The Big 5 Tools That Run My Business (and allow me to work from anywhere)

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So I just recently came back from a cruise from a one week cruise in the Caribbean on the cruise line called Virgin Voyages, which is Virgin - Richard Branson's company. They have a cruise line now, and it's incredible. I strongly recommend their cruise. It's so much fun. And it's adults only. So you don't have kids everywhere. And yeah, it's, it was so fun.

Anyway, during that time, I actually could run my business from the cruise and it's because of online tools and tools I use. So I've created a life in which I am geographically independent, which is incredible! I'm so blessed to be able to say that now for the longest time I was trapped in one place in a cubicle, and I'm not anymore. And it's because of some online tools that have helped me.

Now, I have looked at a lot of different online tools for productivity, for producing videos, audio, all kinds of stuff. And I'm going to distill all my knowledge down to five tools that I think are essential. If you want to create an online business.

My name is Zion. If you don't know me, I'm the founder of the Get Known Service for podcasts and blogs, a service in which we apply the Get Known Strategy, which is a proven strategy to help small businesses and entrepreneurs 'Get Known' through putting out content constantly to their audience, to attract an audience, to attract new audience so that they can get known.

We have some online courses on how it works, but we also sell service for YouTube content, creators, and podcasters. We would love to talk to you. If you are interested in this, we have a free 15 minute consultation. There's a link below and I can talk to you personally, and we can find out if our business would be the right fit for you.

All right, let's get started. Again, these are the five tools that have changed my life and allowed me to become geographically independent and to be able to work from anywhere.

Airtable. This is probably the heart of my business. This is a database tool. A lot of people think it is like Google Sheets because it looks very much like a it looks very much like a grid. Like you would see an Excel, but it's much more expensive. It's like Excel in 3D. This is by far the tool that changed my whole business.

For example, the Get Known Service that I run for podcasts and blogs, every time we get an order, it comes in through a form that I created for my clients. I created a form that they have access to. They get a link, they can fill out the information about the order, their podcast, or their YouTube video, or their blog.

And after that's done that after they've given me the information, it goes into our database and then our team starts working on it. And we take all those different little pieces of elements and create graphics, transcriptions. We update their website. We schedule all their social media. Really love Airtable for a many, many reasons. Airtable is built so that you can connect and link different records together. So if you have clients over on one tab, I won't show you their personal information.

If you have clients on one tab, you can bring them into another tab and then track which orders connect to which clients. Those are called junction tables, and you can do that all over this tool. There's also a ton of automations that you can do, that you can create si If this order goes into this state status, then launch this email or send this or notify me through Slack.

I can't even tell you how many things this tool can do - it's just incredible. They have a free version. If you want to get in, it doesn't cost anything, but they also have a pro version, and I have an affiliate link below. If you want to check it out for free for a little bit, I strongly suggest getting it. If you have any kind of data you're tracking, it's incredible. There's a lot of YouTube videos online. And I actually do have a small mini course on how I use Airtable and how I built out formulas, automations, things like that, and how the whole thing is structured.

If you're interested in that mini course, there's a link below. I created a tool for my music students called Gizmo, and I created it in Airtable. And it's a way of tracking your licensing and songs so that if you're a songwriter, you can actually build reports really easily. Text reports that then you can copy into other things so that you have sort of a one-stop place for all your data.

You're welcome to check that out. There's a link below and it's free. I have a paid version which does a little bit more - it tracks sync licensing if you want to check that out as well. So that is Airtable. This is why I love this tool. It's unbelievably powerful, and it is the heart of our business. It's the heart of all my businesses actually strongly suggest checking out Airtable.

One of the other biggest tools I use for running my business and creating my business is called Kajabi. Now, the website that I have for Get Known is all built through Kajabi. I built this - and the blog that you're probably watching this video on - is created in Kajabi.

The services we offer, the products we offer are all created through Kajabi. I used to work for a client that used different programs. She used teachable to put all our online courses in, Squarespace and WordPress to do her website creation in and ran a different thing. She had all these different apps trying to link together.

Kajabi basically does everything for you instead of having to do that, which I love. So you can have all your different products. You can track all your sales. You can create pipelines, which are kind of like funnels that when somebody opts in for something that they start getting your marketing emails from you telling you about your services and your products and things like that, or just you, you might just have much emails. You want to send them. This is all automated. You can create everything you want in one place, super, super useful.

They just added a feature for coaching. So if you sell consulting or coaching, you can sell it now through Kajabi, which is a game changer. You used to have to use other tools for that. So, so love this product! I strongly recommend if you want to sell anything, if you want to teach anybody online, there's no other program I'd go with except Kajabi. And I've used about four different ones. And Kajabi is by far the cheapest, the best, and it does the best job. And it looks amazing.

Canva. Canva is all about graphic design. If you make any graphics for social media thumbnails for YouTube videos, podcasts, if you want banners, you want to update your Twitter banner or Facebook or cover photos. This is the place to go.

If you build websites, if you're building a website for yourself, use Canva, you can get tons and tons of stock images that you can use to make anything you want. One of the things I love about Canva - this is basically to replace any need for Photoshop. Now, Photoshop is going to do a lot more, you know, really high paid graphic designers are going to use something like that. But for the average, Joe, like me, Canva does everything you need. It's insanely powerful.

You can also make logos business cards, flyers, banners. I mean all kinds of stuff like that. Menus resumes, all kinds of stuff. They've got templates. But one of my favorite things is when you first create a design, you can actually go in and use their stock footage. So if you have a pro account, which is not expensive at all, you can grab any of these stock images and start typing away, add text, add layers to this, whatever you want to do. And you can go from there.

