Business Resources
Below is a list of online services I use in my business, and highly recommend. If you are looking for software, hosting, or a CRM, these services could be what you’re looking for.
Disclaimer: these resources contain affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and purchase the product or service, I will be given a discount or a referral award. I do not use affiliate links on any products that I don’t already use myself.
Dubsado
I’ve been using Dubsado for over six years now. Dubsado is business management system that includes everything from lead management to contracts, invoices, time tracking, bookings and more.
You can test out limited features on their free plan to find out if it might be the right fit for you (no credit card required).
When you’re ready to upgrade, get 20% off your first month (monthly sub), or off your first year (annual sub). Sign up for your Dubsado free trial.
Cloudways
Cloudways is my current choice for hosting. Cloudways offers managed cloud hosting with a range of server providers to choose from.
Hosting is fast, and comes with premium services that other hosts charge extra for. Billing is monthly, rather than annually, which is great for managing small business budgets.
I have referred a few clients to Cloudways now, and all of them have been happy with the performance over their previous hosts.
Sign up to Cloudways and get started, or contact me to discuss how I can set you up and migrate your existing site.
ClickUp
ClickUp is what I use for managing various aspects of my business, organising information, and managing tasks. ClickUp contains a lot of features on their free plan that require a paid plan on other services.
There are various task views to suit your working style, including list layout, kanban (board), Gantt charts, or Calendar view.
ClickUp has a built in documents feature that I rate over Google Docs. You can easily drag and drop pieces of your document into different places as you brain dump information, and organise your paragraphs.
The platform can be overwhelming in the beginning, so it’s worth watching their webinars to see how simple or complex you can make it.
Go to ClickUp to sign up for your free account, and get streamline your task management.
Google Workspace
I have no particular love towards Google products. I just use Google Workspace because their email platform works really well, I don’t have to troubleshoot for issues on a regular basis, and my clients actually receive my emails in their inbox. Not only that, but because my emails are hosted separate to my website hosting, if my website hosting goes down, I can still contact clients and run my business.
I did actually move away from Google Workspace to a competitor for a very short period, and quickly turned tail and returned when I realised clients were not receiving important emails from me!
Google Workspace includes access to their suite of tools, such as Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc. I prefer ClickUp over Google Docs. I do use Drive for storing certain things (my preference is Dropbox).
I use the Business Starter plan, and that has been more than sufficient for my needs. If you’re looking for a better email host, try Google Workspace.
Fathom Analytics
One thing I deeply dislike is the complexity of Google Analytics, and the unnecessary amount of information that they gather. I moved over the Fathom Analytics in early 2022, and I’m not looking back. You’ll really appreciate the nice user interface of the system if you find Google Analytics too confusing.
Fathom provides easy to understand analytics built around privacy, and guarantees GDPR compliance – no cookie banner required for your analytics!
Additional features built in at no extra cost include uptime-monitoring of your website, and weekly and/or monthly analytics reports straight to your inbox.
You can test Fathom out with a free 30-day trial. After that, pricing is $US14/mo for 100,000 monthly views, which is more than enough for low traffic websites.
BlogVault
BlogVault (part of the company that also owns Malcare and WPRemote) is my go-to for WordPress website security, and safe and efficient updates of all of the websites I manage.
With daily scanning, uptime monitoring and cloud backups of all managed websites, if anything happens, I’m alerted to the issue quickly and can quickly recover the website if necessary.
Compared against other website security services, I haven’t found one that ticks all the boxes without a huge increase in cost. BlogVault has also found Malware in websites for me that were missed by other providers.
If you’re looking to upgrade security for your own website, or that of your clients, try BlogVault.
