If you want to build a good business, you are going to need good tools.
As a solopreneur speaker, you spend a lot of time juggling tasks—from balancing your books to creating social media posts.
The great news is that there are hundreds of tools that can help you manage both your time and business, so you can focus on what matters most—giving great talks.
But how do you figure out which of the tools is best for you? Will it be worth the time it will take to sign up and learn how it works? Will it be cost effective for your business?
We want to look at 10 tried and true online tools and platforms that will help you build and manage your speaking business.
The tools below are not affiliate links, but rather come from expert speaker recommendations (suggestions for the tools that help speakers keep their businesses in order) as well as some of the tools the team uses right here at SpeakerHub.
Instead of just listing a bunch of tools and platforms, we’ve looked at a number of areas that solopreneur speakers need help with, and suggest one tool for each area.
There are a lot of spinning plates when it comes to managing your speaking business.
Managing all your projects, whether it is organizing an upcoming talk or writing an article for your blog, can take up a lot of mental space. A project management tool takes the work of having to remember each step out of the process.
Trello is the project management tool to end all project management tools.
It’s a is a well-built kanban-style tool which works with boards and lists, and helps individuals and teams stay on top of a project from start to finish.
Trello has been designed specifically to help manage projects, and it is astoundingly good at doing that.
You create and assign cards and move them around as the work progresses. It allows you to track project stages, assign tasks and get a broad overview of where everything’s at. It will turn you into an A-type project manager, able to see where exactly all your projects are, and what needs to happen next.
Trello has over 100+ integrations with other key tools like Google Drive, Slack and Jira, which means you can store all related documents and conversations in one place.
TOP TIP: You can create a template card, then copy and paste it for each similar project. For example, you could add the different points from the “Essential Speaker Checklist” into one card.
Then each time you have a talk, just copy the card so you know you are going through the correct process for each talk.
Free.
There are upgrade options which start at $9.99 a month.
Keeping your agenda in order is an essential, and while keeping a physical calendar works for some, going digital makes it easier to share your plans and collaborate with others—plus, it is impossible to “lose your agenda” when it is online.
What is it?
We are cheating a little bit here by recommending two tools as one—but together they are a powerhouse of keeping your calendar neatly in order.
Google Calendar is a part of the G-Suite, while it works very well with the other programs in the G-Suite and with Google Chrome, it still works well as a stand-alone platform.
Calendly helps you find booking times and manage meetings with people from around the globe so you don’t waste time emailing back and forth trying to find a good date to connect.
When you sync these two platforms, the results of their synergy are unrivaled.
Creating new appointments on individual calendars only takes a few clicks. Events can have times, descriptions, guest lists, locations, and you can even color-code them based on your needs (one type of meeting can be basil green, while your holidays can be lavender purple.)
You can install the Calendly app to your browser, and when it is synced with your Google Calendar, the two work like a dream together.
Calendly essentially sits on top of your connected personal calendar. It checks for events marked “Busy” and interprets them as conflicts, preventing invitees from scheduling new events at those times. When you add your event to your Google calendar, as long as you ensure it is marked busy and not free/available, Calendly will see it as a conflict and make you unavailable at that time. That way, when you are sending out your Calendly link to people to set up meetings, there is no emailing back and forth for when you are, or are not, available.
Once events are in place you can set it up to get notifications sent to your email, browser, and device to make sure you don’t miss them.
Google Calendar, and the basic plan for Calendly, are both free.
Paid plans for Calendly start at $8/month.
https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/calendly/797340822162
Freelancers are a great asset to your solopreneur speaking business. Without the budget or time to hire a team in-house, it can be difficult to manage everything to keep your business thriving. Freelancers can help.
Make use of virtual assistants (VAs), freelancers, and independent contractors who can make your job easier and allow you to focus on the areas you’re more skilled in, and that will have a higher payoff for you.
Upwork is a very popular freelance platform that connects a database of millions of freelance professionals with jobs from around the world. It is a global platform that will help you find independent contractors and freelancers for short-term or long-term help.
While there are many platforms like this, what makes UpWork stand apart is the sheer number of freelancers that use it. You can find people from almost every price range from clear across the globe.
UpWork is fairly simple at its core: you post the “job” you have—whether this is help with social media, writing articles, building your website, SEO, graphic design, or managing your financial accounts—and freelancers from around the world will bid on your project by sending you a proposal.
If you’d like to be more proactive, you can find freelancers through the search function, and invite them to view your job. Then you have the option to interview or hire the freelancer straight away.
