Everyone wants to get tailored content. But how can you do that when you just have a huge list of names? How are you supposed to make sure Taylor gets emails about building his brand and that Monisha gets emails about creating systems to streamline her business?

It’s time for you to up your email marketing game and collect more information on your subscribers.

What Do You Really Need to Know?

Raise your hand if launching gives you the heebie jeebies. I get it, boss. There are a million and one moving pieces and it’s hard enough for you to remember all the steps - let alone have some sort of organization that helps you keep it all together. Here's our secret formula for using Trello to go from Idea to 10K launch in just 30 days. 

Abagail here. I love paper. The smell of fresh ink on a hot sheet of paper makes me feel giddy. This shouldn’t be such a surprising phenomenon considering my background in design, but I have a confession to make.

I’ve broken up with paper.

Gone are the days of endless stacks of Post-it notes, forgetting which notebook contained what set of notes from which meeting, and constantly worrying that I would forget (or even lose) my to-do list.

Figuring out how to be productive as a small business owner is a job in and of itself. If you’re like us, then you’ve tried ALLL the systems! Some are free (like post-it notes, the notes app on your phone, notebooks and notepads) and some are paid (expensive software or paid apps that you think will do the trick). For some reason, they’ve all failed — and you may feel like you’ve failed all of them. Because for a lot of us (especially us creatives), our brains only work a certain way.

Seriously — for us to be productive, organized and put together we have to have the moon in a certain phase, standing on one foot, in a finger towards the north wind kind of pose. You feel us?

Owning and operating your own business generally means that you end up wearing lots of hats. You’re not only the director of pushing out and creating all the content, but the one who markets it, organizes getting paid, communicates with clients, and so much more. It can get really overwhelming, but if you put systems in place you can save time, earn more, and work less. Organization and systems will help you focus on what you love, and also let you take care of the necessities. We’ve gathered our top 15 productivity tools *(HINT: 8 of them are free!) and today we’re letting you in on how we use them and how they could be big influencers in your business too.

Alright, friends, gather round. It's time for a story and it's one you absolutely want to hear today.

When I was a younger woman, I thought to myself, "Gee Golly. Wouldn't it be nice to turn my hobby into a business?"  Wearing rose tinted glasses, I spent many days and nights planning out what I wanted to do, eager to create this business that would leave me feeling productive and satisfied. In fact, I had this crazy vision of what working for myself would look like. You know you want to hear about it.

As an online business owner, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the software, all the apps and all the things in general. But really, sometimes the simplest systems are the best to keep yourself organized. In fact, some of the most heavily relied upon systems are the ones that include the least amount of setup and have the highest return on that time invested. Today, I’m going to share with you a foolproof system for keeping content creation organized using Trello, Google Drive, and Butler for Trello, all of which can be used for little to nothing in the cost department. Perfect for the budget conscious boss, right?

The day I discovered Kiwi for Gmail was the day I realized there really was actually a better way. If you are anything like me, you are constantly switching between different Gmail accounts, trying to figure out where you saved your last Google doc and just wishing that, for the love of all things bacon flavored, it would stop logging you out when you didn’t ask it to. Kiwi for Gmail is a simple application that allows people to utilize Gmail + the G-Suite right on their desktop… sweet, seriously.