have somebody that I work with as a PR agency. We share spreadsheets for notes and billing and, and things that we're working on together and no one else has access to it.
[00:08:35] You can build strategy documents and slides like a PowerPoint presentation if you need to.
[00:08:40] And it helps because you can collaborate without having to download a lot of things to your machine.
[00:08:46] So a lot of clients are familiar with it and it's easy to use, it's accessible, and it doesn't require any fancy formatting.
[00:08:56] So to wrap all this up, you don't need anything really fancy. You just need things that are functional.
[00:09:02] And you don't need expensive tools to show up and be a professional. You need tools that help you communicate clearly, keep, keep you organized and make sure that the client's happy and when all that is and just you're getting your work done. You get your work done, you deliver things on time, and that helps build your client relationships and helps build your business over time. So every tool I mentioned today, Canva Grammarly Loom Trello, Google Workspace can help you do that at no cost. Now, you can get paid subscriptions to all of these, and they're not horrible. Some of them are monthly, some of them are annually. They're not, they're not really that expensive. But if you're needing to keep your budget trimmed back, you can definitely do a lot with the free version on these.
[00:09:53] I'd love for you to pick one tool this week, maybe just set up a Trello board.
[00:09:58] Just create one loom video to send to someone about something that you've worked on.
[00:10:04] Maybe create one of your social media posts in Canva.
[00:10:07] You'll be amazed how quickly you start to feel more legit like, hey, I've got these tools that work for me. I'm not pulling things from all these different places. I have things saved, I have things organized.
[00:10:18] And it will reduce your stress. And if you're nervous to try something to share it, share it with me. Send it to me. My contact info is in the show notes. I'll be happy to look at it and give you feedback.
[00:10:31] So one quick reminder. In addition to my marketing consulting work, I teach aspiring marketing virtual assistants how to get started in the business and grow. This is how I got started 20 years ago. I truly think this type of work is a career changer.
[00:10:46] I'd love for you to check out my private Facebook group. It's called Marketing Virtual Assistants Launch youh Biz Free Support Group. And I'll put the link to that in the show notes too.
[00:10:56] Come out. Hang out with us there. It's free, it's friendly, and we're all trying to figure it out together.
[00:11:01] So that's it for today, and I'll catch you next week on the Confessions from the Home Office podcast. Take care.
