Quick tools for Small businesses & Organizations to build an online presence

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Building an online presence is a great way to start marketing your small business or organization. An online presence is crucial in sharing your story to others who might not know about you yet. Most of us have an entire community at our fingertips that we don’t think to share our business life with...

​Do you have a personal social media account? You can use your personal social media and these tools to help direct individuals to your business website, business Facebook page and even share products or fundraisers you are organizing. I want to help you discover some easy tools that can help get you started in building your online presence while you continue to operate your business or organization.

Tools to Build an Online Presence:

Canva

Canva is an amazing tool for easy templates to plug in social media content to show your audience quick information or photo updates. They have hundreds of design templates crafted and ready for you to input your information and design anything. ​

To make an account, visit canva.com and create a log in.  From there you will have access to graphics, templates and images to create your designs to download in multiple formats. This tool is free, but there is a paid version that allows you access to more photos and content to input into the templates.

A warning from a frequent user: beware the amount of time you spend picking out templates and colors and images. You could spend hours searching through the catchy designs. Stick to your message, brand and share your story.

Quick Branding Tools

Fiverr.com is a website that hosts freelance designers and other creatives to help you define your look via a logo or graphics for a project or fundraiser. By working with this site you can find someone who can help bring your idea to life visually, making it easier to understand by your constituents.

If you already have a logo and a general look to your business or organization, but need help refining some of those small branding logistics like color schemes, visit pantone.com to view color schemes or grab hex code numbers to make your designs in Canva cohesive and consistent with the same colors. You can also use a hex code grabber in google to upload an image and pull the colors from that image if you have something else in mind.

weebly for websites

This site that you are viewing now is from weebly.com. They offer free website templates that are easy to edit and plug content in for free. If you have a free Weebly site note that your domain name will appear mydomainnamehere.weebly.com. If you have a domain through a service such as GoDaddy! Then your website will be similar to mine helenbrincefield.com

In addition to free website templates, Weebly has paid plans to offer you domain hosting, google ads and business features that could help you if your business or organization has a physical retail space. Weebly offers a Small Business package for $25/month (when paid annually) that gets you access to features like online inventory, a shopping cart, the ability to accept payment via Square and other marketing features such as a search engine optimization and eCommerce statistics.

social media

Social Media pages are a great way to build your social presence and share your website information in a way that gets your audience excited about what you are providing whether that is physical retail product or services. One easy way to do this is to set up a Facebook business page. This will allow you to share information about your business, allow for community members to message you directly for questions or view your hours of physical operation, and to get free reviews to increase your visibility online. Having a Facebook business page will allow you to view more statistics if you create an Instagram profile if you prefer sharing your story more visually. Social media can become one more thing to manage, but it also may help you expand your constituent base by being more accessible online.

Remember that an online presence means you are representing yourself personally and professionally online. Individuals will begin to associate you with your business and what you begin to post on your website or social media. Tread carefully and always be authentic to you and your business and organization.

Want to Learn More?

All of the above tools are very user friendly, but if you or your business/organization would like assistance with setting up these tools please fill out my contact form on this website. I would love to work with you on telling your business or organization’s story by building an online presence. Feel free to share with someone you know who may be looking for the right tools to find their audience.

​Thank you for reading!