Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens…These are a few of my favorite things!

Welcome to episode number 81 of The Determined Mom Show. I hope you had an okay 2020. I don’t think anybody has had an amazing year. However, I feel blessed for many things that happened for our family in 2020, and I hope that amazing things also happened for your family. It’s a challenging year, for sure. The pandemic is also making the holidays difficult, and getting ready or getting together with your family, friends, and school.

And so many things are more difficult this year than we ever imagined last year. But the amazing thing is we made it through, it’s December, and this will be airing on December 23rd. We’re almost through the entire year of 2020, which started amazingly and then quickly went south with the pandemic.

I am very excited about 2021 and the prospect of it being a smoother year and a year of even more prosperity for all of us. So what I want to do today is share some of my most with you—favorite tools of 2020. I am an admitted AppSumo junkie, and I think there should be an AppSumo Anonymous for that, like a group or something where we can talk each other down from purchasing software.

But since there isn’t, I’m going to give you a rundown of my favorite things, and the first one that I will start with is the Law of Attraction Planner. I have been using this planner for four years, and I’m about to order my fifth planner. I love this planner and keep sticking with it because it starts at 5:00 AM and ends at 10:00 PM, so you can fit it.

You can fit so much into the planner if you’re an early riser like me. It also has a built-in vision board. It has just really a lot of detail. You can set goals; you can set three priorities each day. There’s a positive habit maker where you can track your habits. A to-do list, there is a section for notes.

You can track your water. You can set weekly priorities, allowing you to sort them by top priority, priority, errands, and tasks to delegate. And truly, I just love this planner, and it’s very durable. It’s like the outside cover is like vinyl ish. Maybe like a rubbish kind of material, and it has the one that I have for 2020 has the Tree of Life engraved on it with a lot of positive affirmations.

So this is why I love this planner: it gets you into the right mindset. Azure Planning and Azure are trying to set your goals, and it has a lot of work that you can do upfront in the year. You can sit down with it and go through all of these questions, planning, and things that it asks you to kind of.

I highly recommend knowing where you want to be in 2021. And because I will also recommend another tool called Quick List, I will link to a quick list. Of all the links to all of the items I’m talking about and all of the software I’m talking about today. That way, you can see a quick list, see how it works, and get all of the links to these tools if any of them pique your interest.

Now my second tool is going to be the web. I started with MailChimp, which I know probably many of you have, and quickly realized that it’s not very user-friendly. And I also quickly realized, after they changed the pricing structure, That it was something other than what I could afford the way that I was making my email lists because I had separate lists for many different freebies and things like that based on the topic. It would’ve cost me $200 a month to continue with MailChimp.

So I switched to mailer Light. And Mailer light was much more useful and more user-friendly. It was much more inexpensive. It was ten bucks a month, and I might still be paying for that. So I needed to cancel that note to myself, so it was just a lot easier. It allowed you to automate things more accessible, and there’s just so much to it.

But then I met Jenna, The customer advocate for AWeber, and she was also a guest on this podcast, and she introduced me to AWeber and showed me so much that AWeber can do. And even after I switched to AWeber, first of all, I want to say that they. I altogether imported everything from my mailer light.

So they imported every email, they imported every campaign, they imported every contact, every list. They did it all for me. So it was so easy for me just to get started with AWeber. I didn’t have any downtime or anything like that. They were just like, okay, it’s done. And I just took off from there. I love that part.

After I signed up, AWeber introduced a free plan, which I think is a game changer, especially if you’re starting and you’re just now growing your list. It is huge because you have so many features, and all of the plans, including the free program, are fully featured, which is. Very odd and very rare for an email system to give even free users all the features.

And they’re brilliant for doing that because they’re allowing you to see what features as your list grows that you want real love and things like that. So it’s amazing, and I use it. For, they have a blog broadcast so that you can tie it to your r s s feed of your blog, or in my case, I use it for my podcast.

So I set it up. So then that way, every time a podcast episode is published, it auto-sends an email about that podcast episode with links to the show notes, to everything. So it’s pretty cool, simple, and. Worth its weight in gold because I no longer have to send those emails. I look forward to them updating the look of that and the editability of those emails.

