 This is a blog that I've been meaning to write for a while... I founded Prince Talent in 2014 to aid my recovery from a serious back illness. With £600 to invest (I bought a laptop, £10 skype credit and a bluetooth headset!), I generated £150k in sales and worked with leading brands in London and Kent. How did I do this? There was a lot of hard work, LinkedIn and free work involved! But, I wouldn't of had the success I had without the amazing online tools I used on a daily basis. Today, I want to share those tools with you. I hope this blogs helps you build something special, whether that's part of a wider business or your very own business.  Crowfire https://www.crowdfireapp.com/ Crowdfire is a very useful app if you run a twitter or instagram account. You can use it to track who's unfollowed you (and unfollow back!), copy followers and get an insight in to how your updates affect your follow and unfollow stats. My favourite function is the copy followers. This allows you to follow the same accounts as any other twitter user. So you can literally copy the followers of your competitors or complimentary businesses. Think about it how effective that can be? It's a pool of people who are already engaged with a similar product or service  One of my favourite and most useful tools! Canva is a free drop and drag graphic design platform. Using this tool I've designed:
Psst...they also have a brilliant online design school!  Email Hunter https://hunter.io Email Hunter is one of my favourite free tools and the likes of Google, Adobe and Shopify love it too! Email Hunter has 3 services: Domain Search (list all the email addresses of a company publicly available), Email Finder and Email Verifer. I would often use this tool if I'd emailed someone on LinkedIn but hadn't had a response (I sometimes forget that unlike me, people have a life outside of LinkedIn!). I would find their email and send my message directly to them, I would mention that the original message was sent via LinkedIn. In my personal experience, this has given me a very high rate of response.  Recruit'em https://recruitin.netrecruitin.net This tool allows you to search for people's profiles across LI, GPlus, GitHub, Xing, Stackoverflow and Twitter. Although it's a useful tool for Recruiters, it's actually a great tool for anyone who is looking to bypass LinkedIn's search restriction and avoid having to pay those scary subscription fees!  Ok, I'm not sure if this one is brilliant or creepy... Crystal scrapes information from the internet and shows you the best way to communicate with any prospect, customer or colleauge. I was a bit dubious at first so I sent some close connections their profile results and asked for feedback. The results were scarily accurate. I always use this tool before start a conversation with a new connection (whether that's via email or a phone call). I've also started printing the profiles of people my pitch team will be meeting for a potential new project and they've found it really useful. My favourite feature is the personality similarity bar as it tells me instantly if I need to change my style of communication.  Bitly is probably one of the more well known free tools on this list but it's still worth mentioning in case some people still aren't using it! Most people use Bitly to shorten and brand their URL links (it's especially handy for Instagram and Twitter!). One of the other great things about Bitly is that the links sent out can be tracked which means you can see where and when the click through comes from.  Sniply is a tool building on from Bitly. Sniply lets you add a call to action to any page on the web. So for example, if you share alot of news via social media - you can add a call to action directing people back to your own website. Or perhaps you're a web designer who likes to share how to guides, why not add a call to action for people to contact you for new projects? With a little creativity, the possibilities and uses on this one is endless!  So Signals ties in really nicely with previous tools mentioned earlier in the post. And you can start to see how we're creating a 360 set of tools. Email Hunter finds the right address for you, Crystal helps you craft your message so it resonates with the reader and Signals allows you to track when the recipient has opened the email and clicked through any links you may have included. This is a great tool to see when you need to follow up and how effective your copy and sbject lines are.  SumoMe is a suite of online tools rather than being one online tool (although they do all integrate with one another nicely!). I haven't used all of their tools but the ones I have used, have really helped me grow by subscribers list and understand my own website better. My personal favourites are; the welcome mat, scrobb box, contact form, the list builder and heat maps (this showed me that my earlier blogs were too long for my audience!). The paid versions are steep. I've never paid for a pro account and have had a lot of success with the free versions. My advice would be to stick with free!  Before I found CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer, I use to reference a PDF called headline hacks to help me create engaging titles (feel free to get in touch if you want me to send you a copy). This tool is really easy to use, simply type your headline into the analyzer bar and it will give you a score based on it's ability to result in social shares, increased traffic and SEO value. The higher the score, the better the headline! Of course, none of these tools will supplement hard work or luck (everyone needs luck on their side!) but I hope if not all, some of these tools will help you do something amazing!
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AUTHORHi, I'm Chantelle Jones 
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