Here’s a big list of business tools and personal tools I’ve recently used (updated for 2021)

In the past, I’ve shared the business tools and personal tools I’ve been using so you can get an idea of the types of things I invest my money in.

Some of these tools I continue to love and others I either no longer recommend or no longer need.

So I thought it would be good to make a new, updated version of that list of business and personal tools so you can see everything I currently use and continue to recommend.

For organizational purposes, I’ve broken down the post down into the following categories:

• Business investments
• Life/Convenience investments
• Other investments
• Free tools
• Tools I’d pay for if I didn’t have access to them
• And tools I no longer use or recommend

To see the full list, keep reading below. Let’s take a look…

Business investments

Print-on-demand companies

If you do the Low Hanging System, you know we sell items and then purchase those items from print-on-demand companies once they’re made, so I have to pay my warehouse for that service.

My last few big bills have been to CustomHappy.com and I’ve paid my warehouse directly for my sales of mugs and other products. (I have a couple companies, so Rachel Rofe Enterprises pays CustomHappy as it’s a different entity.)

I also use UseGearBubble.com, Printful and PrintProductsFast.com, depending on the product I am selling. CustomHappy is the one I do the most business with, of course.

Amazon ads

You definitely don’t need to run ads with LHS. But I do talk about how you can do this in the training.

If you want to scale up, running Amazon ads can be really profitable and it’s something that I’ve been doing. So the fees for that have been on my American Express bill lately.

IFTTT Pro (If This Then That)

IFTTT is a great tool that lets you automate specific business and personal tasks. I wrote about this tool in a blog post a few years ago, which you can check out here.

IFTTT has a free version, but I pay for the Pro edition ($3.99/month) for certain automations, including…

• Create Evernote “idea” list from Feedly tags
• Track your daily Fitbit activity in a Google spreadsheet
• Stock rise alert
• Get an email when your company is mentioned on Reddit

Zapier

Zapier is similar to IFTTT, and I use this tool to automate certain processes to make them easier for me. The automations I set up range from copying my Google contacts into Evernote to logging all of my Etsy sales.

To learn more about all of the options you have with Zapier, click here.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool I use to come up with blog post ideas. It has a free version but I use Feedly Pro. The way Feedly works is it aggregates links from a variety of sources pertaining to topics or feeds that I’ve specified. On my Feedly, I have the following feeds:

• general marketing
• traffic
• awesome
• Amazon
• blog tips
• content marketing
• copywriting
• ecommerce
• eBay
• Etsy news
• Faceook traffic
• flights
• life hacks
• and more.

I can go in each day and see what articles Feedly has gathered so I can check it any might be good to write about in a blog post.

Zoom

Many people became familiar with Zoom right after the onset of the pandemic. There’s a free version that you can use to chat with friends and family. But I have the paid version, which I use primarily for Custom Happy manager meetings.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is the main email service provider I’ve been using to create and send my newsletters and promotional emails.

MerchantWords

MerchantWords is really good for keyword research. I usually use SpotNiches, but if I need something in a pinch, MerchantWords is perfect. (If you decide to use MerchantWord yourself, use this link and coupon code LOW to get 40% off your first 3 months.)

Coaching

I’m a big fan of working with coaches. They are people who are already at the point where you want to be and, you can learn a lot from them. Working with coaches shortens the learning curve of figuring out how to do certain things for your business and it just makes everything flow a lot more smoothly. That’s why we offer a coaching option with the Low Hanging System.

Dropbox

Dropbox is tool that makes sharing files between myself and my team super easy. I use it a lot with both of my companies, including the warehouse, and it’s great for hosting large volumes of documents and product designs.

Brain.fm 

Brain.fm has great music that helps you focus, relax, or sleep. It’s engineered with different types of beats that are supposed to work well with your brain. I often use it to help me focus and I think it’s really helpful and effective.

My Fancy Hands 

I use My Fancy Hands to get help with both my business and personal life. The service serves as US-based virtual assistance and it can help save you a lot of time. You can check out a blog post I created about using Fancy Hands here.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is one of the tools I use for making designs for my LHS products. You don’t have to use PicMonkey for this, but it’s cheap enough, and I find it really helpful. I use PicMonkey and Picsplosion to make nearly all of my desktop-based images.

Evernote

Evernote is incredible. I use this tool to document practically everything in my life, and it helps me stay organized. With Evernote, I create notebooks for all the different aspects of my life.

For example, I have a notebook for the weekly email content I create. I have notebooks for the warehouse. I have notebooks for Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, and I have notebooks to keep track of vendors’ pricing options.