They could be more pretty. And while it saves me a ton of time each week, I’m not a fan of how they look. And I know, I had voiced that with Jenna and told her, you know, for someone that doesn’t know how to code, like I do know some coding. So I could change the colors of my branding and things like that.

But for anyone else, it’s going to be a learning curve. So I know that they’re working on that, but I highly recommend AWeber if you’re looking for an email system. They also have amazing templates. They have been coming out with new sequences and things like that that you can edit.

If you’re not familiar with email marketing or you need to find a new email marketing system, AWeber is definitely what I recommend. Let’s go to number three, which is my favorite because almost all of these follow AppSumo. So I’m talking about ten different things, and AppSu MO’S number three and all of the other ones that came here from four through nine are from AppSumo.

Let’s go ahead and dive in. AppSumo is a marketplace of apps. So you go there and type in like whatever you want, whatever kind of software you’re looking for. Like you’re looking for webinar software or something like that. You can go to browse, and then you click on. The search bar and type in whatever kind of software you’re looking for.

I’ve searched for c r m Lead Stock and Review, so like stock photos and things like that, review software I’ve searched for. So you can search for so many software on what you’re in the market for. I recommend going here before you go anywhere else because there is a chance even if you find something.

It will be on AppSumo, and you can get lifetime access to it for a fraction of what you would pay even for a month or two. So, it is amazing. I have a link to that on the quick list so that you can check that out as well. So the first one I will discuss that comes from AppSumo is Quick list. I got it on AppSumo and am curious to know how much I paid for it.

It was inexpensive. I will go to my products to tell you how much I paid for all of these. And I have ten pages of products that I’ve purchased over the last year and a half from AppSumo. And they also have a lot of really, really cool free products too. So when someone develops a consequence, they may put it out on AppSumo for free to get a user base, and then they will be able to get feedback and get basically, Tell you what is good and what is not good about your app, and then you can go ahead and edit it.

So all of that is why all these amazing pieces of software, starting on the AppSumo Quick list, are very cool. You can create checklists for yourself, your clients, public click lists, quick lists, or anything like that. There are so many different things. So I have for one of my] programs, the words WordPress Starter Express program, where I teach you how to set up your WordPress site.

I have a quick list with everything you would need on there. For that particular program, it’s all ordered. It’s all numbered. You can brand it, make it, use your brand colors, and then share the link. Another thing you can do with a quick list is lead generation.

Grab people’s information, and then they get the list. So that’s a cool way of doing a freebie if you don’t have a website or want a really quick, easy place to send them to grab your info. And the next one is pretty new. This is the first I have heard of it, but I have heard of some of its competitors, and this one is called air meat.

So it’s basically like a virtual conference. So cool. So you can go in, and there are tables, and there are, there’s a stage there is. I don’t know. It’s just so cool. You can, like your guests can, move around the room. They can choose which tables they want to be at. You can name the tables, and it’s just really, really cool.

And with all of the things that have happened with 2020 and the Pandemic, this is a huge win for software and for people like me who like to host virtual events. Let me see how much this one was. It wasn’t very much; I don’t think it was. Oh, it was 79, so $79, and you get this forever. And you can also host paid events there.

There are so many things you can do, and it is an alternative to go to the webinar and hop in, which is one of the other virtual conference websites. I’m excited about this one because it has the most potential to make things easier for things like workshops, networking meetings, and virtual summits.

There’s so much capability in this software that I highly recommend it. So I will have a link to that on the quick list. I will jump ahead to Hey Summit. So hey, Summit is what I used to host the Business Mom Summit in April of 2020, and I liked it, but there are definitely a lot of capabilities that it needed to have, and also the landing pages could have been better.

And so I ended up directing people to my website and having them click into, Hey, summit because there’s not a lot of ability to make the landing pages look nice in hey Summit. So definitely some drawbacks there. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed using it. It makes it super easy because you can give your hosts a login, and they can upload all their information, and you can edit it, and it’s really.

It is a perfect platform, but it has some limitations, so that I will try air meat for my next summit. And I’ll also be hosting networking meetings for moms, business owners, and Google my business information sessions. I don’t know how I would describe that, but that’s why I will use air meat.

