If you’re a WordPress user like me, it’s likely that you’ve seen listings in your dashboard about meetup groups in your local area and even local WordCamp (essentially a conference) events. When I was finally started to emerge from my cloud of depression, my local WordCamp was the first place I started. Since then, I attend the monthly WordPress meetups as frequently as my schedule allows and I am endlessly grateful for the support, encouragement, and guidance they give me both online & offline.
For May’s meeting, I prepared a presentation on “WordPress on the Cheap”, essentially gathering my favorite free & low-cost tools for anyone building a website, working with clients, or starting their own business. As someone who has been creating content online for over 12 years, I discovered many tools & resources along the way that have helped me create thoughtful content in an organized way. Hearing my friend Brianne, also known as The Huntswoman, in my head, I decided to organize that presentation into a post to share with you.
If I left any of your favorite resources, tips, or tricks out, please share them in the comments below so that we can learn together. And if you found this post helpful, please share it with a friend!
Task Management & Project Organization
- Todoist – my favorite task management app. I love the recurring task feature!
- Milanote – a wonderful way to create mood & vision boards outside of Pinterest
- OneNote – essentially a digital notebook. Feature-rich and as powerful as your imagination
- Simplenote – a lightweight note app that syncs across almost any platform you can think of
- Editorial calendars
- Edit Flow – a powerful plugin that makes it easy to manage multiple contributors, budgets and pieces
- WordPress Editorial Calendar – a lightweight tool for managing published & drafted posts
Writing
- Grammarly – grammar & spell-checking app available in both free and premium versions
- Create your own font using your own handwriting
- Google Docs
- Open Office
Content Promotion
- Buffer – allows you to schedule posts to a limited number of platforms for free
- Pinterest – allows in-platform pin scheduling
- Planoly – free Instagram content planning, scheduling, metrics tracking, and auto-publishing
- Later – similar features to Planoly
Visuals
- Canva – the standard in online graphics tools
- Adobe Spark – similar to Canva but with more features, Creative Cloud integration & video tools
- Photoscape / Photoscape X – user-friendly & fast for quick edits
- GIMP – best feature rich Photoshop generator
- Polarr – great quick editor
- Coolors – color scheme editor
- A Color Story – easy to use app with good filters
- Office Lens – a great app for scanning documents on the go & taking photos of whiteboards
- Unfold – Instagram Story app
- Stock images (like the one in this post)
Education & Resources
- Check out audiobooks, eBooks, and magazines from your local library
- Timesheet.io – best timesheet tracker for managing time spent on projects
Worth Paying For
- Adobe Cloud – I pay for the Photography package ($9.99 per month) that includes Photoshop & Lightroom
- Adobe Fonts – included with Creative Cloud and a very under-appreciated resource for gaining access to premium fonts for free
- Grammarly – the paid version can save you time & headaches, especially if you’re writing 6,000+ words per week
- Buffer – if you manage multiple clients or schedule all of your social content, Buffer is one of the most affordable ways to do so at scale
- Microsoft Office
- OneDrive – included with my Office subscription, OneDrive is easily my favorite cloud storage solution
- Co-Schedule – a powerful editorial calendar and content schedule tool that combines multiple resources but has risen in price in recent years. If you write a review on your website, you can receive 50% off the annual price for your first year.
