By Eoin on Thursday, 17 August 2023
Category: August

50 Non-Joomla tools to make your agency more profitable

This is the second part to my original blog post Ways to become more profitable as a Joomla! Agency. This part focuses a lot more on the tools than the processes that we use. I would love to hear in the comments if you have any other suggestions, better suggestions, or you take my suggestions and find them useful. 

DISCLAIMER:

I talk about and link to a lot of 3rd party tools in this document. When I have a suggestion I make it. This is based on personal opinion and preference as well as habit or in some cases blind loyalty. Please do your own research and make the best decision for you, your business and your clients and please do tell me if you find better tools. I want to make it clear that I have no affiliation with any of the products other than personal preference. None of the links are currently affiliate links BUT I think they should be so I have asked the project if anyone would create a list of affiliate links and link to them so the project can make money. In short… this article attempts to be unbiased but probably contains biases. It’s a personal opinion.

Other tools that can help you to be more profitable?

Up until this point I have mainly talked about tools that can help you to charge more. But in this section I am talking about things that can make you more productive or save you time.

Project Management tools

For project management we use ClickUp, which I LOVE. But here is a list of other tools you could use instead.

Communications tools

The next point is communications. I HATE email, but I love Slack. Especially as there is a free version. But you can also use comments in Clickup to keep things in the right place. The most important thing is you have a rule or precedent so everyone knows where to find stuff.

Here are some other options that we use from time to time.

Sales tools

We use Pipedrive to keep a list of our leads and make sure we haven’t forgotten to follow up with anyone. It’s quick and easy to use, but not the cheapest. But it saves us time and makes sure we don’t lose any money. It’s also got an API so we can integrate it with Joomla quite easily using Convert Forms or any other forms component and Zapier or Make or Pabbly (which has a lifetime deal). 

We also use Better Proposals to send our proposals. The reason being we can boilerplate and template our proposals pretty easily so it’s quicker to build them out. Plus it tells us when people have opened them so we can call the customer at that point and ask what they thought. Timing is everything when it comes to sales. 

Here are some other options for you.

Storage

I’ll keep it brief as I’m sure people are using one or another, but most have a free option if you want to use multiple.

Crashplan I will touch on because it’s less commonly heard of. It monitors your files in real time and backs them up to the cloud. It’s VERY reasonably priced. Don’t use it for sharing or teamworking but DO use it for backup and disaster recovery.

General Admin

Images

Images make a website. Here are some tools you can use to either get free images or create images quickly/easily. 

You can find a full list of free (and royalty free) stock photo websites on a blog we made on our website.

Tools to get Icons for your website

Icons can make your website look more professional, here is a list of sites to help you find more icons. Just make sure you are consistent with your use, if you pick an icon set, use all the same e.g. line drawings, or clipart. Whatever they are, try to find a set big enough to use for your whole project rather than mixing and matching artists or styles.

Use them to get a consistent style across your site. Icons can really make your site pop and often they are SVGs or fonts which means they resize without degrading. This easy tip can make it look like you spent hours stylising the site. Usually, I am up-front with the client about the fact I didn’t create them myself in case they ask us to create more icons. I have a few illustrators I can use if I need bespoke icons too.

Illustrations

Illustrations are another way to make it look like you took a long time to professionally craft a website to be perfect for your target audience. In some cases it’s a really nice way to make it fit and in other cases it’s just nice to have a really consistent style that doesn’t use photographs. This can be especially true if the client doesn’t have any photographs of their business or for a new startup.

Great for if the client is shy and doesn’t want to use photos of them or if you feel the stock photos in that industry are too cheesy or overused. As with the icons, try to be consistent with your style. Make sure you have enough for the whole website so you don’t have to mix and match or pay an illustrator to get you the perfect look.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are a great way to add texture to your website. If you want to find backgrounds and you are having trouble with searching try searching for textures instead of backgrounds. 

Use them to add variety to your backgrounds rather than using flat colours all the time. Do be careful that it doesn’t affect the contrast of your website. 

Useful tools for Marketing

Marketing is a vital component to any business. BUT it’s also a nice service to offer because it goes hand in hand with website design. If you build a website for your client as part of the conversation you should be asking “how do you plan to market your website afterwards”. You can then make money either from being a consultant (you give advice, someone else does the work) or from being a consultant and implementer (get paid for doing the work too), or from referring another business to do the work and getting a financial benefit. There’s no right or wrong answer to which way you should go with this, I’m simply offering a way for you to add an extra income stream into your Joomla agency.

Social Media

How often to post?

If you post 3 times a day you will get more traffic than once a day. That’s not an upper limit, the more you post the more results you will see.

Where to post?

Share to Facebook groups that are active. You can easily get 8,000 views per month using this tactic for organic social media. 

Find local groups, find groups in your niche, also post to larger groups too so you get a combination of high engagement and relevance (niche groups in your industry) and high reach (larger groups, they may be more geographically spread out, so consider this if you or your client’s business is geographic).

