I still love Loom because it saves me so much time.

On a daily basis, I have clients asking me questions or asking me to review documents (I never want my clients to be stuck so encourage this).  Before using Loom I would spend ages crafting an email response.

Now I simply open their email or document, turn on Loom and review their document in real-time on camera and send them the Loom video in response. I estimate this is making me around 50% more efficient when it comes to responding to the client's emails.

Now let me tell you a secret here: often when I get prospects emailing me, rather than sending them an email back I will use Loom to shoot a short video which is personalised to them.  This is a great way of impressing them and building empathy that you can't achieve through a one-dimensional email.

As I've mentioned, I have moved my video hosting to Kartra but I'm still currently using Vimeo until my licence runs out. It is still a great platform!

I use Vimeo for short promotional videos that I may not want in the public domain. The advantage Vimeo has (over YouTube) is how you can control what the user sees and embed calls to actions etc. Vimeo also offers higher quality video.  

It enables you to remove all their branding and offers more features and customisation opportunities (such as password protection and analytics).

This is great for creating social media images, eBook covers and other graphics. It is really simple to use and saves me a ton of time, especially if I start with one of their predesigned templates or image sizes. 

This year I switched to a paid version of Canva. It adds additional functionality such as resizing, removing backgrounds and animation. 

If you create a lot of PDFs and e-books then this is a really useful tool (although you can also use Canva to perhaps more easily create some of this content).

Another useful function is that you could take a blog post and import the contents and automatically create an e-book from it.

If you have a WordPress website then this is my favourite tool to use to easily create engaging websites using lots of beautifully designed templates (however if you've read this far you will know that I have moved from WordPress from my website to Kartra).

It's a WYSIWYG builder that sits on top of WordPress and makes it super easy to create new landing pages.  It's easy to connect to your email marketing system and do other clever things such as A/B headline testing, creating demand and scarcity by using countdown timers, writing quizzes and so much more.

This is one of the more affordable tools in this category. I am a ThriveThemes member and I pay about £175 a year for all the tools and support and all upgrades. This is a fraction of the cost compared with other website building software.

I am still a fan of ConvertKit even though I have now moved my email marketing to Kartra.

I have used a range of email marketing automation tools over the years including MailChimp, MadMimi and ActiveCampaign but in the end, settled upon ConvertKit because its functionality met with my needs.  It is also more cost-effective and it’s easy to set up automations, (think sales funnels).  It plays well with other systems such as ThriveArchitect, Teachable and so on.

I am all about time-saving. In fact whilst this blog is about my favourite tools, it's all about using timesaving and efficiency tools and none are better than saving you time than LinkedHelper.

LinkedHelper is an app that enables you to automate some aspects of LinkedIn engagement (think of it as a sales funnel for LinkedIn).

So for example, you can send personalised connection requests to a targeted audience or you can send more detailed personalised messages to 1st connections.  I typically use it to find new ideal connections and also to let my audience know when I have some interesting things happening such as this blog being published or a new webinar.

Talking of LinkedIn, I also upgraded to Sales Navigator because I can drill down my search in more detail and create lists and 'tag' contacts.

Now a word of caution here: LinkedIn doesn't like these automation tools so use it carefully and don't use it to spam your contacts!

Here is a tip if you're a Mac user: if you press the function key twice it brings up the microphone and you can dictate voice to text (this is how I'm writing this blog).  

This massively speeds up my content creation.  But don't worry, if you're not a Mac user you can also click on the dictation microphone in Word or Google Docs etc.

This has two big advantages:

1. Firstly, it speeds up the creation of content because it's much faster to dictate than it is to type.
2. Secondly, it also ensures that I capture my tone of voice in my written content. This is important because I want my users to have a consistent experience whether they are reading something, listening to my podcast or meeting me in person.  Voice to text ensures that I maintain that consistency.

I started using Xero, which is an online finance app, some years ago to streamline my bookkeeping.

The thing I like about Xero is it speaks to you in plain non-accounting terms and it connects to your bank account making reconciliation very simple.

It also connects directly with my accountants, which means they can rescue me when I make a mistake and submitting my end of year accounts is much simpler than it used to be.

Receipt bank is a sister tool that works well with Xero.

I don't know about you, but in the past I have been terrible at submitting all my receipts. ReceiptBank removes this issue by making it very easy to simply take a photograph of a receipt, which it then digitises.  

You can then submit these receipts directly to Xero -  making the process very straightforward.  This one saves me a ton of time and a ton of money!

I love Google Drive and have slowly moved all my client work from my drive to Google.

This has the huge advantage of easily being able to share docs.  You can quickly invite others to view, download, and collaborate on all the files you want–no email attachment needed. It ensures that both you and your clients are collaborating on the same version of the document. 

You can keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. You can access these docs anywhere, so wherever you go, your files follow.

It also protects you against a hard disk drive dying (which happened to me this year) and losing all your data.

This one was a game-changer for me.

I don't know if you're like me but during the day I open way too many web browser windows and tabs.  I then struggle to find what I'm looking for so I end up opening yet another tab!

Well thankfully I have found a solution to this and now I am much more in control and have way fewer tabs opened.

And that's all thanks to this chrome browser extension called Toby (another rather stupid name!).  

This enables me to create a frequently used library of tabs and put them into various categories.  Now when I open my chrome browser the first thing I see is the library of tabs.

As I said this is a game-changer for me.