As PR Couture has evolved from a standalone blog into a true industry platform, we’ve had to adapt and adjust, building new operational and organizational systems, and relying on outside companies to help everything run smoothly. I’m always fascinated to learn how online business look from the backend, so this week I’m taking you through our essentials. Some of these links are affiliates – meaning you’re helping us out a bit monetarily at the same time – should you decide to use what we use!
PR Couture is run on WordPress, in particular we love how using Elementor PRO has given our internal team (usually me!) so much more control over designing gorgeous landing pages, like this one, and being able to easily edit our homepage. It’s been a game-changer not to have to outsource these as much.
We run our signature course for entry-level practitioners, PRISM, on the Thinkific course platform. It’s particularly great that it integrates with Stripe and our email service provider.
We do our hosting through LiquidWeb who are always responsive and we haven’t had our site go down in years since switching over.
We use ConvertKit to send out the PR Couture Weekly we know you love so much, and all the rest of our promotional and partner emails. We need to have deep intel on our audience because we have so many different segments and revenue streams and CK lets us send out highly targeted emails based on individual subscriber behavior, not list behavior. I love that I can pull a list of people who purchased Ready to Launch and a PR Girl Tee (both currently sold out!), and suggest they also check out our career templates, for example.
For Social Media we use a combo or Recurpost, Buffer and love posting directly to Instagram from our desktop with no mobile pings required with Grum.
Pretty much all our content development these days is done through Canva (though occasionally we use Pages or something else).
Bookkeeping: Switching over to bench for monthly accounting has relieved a ton of stress and pressure each month. We have a dedicated rep and can easily connect via chat or calls to discuss anything wonky with our books; it’s a dream to have this handled.
Invoices: We use Wave for invoicing because it’s free and allows for recurring billing.
We found that upgrading to the paid version of Hellosign made the signing of NDAs, sponsor contracts and even team member agreements much easier to handle. We could move to a more comprehensive solution, like dubsado or 17hats, but the volume doesn’t really require it.
For scheduling client calls, especially consult calls or introductory partner calls, I rely on Book Like a Boss. We then run those through a combo of Skype, Appear.in and Zoom. We used to use Appear.in for internal video meetings as well, but have since swapped to the internal Slack option.
Boomerang for Gmail is a lifesaver when you *are* answering emails at 11 at night but you don’t want you’re clients to *know* you are available at all hours. Simply set everything to send the next morning and you’re on top of it all before your morning coffee.
We use Paperform as our go-to for everything form related, from Bespoke Communication Award applications to gathering responses for our recurring Q+As.
For outreach to help us put together our ongoing gift guides, we often post requests on Media Leads (and recommend their service to many clients and emerging brands).
And of course, Grammarly keeps us all from making erroneous errors while moving a million miles a minute!
