These are some of the best websites and apps I use as a small business owner in South Africa. I have spent the last few years gathering free and low-cost tools that I use for analytics and trends, layout and design, social media, online file storage and more! I hope that they can help you too!
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Disclaimer: There are no affiliate links in this article. I am not getting paid to promote these websites.
If you read my last post, I mentioned that there is a severe lack of information about starting and operating a business in South Africa. Especially for young entrepreneurs. So this week, I am spilling my secrets on the best free and low-cost tools I have found over the last few years that help me run my business every day. Before I get started, I should mention that Canva is almost single-handedly running my marketing department and I believe it is my one true love in life. However, there have been a few other cool apps and website that top my list.
Analytics and Trends
In the Analytics and Trends department we have Google Trends. This is going to help you understand what is new and fresh in your country. The first page you see is likely going to be the visualiser that will rotate the trending topics currently being searched on Google. It is here that you should change the location to your country (you can do this in the bottom left corner). Click on the Google Trends logo and it will take you to the main site. I mostly use the search function to look up new product ideas or trending themes. When you search, you’ll also get top related searches! A true wonder that it is completely free.
Social Media
The enigma of the business industry if you ask me. These three tools are all available on free plans. This is the first time I will speak about the love of my life – *cue Canva*. Canva has an insane number of templates that are ready to be adjusted with your brand colours and fonts for the main social platforms. It has graphics, pictures and more, but I’ll get to this later. If you want to spring for the paid version, you can also schedule the posts you just made for your socials. Instagram also has this feature for business accounts.
On the topic of scheduling your posts, Buffer is what I used a lot at the beginning. On the free plan you can schedule up to ten posts at a time.
Beacons: possibly the second love of my life… I have a lot of love to give it seems. Similarly to Linktree, you can create a landing page with all your links. What sets them apart, is the other apps and integrations they have. You can add a store for digital products! This store links to PayPal. Some of the other apps that they have are email marketing, invoicing, and a media kit. Side note: don’t use the email marketing if you are South African based because they are not – they do not store data within our boarders, and this is an issue with regards to the POPI Act.
Layout and Design
My Layout and Design department is small but mighty thanks to these websites. As mentioned, Canva has templates for days but if you are willing to pay the subscription, there are some cool features that make designing a breeze. You can pick your brand colours, fonts and logos and have them all easily accessible as well as make brand templates so your feed will be aesthetic AF. Another huge Canva feature is their integration with Smart Mockups – placing my designs on products has never been easier. Canva’s integrations also include picture editing, Google Drive access, QR code generation, Pexels and Pixabay (see below), Giphy and the main socials.
For fonts, I use Font Squirrel, Google Fonts and DaFont. Just make sure that if you want a free font, it is tagged as commercial use or 100% free. These sites also have some incredible paid fonts. And lastly, to create colour palettes, I use Coolors – they also have a cool feature that allows you to create a palette from a picture. You can get codes for HEX, RGB, CMYK and more, check contrast, check colour blindness and export your new palettes.
File Storage and Transfer
File Storage and Transfer websites that I use are WeTransfer and Dropbox. You don’t even need an account to transfer files via link or email on WeTransfer. Dropbox is free up until a certain storage threshold. I find it especially useful because you can share a link to a specific file or folder.
Education
Learning… they say you should never stop. A good creative based learning platform is SkillShare – while it is paid, there are free or low-cost courses that are worthwhile. Another paid one is Coursera. This is more academic based, but I recommend them because of Google Certificates – there are good marketing courses from some top universities too! And then we have the incredible Khan Academy… this one got me through high school and uni. If you need the basics in topics like economics, this is your free go to. They also have career-based lessons with advice from people with personal experience on navigating your career. And of course because my love is so versatile, I present Canva. You can learn about Canva itself as well as use their Design School to get inspo, how-to articles, business and branding lessons, and more.
Free Resources
And last but not at all least we have the incredible Free Resources category. For illustrations and vectors I use Freepik. You will need to give an attribution, but some files are free. For completely free, commercial use photos, use Unsplash. I mentioned earlier that Canva has an integration with Pexels – it may also be worthwhile to have a Pexels account for stock photos and royalty free images and videos. Some notable mentions are Redbubble (to sell your art in a drop shipping fashion) and Instagram Business (to sell your products and get analytics on your posts).
The final thing I want to touch on is specifically South African - how to get a B-BBEE certificate. A Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) certificate is a document that shows the level of a company’s compliance with the BEE initiative. It has all the important information about your business like the name, details of registration of the company, category of the company, sector code, element scores and points relating to the Black Economic Empowerment of the company. Exempted Micro Enterprises can apply for one from CIPC free of charge.
I know this was a long post... and trust me, I hate the long ones too. I wanted to be sure that you had a good idea of the features that a new business can use. I hope that you can find a site in this post that helps you run your business.
All the best, Squared Designs Africa Founder, Nita.
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