More Resources
Jeri's Office: my blog
Resources For Images
Looking for more than my free images? Here are some resources.
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."
Stock Photos from Fotosearch: Looking for stock photos and don't mind paying for them? If you can't find what you want in my free stock images, check out Fotosearch for a huge selection of stock images. Photo prices vary depending on size and resolution, or you can save by purchasing "credits" starting at $1.50 per credit.
Photosearch.com is operated out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA.
Stock Photos from Canstockphoto: Another source - a Canadian one - for purchasing a huge variety of stock photos. Images cost between $2.50 and $12 apiece or you can purchase "credits" ahead of time (the same images cost between 2 and 10 credits apiece, with a credit costing $0.75 or less, depending on how many credits you purchase at a time).
CanStockPhoto is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Web graphics from GoGraph: "GoGraph offers flexible royalty free stock photography, vectors, illustrations, graphics, and stock footage at low prices. Purchase and download stock images immediately."
Small Business Resources
Short URLS from BITLY: Create and track your own short links - especially good for posting on Twitter. Another great free 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 2,000 subscribers, up to 10,000 sends per month, proper opt-in features and more.
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, and it's free for up to 250,000 pageloads per month. Gives you not only recent visitor activity, but tracks keyword activity, visit length, browser stats, resolution stats, and more. I have used StatCounter for years and find it an extremely useful tool.
Website Hosting from Hostpapa: Dustwood Media's Canadian webhost of choice. Their "Starter" plan offers one website, 100gB of SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, free standard SSL Certificate, free domain registration, cPanel control panel and more for $10.99/month or less; the "Business" plan offers unlimited websites, unmetered bandwidth, free standard SSL Certificate, unlimited SSD storage, free domain registration, cPanel control panel and much more for $15.99/month or less; and the "Business Pro" plan includes even more advanced features for $25.99/month or less. I've used HostPapa for years and found them very reliable.
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.