What small business tools do you use an entrepreneur?

As an artist seeking to make a living, or at least generate income from selling your art and related products, you are a small business owner and entrepreneur. This means you take on the tasks of organizing and managing your operation, and assume the risks inherent in running it. Effective use of small business tools is essential to your art career success.

You Are the Boss of You

Besides being the chief creative officer, you also are the chief marketing officer, the chief financial officer, and more. It takes wearing many hats to run a successful small business. Fortunately, technological advancements allow semi-automation for many of the tasks you need to perform. We are not at the point where robots and artificial intelligence can fully manage your business operations, but we are probably closer than you think.

Just like you, I am an entrepreneur running a small business. My creative product is information presented in the form of books, e-books, blog posts, webinars, and workshops. I also provide consulting, but due to limited available time, I have never intently focused or marketed on that part of my business.

Here are nine of the small business tools I use daily.

Gmail logo1. Google Apps for email – my primary email address is [email protected], which is powered by Gmail. For the most part, it works flawlessly integrating with Google Drive, Google Hangout, and other Google-related programs. Oddly, one of the things that do not work as well as possible is the search. The point of archiving the email you wish to keep is that the search function will help you find it quickly. Sometimes finding an email through the Gmail search is very frustrating. I label everything that is truly important.

As an alternative, I have seriously considered using Zoho Email, which is free and powerful. Microsoft Office 365, is another reliable choice, which, while not free, comes with the option to have the entire MS Productivity Suite available in the cloud. That option may cause me to move to Office 365 at some future point. Google offers lightweight productivity programs for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, but for me, the word processing, in particular, is not equal to using Word. I doubt it ever will.

Here is the last, but not least, word on email. If you have a domain for your website, then you should have an email address to associate with it. One way to scream amateur is to have Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL as part of your email address. Even worse are the ones from your Internet Service Provider such as cox.net, comcast.net, sbcglobal.net, tampabay.rr.com, and so forth. You are seeking to present yourself as a professional business person. Your email address speaks volumes either positively or negatively. I agree, switching email addresses can be painful and somewhat tricky, but it is easily worth the effort in the long-range scheme of things.

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google calendary2. Google Calendar – a calendar is necessary to run your business. You have to keep track of your appointments and activities. You can use your calendar as a stepped down project manager tool. I use Google Calendar because it works seamlessly with my email and my phone. If you need a project manager and customer manager (CRM) tool because you have an extensive database of buyers and prospects. And, you have multiple projects with many moving parts running simultaneously, then look at Insight.ly, a free extension that works with Google Chrome.

ToDoIst to do list tool3. ToDoIst – the basic premise of David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity book is to get things off your mind. If you don’t need to worry about when something needs to be done because you are confident you will be reminded to do them at the appropriate time, then with less clutter and worry you become more efficient. I use ToDoist.com to keep track of things I need to do. I also use it for project management.

WordPress logo4. WordPress – if you have a website, I also hope you are blogging. That’s because it is the single best way to develop an email list and pull your collectors, fans, friends, and followers closer to you. You can use a blog to show your business and your personality, and snippets of your life to your readers. They don’t care what you had for dinner. However, they are interested if you attended a recent gallery opening. Or, if you took a museum tour, or like listening to Beethoven or Muddy Waters while you work at making your art.

Besides being a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved into a Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to create a website using it. It is estimated that nearly 20% of all new websites published in the U.S. are produced using WordPress. Because of its vast and growing user base, the platform attracts throngs of developers adding new themes and plugins to enhance its use. As such, small business owners and artists have a wealth of options when it comes to creating a unique website and blog with a plethora of available advanced features.

I use WordPress for both ArtMarketingNews.com and BarneyDavey.com. The former is purely for blogging; the latter is an informational-based website with a fully enabled e-commerce solution. I will let you in on a secret. If I could go back to 2005, when I started both of these sites, there would only be one site with a blog attached. With a do-over, I would have kept BarneyDavey.com, but the blog would go by blog.BarneyDavey.com.

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Back in the day, I only had one book, which was about the print market. So I focused on that in the URL and title of the blog. As years have progressed, I have found I have much more to offer than just advice on the art print market. As such I’ve found the name to have somewhat pigeonholed me. Not to the extent that I am willing to go through the loss of Google rankings and other bother to rebrand the blog, but that remains a distinct possibility for a future project.

For the past ten years, I have built my small business while working at a variety of full-time jobs. The need for affordable, quality health care has kept me from jumping to full-time status. That is due to change this fall, and I could not be more excited to have more time to consider such things as overhauling and folding ArtPrintIssues.com into BarneyDavey.com

I cannot conceive of how taking on such a challenge would be possible if I were not using WordPress. In 2005, WordPress was only two years old. I chose then to use Typepad to publish ArtPrintIssues.com as a blog and built BarneyDavey.com on an html template. The Typepad decision turned out to be a bad one because it does not allow its users an easy way to transport a large blog like mine easily. Getting posts and their associated images with them moved was a time-consuming nightmare. This helps further illustrate why having a WordPress site and/or blog is useful – you can move it to another host flawlessly and painlessly within a short time.

