The internet is now helping people reach their business goals quicker
and easier than ever before, and this is one of IT’s true achievements
over the past couple of years, with much credit due to resources already
available on the market. My top ten favourite web applications and
tools (in no particular order) which could help your business are:
1 Dropbox (free versions)
If you’re like me, your work location changes from day to day. For
years I was frustrated by having to remember to put important documents I
might need while out of the office onto a memory stick. What happens
when the memory stick was full? You'd have to start deleting.
Dropbox is a virtual hard drive. No matter where you are, as long you
have synced with the cloud-based tool, you can access your files. Even
if you haven't synced, get your hands on an internet connection and
you’re good to go. It's also great for sharing files without having to
worry about emailing large attachments. Dropbox offers free and paid
hosting solutions and is a must have for any start-up.
2 Basecamp
Keeping on top of projects and delegating tasks can be complicated
and time-consuming. Basecamp is a great tool for project management and
is full of great features that keep you on top of all of your projects.
It let's you do things such as assign specific tasks within projects
to people and monitor their progress. The application has a great
feature that allows you to exchange notes on each individual projects
that you use a lot, brilliant if you have people working on projects in
various locations. You must pay for the application, but it's worth it.
3 Email Center Pro
When we first launched, we found it hard to keep on top of all our
customer service emails. Email Center Pro provided the solution. It gave
us a virtual mailbox that could be accessed online from anywhere. The
application is accessed through most web browsers and is full of
features such as assigning emails to different members of staff,
notifications of new emails, conversation tracker, etc. There are many
more features included as standard. This is a paid-for service, but it’s
incredibly cheap.
4 Google Calendars (free)
Knowing what you are meant to be doing, when and where is vital when
running a business, but staying on top of all appointments can be hard.
Google Calendars works well for us – and it’s free. Although it's not
the most all-singing and all-dancing calendar application available, it
does exactly what we need it to do. We can make appointments, invite
attendees, email and send SMS notifications. It's basic, but sometimes
that's all you need.
5 Wordpress (free)
Blogging is now very popular and with cutting-edge applications such
as Wordpress, it's easy to set up your own blog site. Blogs are a great
way to interact with customers and keep them up to date in more detail
than Twitter and Facebook. We decided to use Wordpress because it's
growing at an incredible rate, there’s a huge amount of plug-ins and
support. It's available as a free hosted solution on wordpress.com or
you can download the application for free and host it on your own
server.
6 Tweetdeck (free)
Keeping Facebook and Twitter pages updated used to be a pain and, in
my case, often ended up not happening. Now with the help of Tweetdeck,
we can update both our Twitter and Facebook accounts from a nice desktop
application. It's so easy to use and available for pretty much all
interfaces. You can create an account for access through different
machines and it also has a web browser version you can use when your on
the road. Also there is support for many other web services such as Buzz, Myspace and LinkedIn.
7 Evernote (Free Versions)
Brianstorming is a massive part of many businesses’ growth ambitions.
Evernote lets us share our notes with others and allow them to
participate in our brainstorming efforts. There is a web version and
desktop application available for most operating systems and a great
mobile version for the iPhone. Free and Premium versions are available.
8 A virtual telephone number
We needed a telephone number that offered two things – ability to put
calls through to multiple extensions and a voicemail service. We chose eReceptionist.
With this web application we chose our telephone number, set up our
extension landline diverts and set our open and close hours. We were up
and running in less than an hour. If a customer calls out of hours they
are transferred to our voicemail and we can also divert calls to another
landline at a different office if there is no one available. It's a
great application and works well for us.
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