Today, I’m sharing five tools that I’m using in my photography business this year that I love! Each of these tools has many bells and whistles, but I choose the parts of each of them that work the best for my business.

Over the past seven years of running a business, I have learned the power of having great systems in place and having the best tools both in my camera bag and tools that I use every day in the studio, to make things run smoothly and efficiently.

#1 Calendly

Calendly is a scheduling tool that I don’t know how I’ve lived without. I’m able to create events for initial consultations, wardrobe consultations, scheduling session dates and reveal sessions. Prior to using Calendly, I would send out a few dates to clients to choose from for various meeting needs, and they’d either choose or date or we might need to go back and forth via email to figure out a date and time.

So instead of sending an email with dates to choose from, and sometimes having to reschedule those dates, I can simply send out a Calendly link for specific events (consultations, studio meetings, etc) and my clients can choose the date and time that works best for them.

Once my client schedules their date, I receive an email and simply add it to my calendar. You can sync Calendly with your Google calendar, but I’m a paper and pen kind of #girlboss.

Another great feature is having a reminder email sent to my client. There are so many wonderful features to Calendly, and I’ve only scratched the surface. It is such a timesaver.

#2 Zoom

I was introduced to Zoom over a year ago, and I finally decided to take the leap. Zoom is a video conferencing call app. My go to video call apps have been Google Hangouts or Facetime, and early on Skype. While all three of these are great, I was also asking clients to choose what platform we could connect on.

Imagine juggling various platforms, and having each system on my laptop, desktop at the studio and desktop at home.

Zoom allows me to have one platform to use to meet with all of my clients. I simply send out the app to download, and a link to meet in my personal meeting room. No more sending out individual links, and having multiple conferencing apps. I use Zoom for timeline planning meetings, wardrobe consultations, coffee connects and business meetings with a professional women’s organization that I lead.

#3 Iconosquare

This is a brand new tool that I’m using to help me spend my time wisely with using Instagram in my business. Iconosqaure is an analytics tool for Instagram. Knowing when to post, what my audience likes and dislikes, and the things that they want to see more of is extremely helpful.

I’m able to create a folder of the images that I want to use, write out captions and insert hashtags, and schedule post automatically or I can receive an alert on my phone when it’s time to post and I can do that manually with a simple copy and paste.

Right now, I’m only using it for my weddings Instagram account because I don’t have a separate portrait Facebook Business Page which has to be linked.

And that is a good segway into why I also use Plann.

#4 Plann

Plann is another Instagram analytics tool (not as robust as Iconosquare) but sufficient to run my portraits Instagram account.

There is a free version, that I used initially, but now I use the paid version which is a reasonable cost. I’m able to view my grid prior to posting with an image, I’m able to write captions, schedule posts with Plann, and receive an alert on my phone when it’s time to post. Both Plann and Iconosquare are helping me to spend my time wisely and strategically on Instagram.

#5 Grammarly

I’ve been using Grammarly for some time now to help me when it comes to blogging. It doesn’t magically blog for me, although I wish that it did, but it does help me to write coherent sentences free of spelling errors and makes sure that I’m using the correct homophone of words like right or write.

Those are five tools that I’m using in my photography business this year and loving. As I mentioned before, they each have many bells and whistles, but I choose the bells and whistles that work well in my business.

Disclosure: These reviews are all from my own experience using these apps. I was not paid to say wonderful things about any of these products.