It's extremely, extremely easy. It's a lot of fun. So one of the things I love the most about Canva is the ability to remove backgrounds in the past. So all I have to do is just hit edit image and then BG remover, background remover. And in the past, that would take me an hour, not an hour, but it would take me 15 minutes of taking the erase tool and going around her face and her jacket and her shirt.

I would try to take out all the background pixels and it would take a long time. This is very frustrating and it would zap into a lot of time. Now I can put in my own background into this image and I can resize her. And now I've got my own template. And now I can add text. Canva is insanely powerful. I hope you can see why you probably need this tool. They have a free version, allows you to do a lot of different stuff, but there's a limited amount of stock photos. And I don't think the background remover comes with the free version. My opinion, it's absolutely worth the pro version. Another thing I love is the ability to add video now. Videos are great. First, for background footage. Like if you're making a video, I actually use this all the time for B-roll in my videos.

So like this - I'll be talking about something and I've got this cool bridge. Maybe I'm talking. I don't even know if - this looks like Portland or something, but maybe I'm talking about walking through the woods and I can put B-roll footage of somebody going through the woods and slow motion, which is really nice. And I think it adds a lot to your videos. I'm a huge fan of this tool. It's incredible. I love Canva. It basically replaced any need for any other graphic design software. I also have a free course on how to use Canva. Click on this link to access the free course.

ScreenFlow. This is my favorite tool for editing software. Now I haven't used all the video editing software tools out there, but I did purchase a copy of Final Cut Pro, which is like the premier video editing software. A lot of movies are made with it and it was just too much in too. Un-Intuitive and too robust for my use.

I found that ScreenFlow gives me all the features I need for content creating. It looks good. It looks sharp. It's easy to use. I love it. In fact, this video I'm making right now is on ScreenFlow about ScreenFlow! Very meta of me. One of my favorite things about ScreenFlow is the ability to move the views around like I'm doing right here and you can actually attach your phone or mobile device to your computer and ScreenFlow will see what's on your screen. And you can actually give a tutorial that way. That way, if you're wanting to show people how you use a certain mobile app, you can do it very easily that way.

You can have multiple cameras going on, you can do screen shots of your computer like I'm doing right now. I'm showing you what's on my screen. It's just super easy. I really love this program. So if you're a content creator, I strongly recommend ScreenFlow.

Let's talk about Zapier. If you want to automate anything, you've got to use Zapier. I think they have a competitor not that's supposed to be really good as well, but I still like Zapier a whole lot. Airtable has a lot of automations. I love Airtable, but oftentimes I have to use Zapier because it's a lot more robust. Zapier is just a place to connect to - think of it as a way of gluing the internet together. It's a way of saying you want to do this over here, but every time this happens, you want to do this over here. You can do that. Like update your contact list. Every time this happens, update your calendar over here when this thing goes live over there, send you a notification, send you a text, things like that.

You basically just set it up by connecting your different programs and tools together. And then when you're ready, you can go in and say, I want to make a zap that is triggered by maybe a Facebook group that gets updated and you want to send that information to something else.

Let me show you a real life example, cause it's a little confusing. This is a client of mine that does podcasts her. Name's Dr. Angela. She's got an amazing podcast called Keep The Weight Off. It's all about losing weight and keeping it off. It's pretty amazing. But every episode, after every episode she does, I archive all the little artifacts that we create for her episode. So everything I do is an Airtable, but I use a Zap.

I use this Zap right here that I've created, which basically goes into my Airtable, takes all these little pieces of data, creates a Google drive folder in this podcast assets area with the episode number and then puts all the graphics for each one of the social media posts that we create and the MP3 of the final podcast.

And then I actually have it create a Google doc with all the different transcription, the timestamps, everything. This is all automated. I don't have to do this myself. Zapier creates this for me. I've already - cause all the data is in Airtable. My team has already transcribed. The video created found the highlight moments, created a subtitle episode, title, all those things. That's in Airtable, but Zapier actually just takes all that information and wraps it up into a nice package. And then I put it in an archive folder so that her ad team can now take it from there and they can do their work and run ads with those graphics or videos or whatever, as you can see, it's super powerful. I think you're going to love Zapier.

Okay. That's it. I hope that really helped you. Again, I would strongly check out these tools.

If you want to be working from home. If you want to be your own boss, you want to sell something online, either services or tool or knowledge or whatever it is, or you have an email audience you want to keep in touch with and you want to funnel them toward a product or an offer, or you just have something free to give away. These tools will all help you.

Zapier for connecting things together. Airtable - the heart of your business, the database tool that you're going to keep all your big information and data in. Kajabi is where you're going to build your websites. Take orders, keep track of people, email people, blog. Canva is where you're going to do all your graphic design work. And then ScreenFlow is where you can make videos. If you're like me and you like to make videos.

Okay, that's it. I'll talk to you next week.

Zion

Links mentioned in this blog:

Airtable: https://airtable.com/invite/r/eJmYv3HJ

My Airtable Mini-Course: https://www.thetriplethreatartist.com/offers/ZD477AmS

GIZMO: https://www.thetriplethreatartist.com/gizmo_optin

Kajabi: https://kajabi.com/?utmcampaign=hometrial&utmcontent=23075&utmmedium=affiliate&utm_source=Zion+Brock

Canva Affilate Link: https://partner.canva.com/c/2409511/647168/10068
Free Canva Mini-Course: https://www.getknownstrategy.com/how-to-use-canva

Screenflow: https://www.telestream.net/screenflow

Zapier: www.zapier.com

This episode was produced and marketed by the Get Known Service