You link up your credit card, and the invoicing is done automatically, and at the end of the project, you rate the freelancer based on their performance.
It is free to set up an account, however, how much you end up paying the freelancers can vary.
Regardless of your audience, your business model, or your marketing strategy, one factor remains constant: social networking is a must. To build your influence as an expert, connect with your audience, and find speaking opportunities, social networking is an important part of marketing and growing your speaking business.
But it can be time consuming, and if you are not careful you can flit between dumping large amounts of posts on your audience when you have the time, to nothing but the sound of chirping crickets for days. Consistency is key on social media. Here is a tool that can help.
Buffer is a social media scheduling automation tool that posts the content you want to share when you want to share it, making sure you always have a stream of interesting content for your audience.
It will post for you on:
Your Facebook page
Facebook groups
LinkedIn company pages
Your LinkedIn profile
It is an incredible time saver. An hour spent scheduling content to go out at later dates and times means that you can sit back and relax knowing that your content is going out at regular intervals.
Preselect a schedule that it is relevant to your audience, then plug in what you’d like to post, and Buffer will take care of the rest.
You can even set up an extension on your browser, so that when you are reading interesting content online, you can easily add it to your social media queue.
Instead of blasting your audience with 4 or 5 posts in one afternoon, then nothing for 2 days, then another blast when you have time again a few days later, Buffer helps you add some consistency to ensure you are not overwhelming your audience and that interesting content is being shared regularly.
Your first three linked social accounts are free, then prices start at $15/month.
Note: on the free account, you can schedule up to 10 posts, which is a great starting point, but gets used up quickly, especially over multiple accounts. Still, it is a pretty fantastic tool, even with the limitations on free accounts.
The back and forth it takes to manage proposals, creating contacts, getting them signed, tracking the time you work on a project, creating an invoice, and emailing back and forth to get it paid can be incredibly time consuming.
You could hire an assistant just to manage this specific type of admin—but that could get expensive and is subject to human error.
What if there was a way to automate the process? Let’s introduce you to Bonsai.
Bonsai is like your personal Accounts Receivable Department.
It takes the work out of proposals, contracts, invoicing, and getting paid. You can automate so much of the process that it will save you hours of work tracking, emailing, and chasing-up and checking payments.
There are quite a few similar platforms, but Bonsai really is seamless, and the interface is very well designed, making it a pleasure to use.
This tool is very easy to use—click on what you need (create a proposal, contract, track your time, or send an invoice), enter the requested relevant information through the wizard, and the automation takes care of the rest. It is really very simple.
Bonsai can handle all your client payment communications, including sending invoices, payment reminder emails, and recurring invoices.
Bonsai currently integrates with Stripe for credit card and ACH payments, as well as PayPal and Coinbase. Of course, you can be paid through check, cash, or bank transfers, but you will sacrifice a bit of the automation.
Plans start at $16 a month.
We’ve mentioned the G-Suite already once in this post, but when it comes to powerful, free tools, it doesn’t get much better. G-Suite is a set of some of the best collaboration tools available. But what is it exactly?
Half of G-Suite revolves around communication—we are talking Gmail, Google Hangouts and Google Calendar. The other half is a set of apps that will help you create and collaborate. This includes Docs (documents. Think: Word), Sheets (Spreadsheets. Think: Excel), Slide (Presentation. Think: PowerPoint), and Forms (surveying tool). All of the tools are stored together on a cloud called Google Drive.
While the apps are a bit lighter then their counterpoints, this will become second to the ability to create, share, store, and access from anywhere on any device.
Once you have a Google account created, you can go to Google Drive and start creating! There are multiple wizards to help you through the process of getting started.
You get 15GB of free storage, which initially might not seem like so much, but can actually take years to get through—countless documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Also, if your computer breaks, laptop gets stolen, or any other emergency of the like occurs, all your presentations and documents are safely stored and you can access them from anywhere.
Lastly, the collaboration aspect is where G-Suite really shines—once you’ve created a presentation, you can share it with as many people as you like, manage their permissions (whether they can view, comment, or edit), they can edit or make comments directly to the presentation, all in real time. If someone has changed something you didn’t like, you can go back through the version history and easily change it back. There is no passing around copies and multiple versions, meaning everyone always has the most up-to-date version.
Your first 15GB are free. After this, plans start at $5.
One of the best things about us moving to a more design-centric world is that design creation has becoming easier, and more economical.
When it comes to sharing ideas via social media, images go a long way:
Facebook posts with images get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.
Tweets with images received 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets.
LinkedIn posts with images get a 98% higher comment rate.
