Free tools that help you get to your online success faster.

I’ve been building my online business since August 2022 and have found some great tools to help me:

• be faster
• be more productive
• be more automated
• be faster at writing
• have more time for essential things like writing and idea finding

Here is the list of my loyal helpers:

Hypefury for Twitter

I chose Twitter to find my audience and get my writing spread out. For that I found Hypefury to be the best tool. I tried out others too, but for the monthly fee, I can queue infinite tweets that get tweeted at different times of the day every day.

The features I like:

• Overview calendar
• Re-tweet if it has a specific amount of likes
• Evergreen: Re-tweet once a day something from the past
• Tweet recurring of a category of tweets
• Send Automated DMs to a give-away post
• Suggested tweets
• Automatically generated thread ends
• Cuts your inserted text if it’s too long for one tweet into two tweets (now you will not need that feature anymore 😉

I’m sure there are many more features I haven’t tried yet, and you can also connect to other Social Media accounts if you pay more. I’m sure I will need it in the future.

You can prepare as many tweets as you want and at what time you want, and the same with threads. It’s great if you start with Twitter and you can prepare tweets to be posted every day, and you can write them once a week for the whole week.

It’s really user-friendly and there is also a small analytics site.

Interested? Check it out here.

WordPress for Website

If you want to have a little more than a simple blog website, then you should take a look at WordPress. You have to invest a little time and studying at first to figure it out, but in the end: WordPress has a looooot of options, plug-ins, and easy tools.

WordPress is a tool you install on your domain (for example mine is
karina-ahrer.com for which I’m paying yearly). The user doesn’t see it but you can log in and change your website, add articles, or add features.

What do I use WordPress for?

• Posting my articles obviously, which I also post here
• Putting some affiliate marketing on it for things I recommend and also a list of books I read
• Landing page for my free digital asset
• and also SEO for myself
• showing my portfolio

If you want a great blog website and don’t want to spend money on a website developer, and you are interested in and have time to learn something about WordPress, then this is for you. There are a lot of videos and pages to help you understand it.

WordPress itself is free, and most of the plugins too but for the premium versions of them you have to pay.

Medium Enhanced Stats Plugin for Analytics

I recently found this awesome plugin for Google Chrome through an online writing community, and it’s a great addition to the standard Medium stats.

I’m obsessed with stats, even though it’s probably not good for my mental health or motivation.

It shows you more stats of each story with today’s views, reads, and stats in a total of your whole Medium history.

I’m proud that I was able to already reach so many people and I didn’t know about it.

You can add it to your Google Chrome here.

Grammarly for Writing

This is the best plugin ever. It helps me a lot to write better texts for you.

You can install it as a plugin to your browser, and it checks everything you are writing online. Not just misspelled words but also the grammar behind them.

I don’t have the premium version yet because it’s a little too expensive for me, but if my online business is improving I will invest in it soon.

This tool is not just for writers, it’s for everyone who is writing anything from emails to social media posts.

With Grammarly, you won’t make any grammar or misspelling mistakes anymore.

Substack for Newsletter

I was looking for a few weeks and tried out a few tools to find the best one where I publish my newsletter. I tried WordPress plugins, Revue, and MailChimp but I found Substack as the best option.

• Your newsletter posts can be discovered on Substack
• The interface is easy to use (the most important point for me)
• There are a lot of options to embed things
• There are pre-fabricated buttons you can add so that your readers can share your stories or subscribe
• Your readers can like your newsletter posts and can comment on them, this way you can interact more with your readers
• Other newsletter writers can recommend your newsletter on their page
• A simple and customizable landing page for your newsletter is included
• The platform is free to use!

There is also the possibility of starting a paid newsletter there. And they have an app now in which you can chat with your readers or other writers. Popular writers like Tim Denning or Alex Mathers are using it.

Gumroad for Digital Products

I know big online writers are moving away from Gumroad currently because they have increased their share of the products. But for starting out it’s a great platform to start publishing your digital assets.

It is easy to publish your product, and it can be discovered on the platform. Your product can be an ebook, online course, or membership.

Your customer will have access to it immediately, and you get the money in a secure way through PayPal or your bank account.

You don’t have to worry about anything. You just have to upload your digital asset and it’s done. Maybe some marketing from your side is needed.

Evernote for Noting Things

After buying an online course from Tim Denning about how to write faster I found the system of noting everything down that could be an idea for an article in Evernote.

Evernote is a tool to note everything. It is easy to use and you can organize your notes into categories.

It is my digital brain to which I outsource all my ideas, great things I’m reading, and then my thoughts to it.

What I love about Evernote:

• There is a free version of it
• There is an app too
• Organizing by folders and sub-folder
• You can search
• It shows you “recently used”
• You can share it
• You can not just write but also make to-do lists
• You can add files like pdfs, pictures…
• You can use it offline
• adding your Google calendar (not in the free version)

You also need a digital brain to save all the great ideas and insights you get. In the future, I will try out some other options for taking notes, as tools like Notion have more options.

Conclusion

These tools are what helped me in the last few months to start writing online.

I didn’t add OpenAI yet but artificial intelligence will be a great tool to help improve your online business. I’m currently using it to help me find interesting titles for my stories.

I will definitely add it to the next list of helpful tools.

Give these tools a try! I would love to hear about your experience using them or other useful tools you tried out.

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