StudioPress5. StudioPress.com – I use the Focus theme from StudioPress.com for both sites. StudioPress is part of the Copyblogger Media family. It is one of the best premium theme providers in the business. Many of its 42 themes are mobile responsive, including the Focus theme. This means the theme will respond to smaller screens without having to have special software or a different URL, such as ArtPrintIssues.mobi, or m.ArtPrintIssues.com.

The growing use of smartphones and tablets for reading blogs and surfing websites means you must make it easy for visitors to navigate your site. If your site is not responsive or mobilized, then you are losing valuable traffic. It is too hard to work on driving traffic to your site to lose it because it is not convenient to read your information or move around on it.

If you are using WordPress, then using a premium (paid) theme is essential. Free theme developers have no incentive to keep pace with the ongoing upgrade to WordPress. They usually provide spottier, less effective support for their themes. When it comes to plugins, fewer is better. Each plugin you activate takes resources to run and slows your site down. Only use plugins that have been downloaded many times and have lots of 4 and 5-star ratings. Otherwise, you risk your website being hacked, or crashing due to poor scripting from inexperienced developers.

wp e-store plugin6. WP e-store – These days there is no reason you should not sell your art directly. Whether in-person, at a show or from your blog or website. You should have systems in place to make selling your work on the spot happen quickly and effortlessly. I use the WP e-store plugin to sell my books, e-books, downloads, webinars, and other products right from my BarneyDavey.com/e-store page.

Given the physical size and shipping needs of selling art, it is probably not the best choice for your e-commerce solutions. If you want to keep your e-store as a plugin on your WordPress blog, I recommend looking at Woo Commerce. It is free but has ongoing annual fees of approximately $300 for the various premium add-ons you will need to make it work for you.

If you are a techie or willing to hire a developer, then you should look at free, open-source programs such as OS Commerce and Zen Cart. I have not checked recent reviews to see if these providers are keeping pace with technological advances. As always, do your research and careful due diligence before investing your time and money in any software. Getting expert advice is highly recommended. Chris Lema writes extensively about WordPress and has excellent information on e-commerce and other WordPress functions. He is also available for consultations if you are looking at a large-scale, expensive launch.

Other options are standalone e-commerce sites such as Volusion, 3DCart, Shopify. There are many other such platforms to consider. Check around with other artists. They can be your most significant source of reliable, insightful information.

Mailchimp7. MailChimp – The whole point of a website, blog, and e-commerce is to get found, get customers, and create sales. Building an email list is an integral, foundational part of the process. A responsive email list is a bottom-line asset to your business. Working to build an email list is critical to your long-term online success. Facebook may lose favor; YouTube may cancel your account or delete your videos, and galleries will come and go. Throughout all such predictable turmoil, your email list will remain your most valuable marketing tool.

I use MailChimp and recommend it to artists because they offer it free for your first 2,000 subscribers. You don’t get some of the advanced features with the free version, such as auto-responders, but you can’t beat free for starting. Other recommended email service providers are Aweber and Get Response. I see these three most often included by developers building marketing tools, software, and plugins that require email integration.

There are many other email service providers for you to research and investigate. While the platform is essential, it pales when compared to the task of working diligently to gain qualified, opted-in email subscribers.

For the past several years, I have championed the idea of artists solidifying their careers by finding sustainable ways to sell directly to collectors. It is the entire premise of my Guerrilla Marketing for Artists: How 100 Collectors Can Build a Bulletproof Career. Email marketing is one of the critical components to making this a reality. Networking, warm and local marketing, and online marketing are all funnels to help you collect names and establish personal relationships with collectors.

Email marketing is central to achieving this goal of a self-sustained career. Find the fans, friends, and followers and convert them into buyers. Keep them informed, interested, and entertained through social media and especially email marketing. Focus your marketing on making this happen, and you give yourself the best shot to have the career you want and deserve.

Grammarly8. Grammarly – Most of us, including me, don’t have the time and extra income to afford a full-time copywriter. Having seen what a good one can do to polish good copy into extraordinary copy makes me wish I could. As my business grows into a full-time occupation, it might just happen.

This copy and every post I have written in the past two years have been run through Grammarly. It is an online copywriting software program that works pretty darn good. It is not perfect, but it catches many common errors, overuse of words, and helps make one’s copy shine a bit more.

