Business Resources
Things You Need When You Start a Business in Vancouver (or anywhere!)Things You’re Going to Need
You’re going to need to make sure you have these things covered off as you start your business in Vancouver (or elsewhere!) and or launch a new website:
Hosting
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Ionos.ca – Great deal if you need domain ($10/yr) and email ($1 a month! cheaper than lots of other providers who do it in a more complex way – great for WildApricot clients who only need domain + 1 email that matches) Go get it >> | |
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GoDaddy is a great and affordable hosting choice Deluxe Unlimited WordPress from $60 CAD per year. They also offer email with Office 360, not bad if you don’t have Office paid for elsewhere. It’s not free though. | |
| Netfirms also great. Choose WordPress-specific hosting if you’re doing WordPress! WordPress-specific hosting has extra features to protect your site and get better performance. Check out hosting prices with Netfirms! |
Logo
Monica Calderon is our go-to good-value graphic designer. Logos from $700, business cards from $200. See Our Team page. See also examples of Monica’s work here.
Photographers
Roger Mahler – Union Photographers – Photographers in Vancouver Vancouver wedding, family, and corporate headshot photographer with unique photographic style and careful attention to detail. Photographer for Lara Spence and team. Melissa Skoda – Photographer in Vancouver Great photographer too. I like to give you some choice here. Melissa was in BNI with me.
Email Marketing – MailChimp
Design and send email marketing campaigns with MailChimp. Unlike Constant Contact, MailChimp is free for small clients. Easy for users to subscribe to your enewsletters. Easy for you to configure, easy to track your revenue. Free to use, forever. Try it now >> I like this one as much as Constant Contact now that I know how to use it!
Image Compressor
We couldn’t have said it better, so we won’t! Here is a direct quote from Website Planet: ‘You don’t want oversized PNG files slowing down your website. When you use the Compress PNG / JPG Images Online for free, the only thing that will change is the file size.’
We’ve tried it and we love it. Here it is if you’d like to use it for your own website images: Image Compressor by Website Planet
Business Cards – Online Printing
VistaPrint offers super sweet deals on business cards, self-inking stamps, postcards, posters, brochures, mugs, pens, photo mouse pads… everything you need to promote your business or event (or cool photo-related gift project). I also do calendars for my family every Christmas (the US site for my US-destined ones; Cdn site for my CAD-destined ones). Use this link>>
Expense and Time Tracking Software
Freshbooks. Hands-down amazing. Track all your time, track your team’s time, have fun (yes! fun!) entering expenses. Send estimates. Send invoices. Track who has paid you, who hasn’t. Get killer reports. All for $23 a month (I use a bigger plan b/c I have more clients, but so worth it!) Try Freshbooks for free for 30 days (it changed my life!)
Send Out Cards – A Real Card in the Mail
Because a business needs to say Thank You now and again. With a real card in the mail. Plus, you’ll be so busy working you’ll need Send Out Cards to help send birthday cards to family and friends too – in Canada, US or overseas. Great way to do holiday cards!
Add Business Number to your Cell
https://talkroute.com/ or https://grasshopper.com/ – get business voicemail and business number (but keep your cell and use your cell) – allows extensions too $19 USD per mo.
Business Cards, Printing (for Vancouver pickup = fast!)
Email Marketing – Constant Contact
Constant Contact is very easy to use, $15 USD per month. Affordable, wonderful email marketing tool offering easy to use and good looking templates you can create yourself, with full opt-in/auto unsubscribe mailing lists. Keep top of mind with your clients by sending them email newsletters! (We recommend you email your clients/circle of influence once every 4-6 weeks at minimum!) FREE trial for 60 days! Let us help you make a template that matches your brand. We can also help with producing the enewsletter and linking back to your blog (*very important!*)
Stock Images
OK, we love istock photo and shutterstock. Images are about $11 or $33 CAD each if you buy Essentials/Signature respectively.
An excellent source for free images is Unsplash. Their tagline is ‘Beautiful, free photos’ and the images are indeed very beautiful and high quality. They’re free, but it is requested that you give photo credit to the individual photographer and there is an easy, copy html option to do this.
You can also try GraphicStock – $99 for full year “all you want” downloads but we find the quality and selection not as good as istockphoto. See what they have >>
SEMPO
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