Marketing

Marketing – Like it or not its a huge part of running an ISP.

Design Tools:

The gold standard for design is Adobe Illustrator, but we will focus on free tools here:

Adobe Express – Suprisingly, Adobe also offers a semi-feature-rich tool called Adobe express. It does require an adobe account, and doesn’t have nearly the feature-set of Illustrator, but certainly seems to get the job done and is easy to use

Inkscape – Inkscape is a great free open sourced piece of software that is a near direct competitor to illustrator. Its extremely powerful, but has a similar learing curve

GIMP – Careful how far down google you go looking at this one, GNU Image Manipulation Program isn’t really a competitor to any of the others on this list, it is a handy tool that everyone should have. It is most similar to photoshop and is meant for editing more so than creating.

Marketing Tools:

Marketing tools vary widely from helping you place ads to helping you increase your Search engine Optimization (SEO).

YOAST SEO – a wordpress built in designed to help boost your seo by adding meta and other fields to your pages

SEOAbility – This is an external tool to check your SEO Score and suggest improvements

Google Page Speed Insights – This tests your speed to load and other speed related things about your website which will factor into where you land on a search page

ISP Toolbox – If you dont know about this, you definetly need to check it out! ISP Toolbox is an open sourced project run by META(Facebook) that has a few digital tools to help you find your target market, test coverage and create ads. Its definetly something you should keep in your…toolbox

Google – If you don’t know what google is then you might be in the wrong industry! In all seriousness, google has excellent marketing tools. The absolute best tool is to have a google business and start getting a steady flow of reviews. Reviews are another way to help boost your placement in search engines. Google also has easy ways to run ads and almost always has some form of ad promotion (as of writing this its get a $500 ad credit when you spend $500)

Microsoft – Yup that microsoft. Microsoft is going crazy with ads, even baking them into windows, that means that when someone clicks their start menu they might just see your ad pop up. Additionally, Edge’s default search engine is Bing, which is yet another place your ads would be placed when using Microsoft ads.