15 Small Business Tools I Use Daily As A Copywriter
Too long, don’t wanna read? Listen in less than 7 minutes ⬇️
I’ve been a copywriter for 4 years, and have figured out how to be a business owner for just as long (and I’m still figuring it out). Along the way, I’ve found small business tools that help me with day-to-day business tasks and save me oodles of time. You might know about some of these, and you might discover new ones that become your saving grace. But you won’t know until you scroll 😉
Here’s the laundry list of small business tools:
Loom
Otter.ai
Toggl Track
Toggl Plan
Notion
Canva
Death to Stock
Later.com
Flodesk
Hemingway Editor
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Zoom
Creative Copywriting 101
Market Research Master Pack
#1: Loom
Loom is a free online screen recording tool with advanced video editing and video storage. Sometimes live calls aren’t possible or, let’s be real, we just don’t want to hop on one. I use Loom to record my screen and present copy to clients! I also use Loom for my walkthrough videos in all of my digital products. Other similar small business tools like this include Vimeo, Online Screen Recorder, and Movavi.
#2: Otter.ai
Otter.ai uses an AI Meeting Assistant to transcribe meetings in real time, record audio, capture slides, and more. I use it to transcribe everything on calls, which has been a real game changer for me client experience-wise. This is great for discovery calls because I can pick out common problems my ideal client has and create offers to serve them. And I love that Otter.ai takes screenshots at important moments during our calls so I can see what we were talking about!
#3: Toggl Track
Toggl is a free time tracking software. This is vital whenever I have a client that invested in a Copy Retainer — which is, by far my most popular service. They invest in a certain amount of hours, and Toggl Track helps me stay on top of things so I know how much time we have left in the retainer. BONUS: when people asked me how long it would take me to write web copy, or emails, or something else, I would never have an answer. With this tool, I can see how long it takes me, on average, to write something!
#4: Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan (the bestie to Toggl Track) is a resource planning and project scheduling software that’s also free! It has saved my ass many a time, helping me stay on top of my daily and weekly tasks — and the user experience is GORGEOUS. Toggl, I don’t know if you’re listening, but your small business tools are so damn good I’d write a love letter to them.
#5: Notion
Notion is a new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one — your Google Calendar, docs, projects, content planner, all that jazz. This connected workspace is my everything. It’s where I plan my content, brain dump all my ideas, and create my resources!
Like Creative Copywriting 101, my Market Research Master Pack, and a new resource that’s releasing soon 😉
I even created a dashboard that’s become a hub for all these things. See ⬇️
#6: Canva
Canva is a free and easy to use graphic design tool that I’m sure most online business owners use to create:
- content
- presentations & proposals
- digital products, and more
That’s what I use it for, and it automatically opens up every time I open my web browser.
#7: Death to Stock
Death to Stock has a library of 8,000 vibrant and iconic visuals + 500 new ones every month. I find some of the best stock photos on there for my content, and it’s 1000% worth the membership fee.
#8: Later.com
Later.com is the social media scheduler I use for my Instagram posts, and it makes things so much easier to have my content scheduled out weeks in advance. I don’t use it for Facebook because honestly I gave up on that platform, I prefer to post natively to TikTok, and I’m anxiously waiting for them to add Threads as a social profile.
#9: Flodesk
Flodesk is an email marketing platform with a user-friendly interface and pretty, easy-to-customize templates for your emails and sales pages. It makes it so easy to be able to have a sales page and checkout on the same platform I have a newsletter instead of having multiple platforms.
In my Welcome Sequence Template, I include links to shared Flodesk templates that have most of the work done for you, so you can easily start a newsletter with the customizable copy on the Flodesk platform!
#10: Hemingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is a free online tool that makes your writing easier to read.
I use it everyday — for my own copy and for my clients. It most definitely has made my job 1000x easier, and will be super helpful for you as you write your own copy and content.
#11: Google Docs
This is my holy grail — where I write all my copywriting projects and where some of my digital products live. I love how user friendly this is and that it automatically saves my work (I had too many tragic losses with Microsoft Word). And even though I grew up on Microsoft Word, Google Docs quickly stole my heart.
#12: Google Sheets
I use Google Sheets everyday when filling in my client’s brand information and doing market, competitor, SEO & consumer research. I created a master sheet template that houses all this information, and I love the user-friendly interface of Google Sheets compared to Microsoft Excel.
(Although you can get the template on both platforms when you grab the Market Research Master Pack™.)
#13: Zoom
As far as video meetings go, Zoom reigns supreme for me. I can easily integrate my Otter.ai with Zoom so it automatically starts and transcribes on every meeting, I can record calls that save to my computer if I wanted to, and it looks better when sharing my screen compared to Google Meets (in my opinion).
#14: Creative Copywriting 101
This is a digital product I created after too many years of trying to figure out how to write cool copy without the darned creative block getting in the way. This freebie has 21 creative writing techniques (with examples) that the advertising industry’s best and brightest stars trust to craft the coolest copy ever. I always refer to it when writing copy for my clients now, and you can use it too!
Download Creative Copywriting 101
#15: Market Research Master Pack
I mentioned this digital product ⬆️ up there ⬆️, but it deserves further explanation — this is the best resource I’ve ever created. Research is the first and most important step in the copywriting process (I’ll speak more on this in another blog post), but it took me 4 years to refine my process. I used to just have a disorganized Google Doc with a bunch of bullet points of information that was overwhelming to sift through — if you’re a copywriter, social media expert, or strategist, you know what I’m talking about. This might be what you’re dealing with right now!
That’s why I created this Notion-based resource — it has all the tutorials and templates we need that show us how to conduct, organize, analyze, and act on market research from 12 different sources:
- AnswerthePublic
- Ubersuggest
- Google Trends
- Think with Google
- Social Media
- Semrush
- Statista
- The Pew Research Centre
- The Census Bureau
- The Consumer Research Questions Masterlist (another freebie of mine)
- Typeform
Watch the full walkthrough video on the Market Research Master Pack here, and you can grab it here if you’re ready to go from confused chaos to clarity!
And here are 12 other market research tools I love using too, if you’re interested.
Closing
That was a lot of small business tools! Thank you for sticking with me through this. Now that you made it all the way down here, here’s quick access to my free and paid resources that I mentioned in this post:
