As a community strategist and marketing professional, I’m constantly evaluating tools and programs that can enhance my effectiveness and bring more value to my clients. Here are the best business investments I made in 2024, some of the best ongoing investments and what’s on my radar for 2025.

New Investments That Transformed My Business

In 2024, I invested heavily in growing my individual skills both as a service provider and creator. I enrolled in a few programs to solve specific problems I was facing and made the most of them.

Courses, Coaching and Programs

Make Your Message Famous®

My life-long challenge is that I’m someone who tends to put their head down and get to business. This is fine in certain industries, but not in online business. If I don’t make time to focus on visibility and my online reputation, nobody is going to do it for me.

I have some big goals for 2025. And to make them happen, I can’t continue being a best-kept secret in the industry.

As a former public relations professional, I know the power of a strong message that serves as a consistent anchor. It’s the only way to get known in any saturated market.

And nobody shapes and elevates personal brands better than Katya Varbanova. Katya’s expertise in virality makes her highly skilled in developing a compelling message that resonates with a designated target market.

Make Your Message Famous® is an intensive designed to help personal brands position themselves as thought leaders and gain visibility. 

In just two weeks, the program transformed how I position my expertise and helped me to refine my brand voice and content strategy.

I now have a single Notion board with a fully developed brand guide. It includes everything from my brand qualities and themes, to deep insights on my ideal clients. 

The work done during this intensive in December 2024 has given me a year’s worth of content ideas for my blog, podcast, and social media accounts.

5-Star Sales Skills

Tasha Smith, founder of Emerge Sales Training, and I have been running in the same business circles since the pandemic shut down the world.

I’ve always admired her fresh approach to sales — and the fact that she’s one of maybe three people in online business who really understands the difference between sales and marketing.

However, I didn’t have a need to work with her until I started leading sales calls for a client. While I have a reliable sales process for my own business, my client didn’t. And it didn’t make sense for me to apply mine to their specific business model.

I enrolled in Tasha’s 5-Star Sales Skills program over the summer and used it to deconstruct and rebuild my client’s entire sales process. We clarified their offers, positioning and created a standardized system for sales conversations that put the prospective client’s needs front and center.

Sales has never felt so natural as it does now. And while I didn’t enroll for my own business, it’s helped me as well. Even if you’re not ready for a full-scale sales training program, these 36 questions (affiliate link) are a great resource when it comes to getting clients.

30-Day Sprint

Kate Gilbert’s 30-Day-Sprint (affiliate link) kicked off my 2024. Kate has a reputation as being an Instagram genius, but she’s so much more. Understanding the daily battle between the practical and ideal faced by business owners, Kate created a system by which social media content creation is almost a cakewalk. In 30 days, Kate will help you build a schedule of 70 posts tailored to your audience’s desires and your business objectives that you can loop so that you’re only have to think about what post a few times a year.

This is not a program I would have signed up for on my own. Navigating social media and know what to post, and when to post it, comes naturally to me. When I make the time for it. And in January, I didn’t have any time to spare. A friend invited me to try the course with her in an effort to block time to do what I already knew needed doing. It worked.

There is nothing I don’t like about Kate, her system, or her approach to social media. She’s not a social-media super-fan who thinks everyone should spend their days building their following. She’s a business owner who understands that every business owner has heavy load to carry. She created Sprint to lighten the load. Best part of the program, though, is the spreadsheet she’s developed to make creating and recycling your content loop simple and nearly automatic.

Launching The Business You Really Want in 2024 led me to joining Caroline Hull’s Strategize and Shine membership for podcasters.

Memberships and Subscriptions

The Playhouse

The Playhouse is a grassroots collective for freethinking solopreneurs who are done with the “hustle harder” culture of online business. I joined as a founding mentor and affiliate in Fall 2024, and love how different the culture is from other online business networks.

First, everyone in the community is both a learner and expert. You can host events, attend events or mix it up and do both. While the community is hosted on Heartbeat, the events use GoBrunch and are never recorded. This makes for engaging events where everyone shows up ready to fully participate.

There is no pressure to be everywhere or do everything – just real connections with people who get it.

Ad Coaching for 7 with Laurel Portie

Social media ads feel a lot like a trip to Las Vegas. While you hope to come home with more money than you left with, you usually end up in the hole.

But that depends on the game you’re playing. Laurel Portie’s game is a long one. She teaches a system for running low-cost video ads that build and nurture your leads 24/7 until they reach a point when they are ready to buy.

And she does it all inside a $7/month membership called Ad Coaching for 7 (affiliate). 

I’ve used her ads strategy with clients and am planning to use it for my own business in 2025.

Strategize and Shine Podcast Membership

Co-hosting podcasts was not on my 2024 bingo card and yet I ended the year as the official co-host of both Clutter Free Academy and The Business You Really Want. 

As the fractional CMO/COO for Everyday Effectiveness, planning, production and marketing for The Business You Really Want lands solely on my shoulders.

I joined the Strategize and Shine podcast membership in Spring 2024 after listening to Caroline Hull’s podcast for several years. Caroline has poured everything she knows as a podcaster and podcast production agency owner into the membership.

Her guidance and resources are what made it possible for me to launch The Business You Really Want and grow it rapidly to 300 downloads per month (not bad, considering my co-host has an email list under 200).

The membership is hosted on Mighty Networks and includes masterclasses, Voxer coaching days, and tons of support around content planning, strategy and marketing your show.

Link in Bio with Rachel Karten

While I may no longer offer social media management services, I still like to stay plugged into the industry. Online communities will always have ties to social media and a lot of community platforms have social media-like qualities. Staying current with social media news is good for me as a professional and also for my clients.