Make a list of the groups and the days they allow you to post. We keep them in a spreadsheet. Don’t click the links in the spreadsheet to get to the groups or Facebook will block you. Just use the Facebook search and copy and paste some text with a link to the post you are sharing.

What results can you expect from social media advertising?

https://youtu.be/AsoZCCPA6bU

Tools

At some point I’ll release a video on our approach to marketing using some of these tools. They will probably be released on my LinkedIn so please do connect with me if you want to hear what I have to say.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are a few good articles about SEO on the Joomla magazine already, if this subject interests you I would recommend checking out Dan Atrill’s article on SEO in the core. 

Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website to appear at the top of the organic Google rankings. Briefly… there are a few sections to the Google rankings as defined in this video.

https://youtu.be/KHwlpAZEXOg

For the purposes of this article I will briefly note what SEO includes. The very first thing it includes is Keyword research. After that you are pretty much writing content around those keywords. Finding ways to write interesting content; that content is the trick.

What does a keyword report look like?

https://youtu.be/r1IQzk6Ui-U

On-Site SEO

Technical SEO

This is the process of making sure your website is built properly. This will mean you include things like Schema tags, the ability to update your title tags and meta description and things like ensuring your website is fast, has a small footprint, images are sized correctly and quite a few other factors. If you want to check your website you can use a tool like https://pagespeed.web.dev/ or if you use Google Chrome you can “inspect element” (or hit CTRL + shift + i) and then press “lighthouse”. This will give you a list of things you can improve on your website.

Content

Content is vital and this includes what’s on your page, so things like the titles and body content are very important. As well as those two points, ensure you have nailed your meta title (page title in Joomla) to be descriptive and potentially cover some keywords. You should also consider your meta description, although this is not a ranking factor, so you don’t need to include any keywords, you should make sure it encourages people to click through to your site.

Off-Site SEO

Anything not on your site that affects search engine ranking. Typically this is backlinks from other websites that are seen as votes of confidence by Google.

There are various other factors (hundreds) that affect ranking too, things like your search history, bookmarks, the types of sites you have clicked on in the past, and much of this is determined by Google’s AI.

The overall message with SEO? 

“Write good content and then share it around the web.”

Generally write over 1,500 words to show you are an expert on the subject. Google gives you some guidance on what to do or not do but Google doesn’t tell you absolutely everything it does. But one thing is for sure, if Google says “don’t do this”, you shouldn’t do it. BUT… if Google says “you don’t really need to do this” it doesn’t necessarily mean don’t do it. Lots of times Google has said you don’t need to do it, and then we find out and prove that if you do it, it makes a difference. But it’s probably a small difference if Google is saying that, or else in some cases Google’s search advocate John Mueller may clarify his comments so we better understand what he means. It’s well worth watching his Webmaster Hangouts if you are interested in learning more about SEO.

Here are some other tools you can use to help you on your SEO journey. Remember… these are just tools, you still need to do the learning and the hard graft. You still need to write the content, these tools just give you suggestions to help you on your way.

Tools

Email Marketing

Is email dead? I’ll admit there has been a lot more spam since the GDPR rules came out. A hilarious side effect of people finding out what was allowed. In any case, if you want to market this way it’s worth considering. Use it effectively for customer retention, to stay in touch and front of mind, and also use it for cold outreach. Be careful with cold outreach and learn the rules first, and think about whether you can combine cold email outreach with something like a telesales approach or a LinkedIn campaign. 

I could talk about email for days, but here’s something someone once said in front of 100 people at an event I was talking at… “use people’s names in the subject because that’s what spammers do so it must work”. To counter that: don’t copy spammers unless you want to look like one, I have found that using people’s names in the subject works less well but please do your own research as trends change over time (including spammer trends). For cold outreach in particular: keep it short, don’t do heavily styled emails, just plain text, and give them an easy way to accept for example a free lead magnet.

Email Marketing Tools

Make templates for your standard email responses such as for proposals. Use your email signatures better, include a link to a video testimonial, tell customers what services you offer etc. The email signature is a much underrated marketing tool. How many times have you heard “Oh sorry I used company X because I didn’t realise you offered that service”.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

There is a great article from Philp Walton on AI extensions you can use in Joomla, if this interests you I recommend you check it out. 

My main points with AI are:

Chat GPT

Chat GPT is a great tool, use it wisely. It’s great to generate ideas for content creation for social media. Try this:

AI Tools

Conclusion

That’s all for now folks, I hope I have managed to provide you with some value in this article and given you some ideas for how you can use these tools and your skills to improve the efficiency of your business and your customers business.  There are so many ways we can charge for the work we do and find ways to add extra value to our customers, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all be able to make some extra money using these techniques and improving our profitability and that of our clients. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. If you would like to hear me talk in more detail about any of the things I have covered in this presentation please let me know and I will do my best to accommodate you.

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