If you’re a female entrepreneur, chances are you’ve had to fight for your space a bit harder than your male counterparts have. It’s a difficult job, but it’s one we all love — otherwise we wouldn’t be here!
Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools available that can make your life as a female entrepreneur a bit easier. Check out our list of tools for the female entrepreneur that we think are worth exploring.
(And, if you’re still trying to decide whether you should make the leap to female entrepreneur, then we recommend reading “How I Turned My Passion Into A Career: And How You Can, Too”)
1. The Female Entrepreneur Association
The Female Entrepreneur Association is an excellent tool to use as a female entrepreneur.
Often, as a woman in business, you can feel lonely and lacking in support. This is why the Female Entrepreneur Association is so great — it’s an international community for women in business to share advice and resources. They help to inspire and empower each other, so that dreams of successful business can become reality.
Having an online hub like this will help to motivate you, and give you plenty of help with everything from branding to productivity to finance. You can learn from videos, blog posts and personal stories, as well as access to online courses in the members’ club.
Image credit: The Female Entrepreneur Association
2. Evernote
If you’re a busy female entrepreneur, it can sometimes feel like you’re juggling a million things all at once. Evernote lets you focus, collect your ideas and organize them.
It’s essentially a note-taking app, but it also works as an organizer and planner. You can use it to jot down ideas and capture your ‘Eureka!’ moments, as well as write to-do lists, store photos or images, and save links to online articles.
Evernote was created to give users the time and freedom to focus on the important things. It’s easy to get distracted and lose productivity if your notes and plans are scattered everywhere and you can’t gather your thoughts, which is why it’s nice to get a bit of help with your organization. It's a handy tool for any female entrepreneur wanting to lead a simpler, more organized life.
3. Freshbooks
Freshbooks is the perfect online tool for a businesswoman to use to effectively keep track of her finances.
If you’re a solo female entrepreneur or small business owner looking for an intuitive, easy-to-use tool, then check out Freshbooks for accounting help. It integrates with lots of other apps, tools and platforms, which makes your life easier. It’s also great for ecommerce — so if you’re setting up your own online store, or you’ve just bought an existing one on Exchange, you don’t have to waste time transferring data from store to spreadsheet and back again.
Freshbooks can also create reporting, and automate tasks like invoicing, time-tracking, and managing stock and expenses. Plus it’s cloud-based so you can use it anywhere — ideal if you’re a woman on the go.
4. ActiveCampaign
Email marketing is a great way of reaching out to your existing customers to solidify relationships and generate leads.
If you want to take your email marketing seriously, then using software like ActiveCampaign is a must. It automates a lot of the process, and takes away a lot of the more complicated stuff, like learning code to create attractive emails — ActiveCampaign has plenty of ready-made templates. It also allows you to segment contacts to increase your conversions and click-throughs — something you’d struggle to do on your own.
One of the big perks with ActiveCampaign is you can analyze the performance of your email campaign, and edit it accordingly. Split testing allows you to improve and refine your email marketing and create optimized campaigns.
Image credit: ActiveCampaign
5. Tailwind
It’s always a good plan to add a social media tool or two to your entrepreneurial toolkit, and we think Tailwind is a great one to use.
Unlike broader social media tools like Hootsuite, Tailwind is specifically a Pinterest and Instagram scheduler, analytics and marketing tool.
This is ideal if you’re a female blogger or business owner trying to target a female audience with very visual products. As you probably know, Pinterest is a predominantly female-centric social channel with enormous pulling power — it’s got 250 million monthly active users, 81% of which are women. Pinners regularly use Pinterest to plan and make buying decisions, so make the most of this opportunity and incorporate it into your social marketing.
You should always have a plan with your social media marketing, and measuring your performance needs to be a part of your strategy. Tailwind lets you analyze your audience, as well as track trends in followers and monitor engagement. This way, you can fine tune your social marketing to keep brand awareness and engagement high.
6. SEMrush
As a female entrepreneur, you’ll know by now that the competition out there is strong. You need to use everything you can to give your business the best chance — and that means getting on board with SEO.
SEMrush is an all-in-one toolkit for marketing and SEO. It audits competitor sites and analyzes all kinds of data on keywords, backlinks and more. This means you can figure out which strategies are the most successful, and use this information to boost your own rankings and traffic. Pretty clever.
Get It Started
These are just a few of the great online tools available for female entrepreneurs.
Exploring your options and experimenting will help you to decide which tools or platforms are best suited to you. Most have free trials for starters, meaning that you can test them out and pick and choose your favorites. Aim for a variety to aid you in each area of your business, whether it’s finance, wellbeing, social media or email marketing.
-Kayleigh Alexandra is a content writer for Micro Startups — a site dedicated to supporting startups and small businesses of all shapes and sizes. Visit the blog for the latest entrepreneurial news and side hustle tips and follow on Twitter @getmicrostarted. | Photo, Bloguettes