These are a Few of My Favorite Things-Second Edition

These are a Few of My Favorite Things-Second Edition

Welcome to episode 213 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and today I wanna share with you some of my favorite things. So this episode is titled, These are a few of my favorite things. Our most popular episode ever downloaded was episode number 81, and I was entitled. Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on kittens.

These are a few of my favorite things. So this is gonna be a follow-up to that episode that aired in December of 2020, so pretty much almost two years ago now. And I wanted to update you on some of my newest, favorite things. 

There may be a little bit of overlap in there, but most of these things are newer to me and they’ve totally changed my business, so I wanna be sure to share them with you and hopefully give you some insights into why they are some of my favorite tools.

My first favorite new tool is a scheduling software called trafft, and that is T R A F F T. And I was introduced to this by Dana, L’Oreal Morales of the. Organized Academy and also the Organized Holistically podcast. She is a good friend of mine and she was like, Oh my gosh. I finally found a scheduling software that I like.

I too had been using Acuity for probably about four years, and it was the only software I kept trying other software, Dub Sodo. I even tried my CRM software. Suite Dash. I tried. A whole handful of other scheduling tools and none of them could do absolutely everything that Acuity could do.

I love it, but it was also a little bit annoying, and also I had to pay for it every single month. So I was not digging that. So I found this through Dana on App Suma, which is gonna be one of our other favorite things that we talk about, but, I found it on AppSumo, and I absolutely love it. It looks so much better than Acuity.

You can have as many employees as you want. There’s no limit. You can set a new calendar for every employee. There’s no, it’s just absolutely fabulous. The booking pages look so professional. You can put a nice one on. Huge photo in there. You can set your availability, you can set different locations. It is absolutely top-notch as far as scheduling tools go, so I’m gonna put the link to that in the show notes.

If you’ve been looking for a new scheduling tool, TRA is where it is at for sure. Do not miss out on it because it will change things for you and allow you to expand your business if that’s what you’re looking to do, and also just allow you to seamlessly. , book appointments with people, schedule different types of appointments, and things like that, so I love it.

As I mentioned before, AppSumo is going to be our second favorite thing on our list. Sumo is absolutely my favorite thing in the world and I’ve spent way too much money there over the last five years. However, it’s totally been worth it. So it is a place where you can go and buy lifetime subscriptions to new and emerging software.

They generally don’t put two established pieces of software on there because it’s how people get buy-in to their software. They use you as a beta user. You can make suggestions, changes, and anything like that. And you get it at a discount as you get it for a lifetime discount. I think I paid $49 for the draft, which is the tool that I talked about just a minute ago, and.

That tool has saved me probably hundreds of dollars, if not close to thousands so far because I no longer have to pay like 20 dollars a month for acuity. So even just two months of TRA that I’ve paid $49 for has already paid for itself in a sense. So Appsumo is my favorite place.

They have a sale Black Friday sale coming up, and if you are looking for any type of software, definitely look there first. Any type of WordPress plugin, any type of tool. Anything that you can think of, definitely look at AppSumo first. 

And it is definitely a great place to purchase those tools. The other thing that I love about AppSumo is that you get a 60-day money-back guarantee. So basically, If you try out an app or a tool or a plugin, whatever it is, and you don’t like it, they’ll immediately refund you, whatever you spent right there on the spot as soon as you return it.

And that is within 60 days. So it’s definitely an amazing place to buy things. My third favorite thing is a networking group called Mob Nation and which stands for Mom Own Business.

So MOB stands for Mom’s own business, and it is a networking group all for mom, business owner. So if you’re a mom and you own a business, this is an amazing networking group for you. It is a national network.

They have virtual meetings, I think about three times per week right now. It is worth its weight in gold as far as referrals go, as far as support, and as far as resources. They have so many different classes you can take in there. They have a huge Facebook group that is. Basically full of other mom-owned businesses and mom business owners.

So I’ve known some of these women now for probably about three years since I met Aria, who was the original founder of the Mob. I can’t even tell you how many amazing interactions I’ve had with them, either online, or in person, they’ve just been such an amazing group of people.

So if you’re looking for a networking group that is going to change your business, help you with your mindset, help you to network and just help you to be amongst your peers, this is a great group to join.

The next tool that I wanna talk about is a web host. So if you are on WordPress and you host your website and you’re looking for a new host, you’re not super excited about who you have it hosted with, or you are looking to get onto a WordPress site and build it somewhere, the most reliable host that I’ve had.

An experience to date, and I didn’t look, but I know that we have at least 30 websites hosted on our virtual private server with Dream Host. Okay? Dream Host has made our web hosting so much easier. I can’t tell you I’ve even lost my website while on the. Support with Bluehost. Like I was on the phone with them and they deleted my website one time and I’m like, Oh my God, what did you just do?

Please tell me that you can get that back. They did get it back, but that was like the last straw for me. After dealing with their customer service and things like that over the years, I was just like, Oh my gosh, we have to switch everything over to somewhere else. So I tried Dream Host and I absolutely love it.