Whenever I buy courses, I create notebooks for them. Then, I put my course notes inside the notebooks so I can easily review them and find the most important information.

Additionally, I have notebooks for personal things, including a health notebook, which I use to keep track of information I get from doctors so I’m able to keep it all straight.

There are so many things you can do with Evernote, and it makes it really easy to search for specific information within your notebooks. 

AppSumo

AppSumo is a site offering daily deals for digital products and online services. I’ve bought a lot of random things from AppSumo that ended up being really helpful. So if you haven’t signed up yet, I would definitely recommend doing so. 

You just have to make sure you’re buying things you’re actually going to use because it’s easy to go crazy grabbing up all of the cool things available.

Screencast (Techsmith) and Screencast-o-matic

I use Screencast and Screencastomatic to take pictures and record videos. This makes communicating with my team a lot faster and easier. Making a recording of yourself speaking instructions or feedback is way more convenience than typing it all out. I even recorded myself dictating a portion this blog post before having it transcribed. 

InventoryLab

If you don’t have a ton of products with your LHS business, you don’t necessarily need Inventory Lab. But since I have thousands of products, I really love this tool. I use it to quickly identify my most profitable SKUs and ASINs. I check what my FBA inventory is looking like, and it shows me all kinds of other useful information as well. 

Because Amazon can be so hard to read, I think it’s worth it to pay the $49/month to use InventoryLab to help me read reports more easily.

Hosting – LiquidWeb

In the past, I tried streamlining my hosting payments for the different websites I have. I used LiquidWeb along with a few others sites to put everything into one particular hosting service. I’ve also looked into Amazon’s services but I found they were a bit scattered.

HaikuDeck

HaikuDeck is something I use for my courses. It makes really nice PowerPoint slides super easily. HaikuDeck is good for anyone who creates information products. It costs $120 a year.

ClickFunnels

I use ClickFunnels primarily to automate processes and make them easier.

YouTube Premium

YouTube Premium used to be YouTube Red. It by-passes all of the ads that show up with videos, which I prefer. I use YouTube a lot. I love it for learning purposes. I get discover some really awesome things there so paying for premium is worth is to me. 

Training courses

I’m always investing in different training courses. I love to learn, so I like to buy courses to learn specific things. I’d say I’m pretty picky about the types of things I buy, though. So for other people, I recommend having a goal that’s outlined and then making purchases accordingly.

LibSyn 

I used LibSyn when I was doing my podcast regularly, which I would really love to start up again, as I’m still getting downloads every month.

Rev.com

I use Rev.com for transcriptions. Every week, we have Jumpstart calls, during which we do Q&As, and I like to get these transcribed for people.

Bonanza

Bonanza is one of the marketplaces I get sales on.

Fiverr

I use Fiverr for a lot of random things for my business, including help completing case studies, SEO keyword research, and getting content written.

Affiliate payments 

I make affiliate payments for various courses, and I’m always happy to pay these because affiliates draw a lot of traffic, which is awesome.

Namecheap

I use Namecheap either for the domain names I buy or for renewing the domains I already have.

PayKickStart

PayKickStart is a shopping cart, which I’ve started using more than Zazaa because it offers more flexibility. 

Upwork + My team

I use Upwork to pay people on my team for their services. I also use PayPal and Citibank to do this as well. Staffing is by far my biggest business expense, as having an awesome team with phenomenal service is super valuable to me. So I pay a lot for that. If you’d like to learn more about outsourcing, click here.

Life/Convenience investments

Travel

Outside of my business expenses, travel is where the bulk of my money goes. I believe travel is an investment in yourself, as seeing new places and meeting new people allows you to broaden your horizons and expand your world view. 

Peloton

I used to pay for a personal trainer, but now I use Peleton as my main form of exercise.

Instacart

With Instacart, you can get items from Whole Foods and other grocery stores delivered to you, which saves time and is a safer way to shop during the pandemic.  

Water delivery 

With this service, every week, I get fresh water delivered to me so I’m not drinking bottled water as much, which is terrible for the environment.

Other investments I make

Donations

I tend to make a bunch of random donations. I won’t list them out, but they include things like GoFundMe and charities that tug on my heartstrings. 

Robinhood

I use Robinhood for my stocks. And I prefer Robinhood over other platforms because it gives you free trades. I also use eTrade for my Roth IRA.

