Here you’ll find more generalized resources for small business or personal use. See the Author Services and Artist Services pages for resources specifically for authors and artists.
Free Image Editing with Canva: “For people and teams wanting to design absolutely anything, from logos and social media content to documents, prints and more. Tons of free templates, photos and fonts to bring your vision to life.” Has a free version.
(I’ve never used Canva myself, being used to the more complex tools in Corel Paintshop Pro; but Canva is supposed to be an excellent tool).
No-Hype Marketing with Marcia Yudkin: Marketing For Introverts and Other Under-Appreciated People and Companies. Marcia offers great marketing services and resources, including free before & after makeovers, FAQs on logos, marketing, and more.
Marcia operates out of Goshen, Massachusetts, USA
Email Marketing with Mailchimp: MailChimp provides you with an Email marketing tool similar to Constant Contact, but with a viable free level – up to 1,000 sends per month, with forms and landing pages. The Essentials level ($17.88CAD/month) allows up to 5,000 sends per month, with forms & landing pages, pre-built email templates, and email scheduling.
Accept Credit Cards With Paypal: I have been using PayPal Payments Standard for years to give me the capability of accepting both credit card payments and PayPal payments. I have always found them to be reliable, and there’s no better – or easier – way to get into e-commerce. Setup is free, and there are no regular monthly charges. You simply pay a percentage of each sale (2.9% plus $0.30) to PayPal – which means you only pay when you make money. The only other fee is a charge of $0.50 when you transfer money from PayPal to your bank account.
Canadian Payroll Tool – Payroll Deductions Online Calculator: This is an extremely handy tool for any Canadian small business that has to handle a small payroll and doesn’t want to pay the extra for the payroll module in Sage or QuickBooks. Completely free, and provides you with printed reports.
Website Stats From Statcounter:. An excellent and very detailed statistics-tracking service for your website, with a very useful Free plan that lets you track up to 500 page views per month. Gives you traffic trend charts, an analytics dashboard, real time visitor fees, and basic email reports. I have used StatCounter for years and find it an extremely useful tool.
File Sharing from Hightail: “Securely share large files with instant recipient email notifications, and know when your content has been accessed with file delivery and send tracking.” Hightail also enables you to collaborate on documents and do project management. Their “Lite” level, which is free, provides 2 GB of storage and lets you share files of up to 100MB in size.
Free Email Accounts:
Google’s Gmail is my top choice for a free online email provider, powerful and reliable. Just go to www.google.ca and click on “Gmail”.
You may have an email account available through your ISP (Internet Service Provider). Check out your ISP online and see if email addresses are included in your package.
If you have your own website, very likely you have the option to create one or more email addresses through your cPanel. This is the best choice for a business email address.
You can also get a free email address at Yahoo, Hotmail, and other places, but many servers treat email from these locations as junk mail. If you are using the email for business (and don’t have an email address through your website host), do NOT use a Yahoo or Hotmail email address – choose Gmail instead.