In the past you might have had to pay a designer hundreds of dollars to create designs for you—but now you can create your own designs at a fraction of the cost.
Canva is a tool that makes it possible to design almost anything and publish anywhere. It's an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tool with thousands of customizable templates with millions of stock images to choose from, making it easier to create pro-looking designs at a fraction of the price.
You can easily create beautiful presentations, social media designs, media kits, proposals, business cards, even lesson plans via the 65,000 editable templates (you don’t need a template, but they definitely make the designing easier.)
Once you’ve selected a template, simple add in your content. Search and choose from the millions of stock images, illustrations, icons and fonts to make it your own.
Then either share with your team, share directly to social media, store, or download your design.
There is a free version of Canva which is very good. Pricing starts at $12.95/month
Solopreneur speakers often do almost everything themselves, including writing their own copy for presentations, proposals, articles, email, social media, and website pages. Making sure that your text is free from typos and that you are using commas correctly usually takes another set of eyes (i.e. a proofreader) to go over your copy, but this can be time consuming and costly.
As you type, Grammarly checks your text for hundreds of common and advanced writing issues. The checks include common grammatical errors, such as subject-verb agreement, article use, and modifier placement, in addition to contextual spelling mistakes, phonetic spelling mistakes, and irregular verb conjugations.
Essentially, it is a next-level spell checker that will help make sure you don’t make silly slip-ups that may lose you credibility.
If you download the extension to your browser, Grammarly will automatically check everything you write online, whether it is on Twitter, SpeakerHub or WordPress.
You can also download the desktop application.
You can import or copy and paste text, either on the website or application, and then export the grammatically correct copy easily.
The majority of the platform is free. Upgrading your account is $29.99/month.
Spend more time doing what you love, and less time trying to market your speaking skills.
SpeakerHub was created specifically to help you get more speaking opportunities—it is an inbound marketing service, meaning you don’t have to find the meeting planners and organizers, they will find you.
Your profile is a lot like an advance Speaker One-Sheet. We want to get the best information to the event organizer as quickly as possible.
It is also a great resource to keep your speaking resume up to date online.
The Events Marketplace is a one-stop-shop for creating connections between speakers and event organizers. We make it simple to find out about the latest events: either go to the search page and filter the results by location, topic or fee, or have events tagged with your topic sent directly to your inbox.
Event organizers will find you based on the information you provide in your profile. Upload media content, videos of your speeches, and add references to get the best out of it. You can embed your speaker profile card on your website or conference page, or simply send potential clients a link.
Organizers can invite you to their events and they can send you direct messages through your profile. You can also browse the “Call for speakers” list and send a proposal yourself.
The majority of the platform is free. Upgrading your account starts at $9.90/month.
Having a notepad around at all times is great for tracking new ideas, inspiration, taking meeting notes, and writing to-do lists—but if you leave it at home, it is a bit useless. You’re less likely to forget your smartphone though, and this advanced “notepad” can help you track and tag your notes no matter where you are.
Evernote is the ultimate note-taking and archiving tool for collecting information, keeping it organized, and collaborating with others. Evernote is a cloud-based software service designed for creating, organizing and storing various text and media files. Whether a text document, a photo, a video, an audio file or even a web page, Evernote stores everything so you can access it on any device when needed.
What sets it apart is its syncing. It automatically syncs all the new uploads and changes between your devices, and since it is designed to be a complete virtual filing system, it makes finding what you are looking for (and related materials) as easy as pie.
Sign up, download the app, then start creating notes!
Here is a breakdown of what sets it apart from your Moleskine.
Notes: Written document, an image, a web page, basically whatever you would jot down in your notebook, plus the ability to add media and websites.
Tags: This is one of the best features, when you tag a note, it links it with all of the other notes with the same tag. So for example, if you are giving a talk at the Digital Pharma Conference, each time you have a new idea, meeting, or article you want to link in, just tag each note with “Digital Pharma Conference 2019” then when you set down to work on the talk, all your notes will be readily available.
Notebooks: Notebooks are sort of like folders.
Atlas: Geocodes your notes for you on a number of interactive maps. This is useful if you travel a lot or need to attach certain photos or documents to specific locations.
Web Clipper: An extension you add to your browser, which acts as a bookmarking tool to help you save web pages and tag them.
Free.
Upgrades start at $7.99/month.
Which tools do you use on regular basis? Share your ideas with us on our LinkedIn Professional Speakers group, Need A Speaker / Be A Speaker.
Sign up for SpeakerHub to land more speaking opportunities this year. Sign up here.
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