Acorns

Acorns is a cool investment tool that rounds up your purchases. So, for example, if you spend $9.88 on a purchase, Acorns takes that $0.12, saves it for you, then invests the money it rounds up. Acorns is a cool way to save money on autopilot without having to think about it.

WealthFront

WealthFront is amazing. It’s another way to invest money, and I’ve had an ROI of over 30% on the money I’ve put in there.

Cryptocurrency and CoinBase

A big chunk of my money has been going to investments, especially cryptocurrency and CoinBase. 

Free tools I love

Trello

Trello is a tool I use to organize a lot of random thoughts. It’s how I brainstorm weekly blog posts and emails, communicate with my warehouse team, and organize projects with people I’m working with. I have sections on Trello about things to talk about in my upcoming meetings, things to follow up on, and tasks for my team members to complete.  

Google Photos

Google Photos is incredible. You can put all of your photos in there and organize them by albums. You can also search by location, date, or even person.

I’ve been slowly moving every picture I have to Google Photos because of the search feature alone. It’s really awesome.

There are some things I wish Google Photots would make a little bit easier, though. Sometimes, it takes longer than it should for certain things, but overall, it’s a valuable tool.

Tools I’d pay for if I didn’t have access to them

SpotNiches

SpotNiches is something I own, and I would absolutely pay for SpotNiches even if I didn’t own it because it’s super valuable in terms of finding competitive keywords and profitable niches for the Low Hanging System. 

GBPro

I’ve heard a lot of people say this platform out-converts Shopify by a lot. I’ve also heard you can make a lot more sales with GBPro than you can with Shopify.

Tools I no longer use or recommend

AMZ Tracker

This tool used to be a good way to sell discounted versions of products. But they started making promises they didn’t follow through on. So I started thinking the company had integrity issues and I didn’t want to use or recommend them anymore.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is still a good tool. I just use AppSumo now instead, which helps me do pretty much the same thing without the monthly fee.

LessAccounting

Since I first shared the list of my preferred business and personal tools, I’ve updated my accounting and no longer use LessAccounting.

JumpSend

I didn’t think this tool was producing the results I thought it should, so I stopped using it.

Nanacast

Nanacast became obsolete so that’s why I stopped using it.

Barefoot Student

Barefoot Student was fine for a little while, but then I started getting a lot of old profiles and not as many real people so I stopped using it.

Scribd

I used to have Scribd. You can get unlimited books with it and it’s a pretty cool tool. I just found it to be a nuisance to use with Kindle, so I canceled.

Listing Mirror

I just stopped needing this tool.

Trendosaur

This tool is no longer available.

…I’d love to hear your feedback on all of these tools – what do YOU think?

Have you tried many of these tools before? What tools do you use in your business and personal life that you recommend? Leave a comment below and let me know! Also, if you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends and followers!

Business investments

Print-on-demand companies

If you do the Low Hanging System, you know we sell items and then purchase those items from print-on-demand companies once they’re made, so I have to pay my warehouse for that service.

My last few big bills have been to CustomHappy.com and I’ve paid my warehouse directly for my sales of mugs and other products. I’ve also paid UseGearBubble.com for some other items I’ve sold, along with Printful and Printify.

I buy products from all of these platforms. But Custom Happy is the one I do the most business with.

Amazon ads

You definitely don’t need to run ads with LHS. But I do talk about how you can do this in the training.

If you want to scale up, running Amazon ads can be really profitable and it’s something that I’ve been doing. So the fees or that have been on my American Express bill lately.

IFTTT Pro (If This Then That)

IFTTT is a great tool that lets you automate specific business and personal tasks. I wrote about this tool in a blog post a few years ago, which you can check out here.

IFTTT has a free version, but I pay for the Pro edition ($3.99/month) for certain automations, including…

• Create Evernote “idea” list from Feedly tags
• Track your daily Fitbit activity in a Google spreadsheet
• Stock rise alert
• Get an email when your company is mentioned on Reddit

Zapier

Zapier is similar to IFTTT, and I use this tool to automate certain processes to make them easier for me. The automations I set up range from copying my Google contacts into Evernote to logging all of my Etsy sales.

To learn more about all of the options you have with Zapier, click here.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool I use to come up with blog post ideas. It has a free version but I use Feedly Pro. The way Feedly works is it aggregates links from a variety of sources pertaining to topics or feeds that I’ve specified. On my Feedly, I have the following feeds:

• general marketing
• traffic
• awesome
• Amazon
• blog tips
• content marketing
• copywriting
• ecommerce
• eBay
• Etsy news
• Faceook traffic
• flights
• life hacks
• and more.