I discovered Rachel’s Link in Bio through Matt Navarra’s Social Media Geekout Pro community. 

Where Matt curates the biggest news in social media, Rachel goes deeper. She interviews the top professionals behind some of the most iconic social media accounts of our time. 

I enjoy her interview style, and the perspective she brings to the topics affecting everyone who uses social media professionally.

Authory is a service that curates and showcases your online content for ease of sharing. My portfolio contains articles written for the California Breastfeeding Coalition and UC Merced, in addition to podcast episodes I’ve been featured on and blog articles written on my own website.

Authory

Authory (affiliate) is a service that I might not need but I enjoy having access to. It aggregates everything you’ve ever written or recorded and stores it in a single location. You can then use Authory to generate a portfolio, or showcase and share specific collections.

I like that it makes it easy for me to collect and keep bylined articles written for other organizations along with my own website articles and podcast episodes and interviews. And it updates automatically, requiring very little ongoing maintenance.

Productivity Tools

Motion App

Imagine Asana, a paper planner, and a robotic assistant had a baby. That baby would be the Motion app, which uses AI to prioritize your tasks and slot them into the open pockets of time in your day.

I recorded a walkthrough of my experience during the first two weeks of using Motion. After my first month, Kathi Lipp invited me to talk more about it on The Writing at the Red House podcast. She’s now a Motion user, too.

What we both appreciate about the app is how it reduces decision fatigue by deciding what we should do next. So long as I put everything into Motion with accurate deadlines and priorities, I can trust it to tell me what to do next.

Fathom Video

For three long years, I was a paying Otter.ai user. The AI-powered video transcription and note-taking service seemed worth its weight in gold.

And then I discovered Fathom (affiliate), which does a whole lot more for half the price. Fathom is a much more user-friendly interface, showcasing the meeting recording, summary, full transcription, action items and key quotes all on a single dashboard. 

The Ask Fathom feature, however, is my favorite. It allows you to have a conversation with AI based on the meeting, which can pull out themes and details I might have otherwise overlooked or forgotten.

The one thing Otter has over Fathom, and it might be a big one for you, is that it allows you to upload recordings for transcription. At this time, Fathom only supports transcription of live calls. So, if you’re someone who likes to get your videos or livestreams transcribed to repurpose later, you’ll need a workaround. One way around it would be to use Zoom for livestreaming and have your Fathom notetaker on the Zoom call.

Ongoing Investments Delivering Consistent Value

My resources page is an updated list of everything in my business arsenal, in addition to other resources that benefit online community managers. 

However these are the tools that I rely on heavily to keep my business running effectively:

• GroupTrackCRM (affiliate) – Scaling my high-touch brand of community management would be impossible without GroupTrack. A social-specific CRM is hard to come by, and this one outshines any I’ve tried in the past. Thanks to GroupTrack, social media contacts never fall through the cracks.
• Profitable Pipelines — This membership, hosted by the GroupTrackCRM team, provides a simple strategy by which to convert social media contacts into clients. It’s not for everyone, but I have found it useful in making sure that every group I run is set up to achieve the objectives of its owner in a way that’s both effective and sustainable.
• Email Marketing Membership with Liz Wilcox (affiliate) — I still can’t believe the value this membership holds for just $9/month. No matter how busy I am, I can always find time to write a newsletter to my subscribers with the help of these templates.
• Matt Navarra’s Geekout Pro — I thought I hated WhatsApp until Matt Navarra launched his membership community for social media managers there. So not only can I credit Matt for keeping me informed of social media news as it happens, he also gets the credit for showing me how you can successfully host a thriving community on WhatsApp.

While “best” is a relative term. These made the list of ongoing best business investments because without them, my business would truly suffer in one way or another.

Business Investments Cut in 2024

Like any business owner, I have a finite amount of money to invest in my business each year. So while 2024 was a year of new business investments — mostly in developing my own skill and knowledge — it was also a year where I made some cuts.

On the chopping block:

• StreamYard — Once my ride-or-die livestreaming software of choice, StreamYard lost my endorsement this year when it drastically increased its prices. For several years, I spent $200/year to use this multistreaming service. Then in 2024, my annual subscription increased to $392. In Fall 2024, the company sent out a notice that they were redoing their subscription tiers yet again. To get the same level of service I’ve been enjoying since 2019, I will now need to pay $788/year. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze any more.
• Calendly — I love Calendly as a scheduling app. It makes it easy for clients and associates to find a convenient time to meet with me without much effort. However, now that Google offers its own booking calendar feature (and it’s free if you’re on Google Workspace), I can’t justify the expense of Calendly any longer.

Looking Ahead

As we continue to 2025, I’m looking at hiring tools just like I would hiring people — advice I got from automation expert Kronda Adair.

With big goals on the horizon, 2025 may be a year of investing in my own marketing and operations. I’m considering hiring humans for the following roles:

• A copywriter to rewrite my website homepage, services page, and to create a page showcasing my mission, vision and values so that there is no ambiguity as far as who I am and what I stand for (and against).
• A writing coach to hold me accountable to the goal of finishing the first draft of my upcoming book.
• A designer to freshen up my brand and unify my visual identity across platforms.
• An agency to help me get my solo podcast, Find Your Freaks, launched and out into the world. I could DIY the show, but I don’t think I can master podcast production on top of everything else I want to do in 2025.
• A project manager to make sure my clients get the service excellence they’ve come to expect from me.

The key to successful business investments is alignment with strategic goals and measurable impact on business outcomes. If you need help deciding which business investments make sense for you, check out Do I Need This Now? It’s a mini-course on making strategic business decisions so you never experience buyer’s remorse again.