So the next one I’m going to talk about is called Invideo. An Invideo is a very cool video editing and auditing platform that allows you to add really cool graphics. Music and all kinds of stuff to video clips, so it’s not for super long videos, and the most you can do with the AppSumo version I purchased is 15 minutes.

So that’s the most extended video I can do. Now what I do is I use Screencast Amatic as a workaround because I can do unlimited videos there. So I’ll make the intro and outro to my videos in, Invideo. And then, I will download those, put them into Screencast Matic, and merge all of my videos.

So I love that, the capability, and it makes. Your video is more professional. When you have that intro, you have that outro and some music and interest in them. So highly recommend Invideo, and I will have a link to that on the quick list. The next one is Metric. Cool. So I had looked into Metric Cool before because I wanted an easy way to give my Google My Business clients detailed reports on their monthly.

Progress. And what I ended up doing because it was so expensive is that I ended up going through and making, actually hired someone off of Fiver to make a custom Excel spreadsheet. And it was good, but it still needs to be different from metric. You can go in, and you can add, so I have a program, I guess I would say, a plan that allows me to add five different businesses, and I’m about to delete mine so I can add another client, but it will allow you to track information from and metrics.

Your web, your webpage, or your blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook ads, Google Ads, and TikTok ads. So all on this one platform. For each brand you put in, you can track all that information, which is huge because. It allows you to see how any business is doing on any platform.

You need access to those platforms to work because you need to hook them up. But for most of my clients, I use the Google My Business metrics and nothing else because that’s what I focus on with them. So, The next one is social be. You’ve probably heard me talk about social be in the Determined Mom community or on one of my Google My Business webinars.

I love social media because it makes posting on Google My Business easy. And it allows you actually to select the call to action. So there are six different calls to step on a Google My Business post that you can use, and it allows you to select those in the social B platform and upload the photo.

And you can schedule it for whenever you want it to go. Another thing that I like is that you can set up a schedule. So I have my clients set on plans, and I go ahead, and some of my team members and I will go through and add the posts in, and then they’ll just auto-post to wherever and whenever we want them.

 I can’t say enough about it. It also allows you to create different workspaces, so I have a workspace just for my social media, and then I also have a workspace just for my Google, my business management clients. I have up to 25. Spaces for different brands or different platforms, for example.

And I am nearing that with Google, My Business client So, but I highly recommend it. And if it’s just you, I recommend getting the lowest plan and starting from there. But it is one of the only platforms that post to so many different. You know, platform. So Facebook posts to your profile, your page, and your group’s Instagram, your profile, Twitter, and your profile LinkedIn.

It posts to your profile and your rare company and publishes a Pinterest and Google My Business. So having a place where they are all in one is huge. A time saver and makes life easier. The final one that I will talk about is one that I’ve talked about before, and we had them as a speaker at our summit in April.

So that is Dub Soto. Dub Soto is my go-to tool for almost everything. Scheduling, proposals, invoices. Everything that you can think of. I used Zao for and I; it’s all automated. It took me a while to set up because it’s just a little more complicated. It could be more intuitive, but once you have it set up, it is literally amazing.

It will just do everything for you, and I’m also excited that they have zero integration, and Zero is some accounting software. And so in January, I will switch from Wave Accounting to Zero, even though it costs a little bit every month; I want to make things easier.

So, This is a super easy-to-install WordPress plugin that will allow you to create an instant deadline on your website or your landing page, and you can set it to any date, any time. You can put it on Countdown if you like. Track the cookies of the person so that way, you know, if they revisit, it can display a different message.

And I am a huge fan of it because it creates that urgency and helps you target the right people for the right things at the right time and close that sale. I so love Deadline Funnel. So if you enjoyed this show or this episode, please leave me a review and rating on iTunes and subscribe wherever you’re listening because that will help more people find this podcast.

I hope you all have an amazing rest of the year 2020 that will go down in. And enjoy the time that you have with your families. This episode of The Determined Mom Show is brought to you by the free Facebook group mastering Google My Business to increase your revenue. Inside this group, you’ll get insights into new.

Features of Google My Business, and you’ll learn how to master your Google My Business listing to increase your revenue. This is free to join, and you can find it on Facebook by searching and getting Google My Business to increase your income inside the Facebook groups.