This article was last updated on March 24, 2016
All entrepreneurs are trying their best to present worthy products to the world. And of course they want to broaden their business horizons as well. Sooner or later they start dreaming of making their business global. Sounds colossal and scary at the same time, doesn’t it?
You’re going to face numerous difficulties, like finding one’s place in the sun or dealing with counterparts. Generally speaking, however, global business doesn’t differ drastically from local business. You just need to know the same principles and work them as thoroughly as possible.
Today it’s much easier to start a global business than it was a decade ago. Thanks to the power of the Internet, every local business has a chance to go global. The shocking truth of the matter is this: You don’t even have to be an experienced businessperson to make it happen! The trick is using superb online tools to help you create high-quality offerings and present them to the world. That’s it. And here’s a list of the tools you should be using to make it happen:
16 of the Best Online Tools to Make Your Business Go Global
Google Analytics shows you what users most like on your business website and what pages they visit. Thanks to the data that Google Analytics provides, you are able to analyze visitor traffic and adapt your offering to your customers’ needs.
NinjaOutreach is a blogger outreach software CRM perfect for influencer marketing. Empower your PR team to find and outreach to bloggers.The tool can help you find guest post opportunities, product reviews, podcast and interviews, promote your content, leads to making sales and more. It also shows a site’s metrics (DA, PA, Alexa, backlinks, etc.,) as well as the number of shares of a particular post. From prospecting to outreach, you can do all that with this tool.”
Bplans will help you build your business plan, even if you’ve never done it before. There’s a collection of templates for business plans, a bunch of interactive tools (like a cash flow calculator, conversion rate calculator, and many others). A good plus is that the resource publishes pieces of advice on planning and running a business.
CoSchedule has a number of useful features for your business, including marketing calendars, social media scheduling, workflow management, and a number of others to save you a lot of time, simplify content creation and posting, and track progress. It’s convenient for teamwork because CoSchedule allows easy communication among colleagues (sharing, assigning tasks, and so on).
Hubspot’s Marketing Grader analyzes your business website/blog success on the web and provides you with a report. You can see up to 100 points for your web resource, as well as checklists of what should be done to make sure your website is getting plenty of online visibility.
Buzzsumo is a resource to improve different aspects of your business. For example, you can check what content is the most shareable and tweak your own content to make it more attractive . Buzzsumo helps you stay one step ahead. To be precise, this website helps you keep an eye on opinion leaders and counterparts. You’re able to see what they publish and discuss on their websites and blogs through notifications.
Yelp is a platform that connects people with local businesses. Customers are able to easily find the services and products that interest them. This resource also helps you monitor your business reputation since yelpers write reviews and discuss businesses in the community.
Unplag is a plagiarism detection tool for checking your business website or blog content to see whether it was plagiarized or not. For example, you can post an amazing article on your blog and then some villains copy it and publish it on their own blog. In order to see if everything is fine with your content, upload your articles to the Unplag account and run a 4-second check. You can also use it to make sure your own content wasn’t inadvertently lifted from someplace else.
Slack is an instant messenger you and your colleagues can use for everyday workflow. It helps everyone stay in touch, exchange files, and discuss work issues promptly in both private and open channels. It’s trendy and easy-to-use interface is a considerable advantage.
EverNote is a great notation tool to always keep at hand, both on your mobile phone and computer for instant synchronization of all your notes. Besides making notes, you can clip documents or photos as well. You can create small to-do lists or write huge notes, share your notes with colleagues, and work on them together. If you want to make a presentation, it’s possible to transform notes into slides with a single click.
Time is money, and every second counts. Stopwatch is a countdown and count-up timer. It has customizable alarm sounds and timer displays (size, color, font). Why do business people need it? It can boost productivity and faster work when you allocate precise timeframes for each task and stick to them.
WUFOO helps create contact forms, surveys, and invitations. If you’re interested in customer feedback, you can use WUFOO to build lovely surveys and receive a report on the data. The WUFOO team pays careful attention to the quality of surveys you can make on their website. Apart from templates introduced in the Theme Gallery, its theme designer can create a custom form with your business identity.
Gengo is a platform for translating your content into different languages, a must-have for any business that wants to go global. Gengo translators work with more than 35 languages, so it won’t be an issue to translate your website or blog into any of them.
Unsplash is a photo database full of high-resolution photos, which posts 10 new photos daily. You’ll obviously need good blog illustrations, and unsplash is the perfect source for you to get them.
Canva is a website for creating great designs on your own when you can’t hire a professional designer. It has several categories for fast access to the materials you need, whether lines, shapes, frames, and so on. Canva lets you create social media images, presentations, posters, Facebook covers, and many other kinds of designs, and provides fantastic templates to be used for your business blog or website.
easelly is a treasure house of infographics. And infographics are always a great way to visualize your offerings and other business-related information. Alongside with ready-made infographics available for your use, you can also enjoy making your own infographic.
If you take the time to explore and use the 16 tools I’ve presented here, you’ll have everything you need to go global with your business.
Photo credit: Jacob Bøtter via flickr