If you want to use a live service, then look at Gramlee.com. I have used it many times and have never been disappointed. Its prices are quite reasonable. You can bank words. For instance, you might buy 1,000 words and use them to have several 300- 400 pages of blog posts or web pages professionally edited. If you are writing a proposal, resume cover letter, or other crucial documents, then turning to Gramlee.com is highly advisable.

Go Daddy Bookkeeping9. Go Daddy Bookkeeping – I started using Go Daddy Online Bookkeeping before it was bought by GoDaddy.com when it was called Outright. If you are using PayPal, then I don’t need to tell you when it comes to tax time that extracting the data you need for your Schedule C and other tax reports is a monstrous pain in the patootie.

Now, I can get a Schedule C report in a matter of a few minutes. You can add your credit cards, PayPal, and checking accounts to the service. It will keep track of your expenses. You can train it automatically to file certain expenses in a chosen category. For instance, it recognizes all PayPal credit card transaction fees and appropriately records them, same for purchase from my Stamps.com account. This service saves me hours of time and headaches. I recommend it without hesitation. On the other hand, if you have more sophisticated bookkeeping needs, then look at Quickbooks or Freshdesk.

This is far from a comprehensive list of every tool I use to manage my business. These are among the most important. I use them personally and have high confidence when you use them you will get the highly satisfactory results I experience, or better.

BONUS TIP

Lumen5

Lumen5 is the fastest way to make videos for social media marketing. It is an easy-to-use terrific tool to help get the most from your social media marketing efforts. I love the text-to-video AI tool.

It does an impressive job of finding just the right text in a blog post or online article and matches images from its extensive library to them. Users can alter the text and images it suggests. Then you can choose the format you want for the social media platform of your choice.

Lumen5 is a video creation platform designed for brands and businesses to produce engaging video content for social posts, stories, and ads. Its goal is to enable anyone without training or experience to easily create amazing videos in minutes. The technology Lumen5 enables marketing teams to focus on the story and narrative while relying on our system to do the heavy lifting.

Milanote is a tool for organizing your creative projects into beautiful visual boards. Created to replicate the feeling of working on a wall in a creative studio – visual, tactile and sometimes a bit messy – Milanote is a great fit for freelancers in both the marketing and design spaces. Milanote has heaps of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from creating a moodboard to set out the visual direction for a project, to writing that perfect creative brief. Its sharing features make it a great option for those who regularly provide work to clients for feedback.

Milanote’s basic plan is available for free with no time-limit.

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art business, art career, art marketing, small business tools


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  • As an alternative, I’d also like to highly recommend Squarespace for websites and web hosting. I used WordPress for around 5 years, using different themes (free and paid), starting on GoDaddy, then switching to HostGator. HostGator’s customer support was much better than GoDaddy, but I got very tired of plugin troubleshooting and streamlining. This led me to look for alternatives. I ended up switching entirely to Squarespace and could not be happier. They have dozens of templates (themes) included, and host your site on their own servers (which have been, thus far – roughly 18 months and counting – flawless and fast). They are kind of like dealing with Apple, or Tesla. Their products are entirely their own, and optimized to work seamlessly together. There are no third party plugins to worry about corrupting your site, or not playing well with other third party plugins. It just works. Their customer support is incredible and fast. They also offer built in ecommerce solutions, which are BY FAR the easiest I’ve ever used, and the most flexible. They also integrate with Mailchimp, social media sites, ShipStation (all major shipping companies are compatible), Xero (cloud-based accounting), USPS for shipping calculations, etc.
    Plus – you can make really beautiful websites with them:) Hope this helps!

  • I love the fact that you offer budget friendly advice to starving artists.
    Thank you

  • marijoswick says:

    Great article.
    I’d like to recommend another app for bookkeeping, free and very easy to use. Wave accounting (https://www.waveapps.com/) it also connects to your bank account, you can send invoices and accept credit cards.
    I’m still looking for that perfect bit of software that will help me with keeping track of artwork. I used to use Working Artist, which I loved, but since switching to a Mac, I hate using Parallels to switch over to windows software(it never quite works as well as I’d hoped), and have been using GYST, but while it’s ok, there’s just something I don’t care for about it, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what.
    If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears!
    Thanks again for the great article

  • All great advice, Barney – though I have had to move away from my @jenibate.com emails when I truly realized how* many emails and thus how much potential business I was losing.

  • I wholeheartedly agree with what you say about having a more “professional” email address than that of a free service or ISP. I have several websites and, consequently, several email address domains – but most of them redirect to my Gmail account.

    Most people do not realize that Gmail can act (sort of) as a clearing house, or repository, for numerous and varied email domains. For much of my business use I use my bill [at] swartwout [dot] net, for my consulting business I use my bill [at] 12pm [dot] com – which both end up at in my Gmail inbox. I have the Gmail configured so a response to either of those will appear to come from that domain.

    Cheers,

    Bill Swartwout Photography
    http://www.USPictures.com

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