There’s nothing that has ever gone wrong that they couldn’t help me with, and most of it was my fault, so that’s great too. I’d rather it be my fault, just being me doing something that I shouldn’t have done than have it be the professional on the other end of the line. Deleting my website.

So if you’re looking for super, super fast hosting, Dream Host is the place to go. We have a virtual private server and I think we pay $130 per year, maybe. Something like that. and that really, I mean we have, like I said, like 30 websites hosted there. We’re probably at about 50% of storage capacity.

So I have to keep an eye on that because we do have a lot of content there. And as we build those websites out a little bit more, it’s gonna get even fuller. So I do, I am keeping my eye on that. But as far as performance goes, as far as uptime goes, It is absolutely amazing. So I highly suggest Dream Host.

If you are looking for a new website host. SocialBee is my next favorite thing, and it is a social media posting platform that allows you to post everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I literally mean everywhere. I’m gonna open it right now and tell you all of the different places you can post to. I have. Referred so many people to SocialBee because it’s just something that’s unheard of.

First of all, it’s not a very popular platform. It’s not, they don’t do a lot of advertising like Hootsuite or any of the other ones, but this is literally an amazing platform. So I’m gonna read you the list of places that they post to, which almost nowhere else posts to all of these places. Okay, so we have a Facebook profile.

Facebook pages. Facebook groups. Instagram profile. Instagram business pages. Twitter profile, LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn Company pages. Pinterest profile, Google My Business Profile, and TikTok profile. So there’s almost no other social platform that lets you post to all of those places. And the other thing that I love about it is Instagram, for example, you can create hashtag collections. 

Make the first comment on social B. Just, it’s just literal, a little toggle switch, please post in the first comment and you can also just literally click and select your hashtag collection.

So if you have certain hashtags that you use often, you can literally create different hashtag collections with up to 30 hashtags you can.

So it makes it so much easier. I also use this for, TDM marketing posting to all of our Google Business profiles for our clients. It is so much easier than any other tool that I’ve used. And it’s just, it’s just amazing. And the support is also really robust with this. I’ve reached out to them multiple times when something happens or I have a question about something and they get back to you right away.

Avi is the owner of the company and he will email you right back. It’s cool to get that kind of. VIP treatment from a huge company like social B. So if you’re looking for a new social scheduling platform, social B is definitely where to go.

My next favorite thing is called Envato Elements. So everybody loves stock photos. They go to all of the different free stock photo sites, but eventually, you end up seeing some of the same stock photos that you’ve used in other people’s work. I got a little bit tired of that, even Canva.

Some of the stock photos in there that are under the premium level are not exactly what you would want to have because so many other people have used them. It’s kinda like some of the templates in there, they get a little redundant. So stock photos are the same way. If everybody’s going to, I don’t know, I can’t remember any of the stock photo sites cuz it’s been so long since I’ve used them.

It’s been probably at least three years, cuz I’m going on my third year of subscription with Envato Elements and whatever they are. Pixels. I think that’s one of them. 

 If you’re looking for somewhere to get, Fresh stock photos. You can filter by color, you can filter by background or no background, or whatever. This is an amazing tool. They also, not only do they have stock photos, but they also have plugins. They have videos, they have music. They have pretty much anything that you can imagine needing.

I will read you the different categories now. They have stock video templates, music sound effects, graphic templates, graphics, presentation templates, photos, and font. Addons web templates, CMS templates, WordPress, and 3d. So those are all the different categories that you can search for items in. And it’s literally like just millions of things that you can find on there.

And it says it starts at 16-50 per month, which I think is a steal if you’re looking for original, really high quality. Stock photos, videos, and things like that. So I hope that you enjoy that one, and I hope that you check it out.

The last favorite thing that I’m going to share today is going to be the Podcaster’s Kit for 2022. This is something that I just stumbled upon, but I am so excited to get started in it and dive in. If you are a podcaster or you’ve been on a podcast, this is something. That will definitely help you.

 There are 39 different courses or books or guides or whatever it might be to help you to grow your podcast. There’s fan engagement guides, time management for productivity, getting rid of noise from your face and your space.

Use your podcasting skills to land voiceover jobs. Ultimate Planner and Tracker, Canvas templates, Air table business organizer. I could go on and on. I’m just naming the bottom few here as I scroll back up. But there’s so many podcasts. Tools in here, and they’re all from really well known people, and it is a steal, I think.

I think it was like $49 or something like that one time. And you get access to all of these different courses and resources. So if you are a podcaster, a podcaster or you’re thinking about starting your podcast, this will be a great place for you to get a lot of resources and figure out how to grow your podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this second edition of My Favorite Things episode, and if you have any questions about any of these tools, please feel free to reach out.

You can always email me at amanda@tdm-marketing.com or amanda@thedeterminedmom.com. I am an open book as far as sharing information and resources, so I hope that you do. 

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