I can go in each day and see what articles Feedly has gathered so I can check if any might be good to write about in a blog post.

Zoom

Many people became familiar with Zoom right after the onset of the pandemic. There’s a free version that you can use to chat with friends and family. But I have the paid version, which I use primarily for Custom Happy manager meetings.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is the main email service provider I’ve been using to create and send my newsletters and promotional emails.

MerchantWords

MerchantWords is really good for keyword research. I usually use SpotNiches, but if I need something in a pinch, MerchantWords is perfect.

Coaching

I’m a big fan of working with coaches. They are people who are already at the point where you want to be and, you can learn a lot from them. Working with coaches shortens the learning curve of figuring out how to do certain things for your business and it just makes everything flow a lot more smoothly. That’s why we offer a coaching option with the Low Hanging System.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a tool that makes sharing files between myself and my team super easy. I use it a lot with both of my companies, including the warehouse, and it’s great for hosting large volumes of documents and product designs.

Brain.fm 

Brain.fm has great music that helps you focus, relax, or sleep. It’s engineered with different types of beats that are supposed to work well with your brain. I often use it to help me focus and I think it’s really helpful and effective.

My Fancy Hands 

I use My Fancy Hands to get help with both my business and personal life. The service serves as US-based virtual assistance and it can help save you a lot of time. You can check out a blog post I created about using Fancy Hands here.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is one of the tools I use for making designs for my LHS products. You don’t have to use PicMonkey for this, but it’s cheap enough, and I find it really helpful. I use PicMonkey and Picsplosion to make nearly all of my desktop-based images.

Evernote

Evernote is incredible. I use this tool to document practically everything in my life, and it helps me stay organized. With Evernote, I create notebooks for all the different aspects of my life.

For example, I have a notebook for the weekly email content I create. I have notebooks for the warehouse. I have notebooks for Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, and I have notebooks to keep track of vendors’ pricing options.

Whenever I buy courses, I create notebooks for them. Then, I put my course notes inside the notebooks so I can easily review them and find the most important information.

Additionally, I have notebooks for personal things, including a health notebook, which I use to keep track of information I get from doctors so I’m able to keep it all straight.

There are so many things you can do with Evernote, and it makes it really easy to search for specific information within your notebooks. 

AppSumo

AppSumo is a site offering daily deals for digital products and online services. I’ve bought a lot of random things from AppSumo that ended up being really helpful. So if you haven’t signed up yet, I would definitely recommend doing so. 

You just have to make sure you’re buying things you’re actually going to use because it’s easy to go crazy grabbing up all of the cool things available.

Screencast (Techsmith) and Screencast-o-matic

I use Screencast and Screencastomatic to take pictures and record videos. This makes communicating with my team a lot faster and easier. Making a recording of yourself speaking instructions or feedback is way more convenient than typing it all out. I even recorded myself dictating a portion this blog post before having it transcribed. 

InventoryLab

If you don’t have a ton of products with your LHS business, you don’t necessarily need Inventory Lab. But since I have thousands of products, I really love this tool. I use it to quickly identify my most profitable SKUs and ASINs. I check what my FBA inventory is looking like, and it shows me all kinds of other useful information as well. 

Because Amazon can be so hard to read, I think it’s worth it to pay the $49/month to use InventoryLab to help me read reports more easily.

Hosting – LiquidWeb

In the past, I tried streamlining my hosting payments for the different websites I have. I used LiquidWeb along with a few others sites to put everything into one particular hosting service. I’ve also looked into Amazon’s services but I found they were a bit scattered.

HaikuDeck

HaikuDeck is something I use for my courses. It makes really nice PowerPoint slides super easily. HaikuDeck is good for anyone who creates information products. It costs $120 a year.

ClickFunnels

I use ClickFunnels primarily to automate processes and make them easier.

YouTube Premium

YouTube Premium used to be YouTube Red. It bypasses all of the ads that show up with videos, which I prefer. I use YouTube a lot. I love it for learning purposes. I get to discover some really awesome things there so paying for Premium is worth it to me. 

Training courses

I’m always investing in different training courses. I love to learn, so I like to buy courses to learn specific things. I’d say I’m pretty picky about the types of things I buy, though. So for other people, I recommend having a goal that’s outlined and then making purchases accordingly.

LibSyn 

I used LibSyn when I was doing my podcast regularly, which I would really love to start up again, as I’m still getting downloads every month.

Rev.com

I use Rev.com for transcriptions. Every week, we have Jumpstart calls, during which we do Q&As, and I like to get these transcribed for people.

