Since I've made the jump from the start-up world to being a full-time freelance marketing consultant, I've learned many many things about running a business.  Government filings, taxes, and business checking have all been swirling around my brain of late.

But, I've also learned a lot about controlling expenses.  I work on a 4 year old Dell laptop, share my office with a rarely-used elliptical trainer, and waited for Vistaprint to have a sale to order my business cards! (They are now on their way.)

I've also gotten pretty handy with utilizing free tools to get my work done.  Using free tools keeps my margins as high as possible, and helps to maintain a minimum balance in my business checking when the work isn't coming in as it should.

Here are a few of my must-have free marketing and business tools! 

1. Grammarly - This is an essential toolbar addition that corrects your grammar and spelling in almost anything that you write online.  It comes in handy most often in email communications, but also checks what you type into online forms and social media posts.  For embedded editors that aren't compatible with Grammarly, they also offer a standalone editor where you can copy and paste anything for a grammar check, and it's only one click away.

2. Canva - Canva is an incredible online tool that can turn anyone with a good eye into a junior designer.  It offers pre-built templates for display ads, social posts, presentations, documents, and more PLUS a million free images and graphics to personalize your design.

If you're a marketer that does a small amount of design to support digital campaigns, and doesn't want to outsource it, Canva is great for you.

3. Subjectline.com - Nurture marketing is not easy.  Trying to write content that is both compelling enough for your audience to read, while simultaneously promotes your product, is almost impossible.  So, I get a little help from my friends at subjectline.com when building email campaigns.  Using signals like character length, word strength, and composition, they run your subject lines against data from big email platforms to predict if it will garner opens.  The tools gives your subject a score from 1-100 and provides tips to tweak it for a little more oomph.  Brilliant!

4. Wrike - Wrike isn't a marketing tool exactly, but it sure helps me get work done.  It's a project management tool that allows me to create tasks across all my clients, and view those task lists by due date or status.  I can add notes to each task quickly, which is great if I need to follow up later.

I can even aggregate the lists, to get a better idea of which tasks need my immediate attention.  When I start a new project, I spend 30 minutes documenting every single step, and their dependencies in Wrike. It's a bacon-saver when juggling multiple projects get overwhelming and you're afraid of something falling through the cracks. 

What are some of your favorite free online tools for your business?