Bonanza

Bonanza is one of the marketplaces I get sales on.

Fiverr

I use Fiverr for a lot of random things for my business, including help completing case studies, SEO keyword research, and getting content written.

Affiliate payments 

I make affiliate payments for various courses, and I’m always happy to pay these because affiliates draw a lot of traffic, which is awesome.

Namecheap

I use Namecheap either for the domain names I buy or for renewing the domains I already have.

PayKickStart

PayKickStart is a shopping cart, which I’ve started using more than Zazaa because it offers more flexibility. 

Upwork + my team

I use Upwork to pay people on my team for their services. I also use PayPal and Citibank to do this as well. Staffing is by far my biggest business expense, as having an awesome team with phenomenal service is super valuable to me. So I pay a lot for that. If you’d like to learn more about outsourcing, click here.

Life/Convenience investments

Travel

Outside of my business expenses, travel is where the bulk of my money goes. I believe travel is an investment in yourself, as seeing new places and meeting new people allows you to broaden your horizons and expand your world view. 

Peloton

I used to pay for a personal trainer, but now I use Peleton as my main form of exercise.

Instacart

With Instacart, you can get items from Whole Foods and other grocery stores delivered to you, which saves time and is a safer way to shop during the pandemic.  

Water delivery 

With this service, every week, I get fresh water delivered to me so I’m not drinking bottled water as much, which is terrible for the environment.

Other investments I make

Donations

I tend to make a bunch of random donations. I won’t list them out, but they include things like GoFundMe and charities that tug on my heartstrings. 

Robinhood

I use Robinhood for my stocks. And I prefer Robinhood over other platforms because it gives you free trades. I also use eTrade for my Roth IRA.

Acorns

Acorns is a cool investment tool that rounds up your purchases. So, for example, if you spend $9.88 on a purchase, Acorns takes that $0.12, saves it for you, then invests the money it rounds up. Acorns is a cool way to save money on autopilot without having to think about it.

WealthFront

WealthFront is amazing. It’s another way to invest money, and I’ve had an ROI of over 30% on the money I’ve put in there.

Cryptocurrency and CoinBase

A big chunk of my money has been going to investments, especially cryptocurrency and CoinBase. 

Free tools I love

Trello

Trello is a tool I use to organize a lot of random thoughts. It’s how I brainstorm weekly blog posts and emails, communicate with my warehouse team, and organize projects with people I’m working with. I have sections on Trello about things to talk about in my upcoming meetings, things to follow up on, and tasks for my team members to complete.  

Google Photos

Google Photos is incredible. You can put all of your photos in there and organize them by albums. You can also search by location, date, or even person.

I’ve been slowly moving every picture I have to Google Photos because of the search feature alone. It’s really awesome.

There are some things I wish Google Photos would make a little bit easier, though. Sometimes, it takes longer than it should for certain things, but overall, it’s a valuable tool.

Tools I’d pay for if I didn’t have access to them

SpotNiches

SpotNiches is something I own, and I would absolutely pay for SpotNiches even if I didn’t own it because it’s super valuable in terms of finding competitive keywords and profitable niches for the Low Hanging System. 

GBPro

I’ve heard a lot of people say this platform out-converts Shopify by a lot. I’ve also heard you can make a lot more sales with GBPro than you can with Shopify.

Tools I no longer use or recommend

AMZ Tracker

This tool used to be a good way to sell discounted versions of products. But they started making promises they didn’t follow through on. So I started thinking the company had integrity issues and I didn’t want to use or recommend them anymore.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is still a good tool. I just use AppSumo now instead, which helps me do pretty much the same thing without the monthly fee.

LessAccounting

Since I first shared the list of my preferred business and personal tools, I’ve updated my accounting and no longer use LessAccounting.

JumpSend

I didn’t think this tool was producing the results I thought it should, so I stopped using it.

Nanacast

Nanacast became obsolete so that’s why I stopped using it.

Barefoot Student

Barefoot Student was fine for a little while, but then I started getting a lot of old profiles and not as many real people so I stopped using it.

Scribd

I used to have Scribd. You can get unlimited books with it and it’s a pretty cool tool. I just found it to be a nuisance to use with Kindle, so I canceled.

Listing Mirror

I just stopped needing this tool.

Trendosaur

This tool is no longer available.

…I’d love to hear your feedback on all of these tools – what do YOU think?

Have you tried many of these tools before? What tools do you use in your business and personal life that you recommend? Leave a comment below and let me know! Also, if you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends and followers!