Biz Tools

Below are a list of tools I recommend for entrepreneurs wishing to build a profitable online business they can run from anywhere

I recommend them because I use them, love them and I believe they’ll save you time and money and allow you to run your business from anywhere. Many are free or seriously inexpensive.

I’ve separated them out into useful categories of business and will keep on adding more tools as I test them out! For lots more, check out The Ultimate Toolkit where I’ve gathered 85 amazing tools complete with write-ups and reviews.

Before you check them out below can I say there is one program I truly recommend you take a look at if you’re serious about online marketing. It’s the Marketing Program with Clay Collins that I’ve used to grow my online business into what it is today and play a bigger game. If you’ve seen my results then you can guarantee it works!

Tools to Run Your Team And Business from Anywhere:

oDesk

oDesk lets entrepreneurs like you and me hire, manage, and pay remote contractors as if they were in our own office. You can choose from a talent pool of nearly 1 million contractors and they make it easy as pie to search for the right people, post jobs, interview your potentials and hire someone within minutes. You select your budget, contractor rate and whether you want someone on an hourly or project basis. They even take care of automatically billing you and paying your contractors.

I started by posting a research job. Within 10 minutes, I had 20 applications. Within 45, I had hired someone. I’ve gone on to find people to manage all sorts of things from design to website coding and building a small virtual team for specific projects. If it weren’t for oDesk, I wouldn’t have a small team of incredible people helping me run my business. If you’re not outsourcing work so you can focus on what you do best, then you’re missing out.

Freshbooks

Nobody likes accounting (well I don’t), and that’s why so many people love Freshbooks.

It has a great interface that makes it incredibly user friendly. It is amazing for invoicing your clients and is decent at other basic accounting features.

With Freshbooks, you can track expenses, create time sheets and log hours on projects. It is free to use for up to three clients and then there are a few options to upgrade and access more features from very little per month.

I really like the handy ‘time-tracking’ tool which I use to track just how long I’m spending on a project. Sometimes it surprises me.

Shoeboxed is a damn cool service for those of us who keep all those pesky receipts we want to use to claim expenses.

Rather than letting them build up in your wallet or some envelope like I used to, Shoeboxed lets you send receipts, business cards and documents to them via postage-paid envelopes or camera-equipped smartphone for a really low monthly fee.

They scan and data-enter every document, then organize everything in a secure, searchable online account. All of the receipts you send to them are also accepted by the IRS, so if you are ever audited, just show the images of your receipts from your account.

The bottom line: no more crinkled, unorganized receipts, no more expensive scanners, no more data entry or lost documents, and best of all, no more stressful tax seasons!

Tools to Help You Communicate:

Grasshopper

With the tagline of “The Virtual Phone System Designed for Entrepreneurs” how could you not love Grasshopper , a service where you have complete control of the experience you give your callers.

You can set up multiple extensions, adjust voicemail greetings based on time of day, have your voicemail transcribed and sent to you, and more. It’s also been proven that having your phone number on every page of your website increases sales (ok so not set stas but trust me it does).

I especially love that they have no long term contracts, and prices start at just $9.95 a month. I’m excited to support Grasshopper to support you. Check out Grasshopper virtual phone system

Skype

If you don’t already use Skype, start using it now! Skype is my number one go-to software. It lets me stay in touch with not only family and friends, but also with my colleagues and team worldwide. It’s the one tool that allows me to communicate with anyone, worldwide, for free. Just add a decent internet connection and a headset, and you’re set to go!

It even allows for video conferencing and screen sharing, which is super helpful when you need to get things done.

MeetingBurner

MeetingBurner is hands down the best webinar and online meeting platform I’ve used and I’ve tried them all. What I like most about it is the clean interface, that it’s dead simple to use and to set up meetings in an instant.

I wrote a review and did a video walk-through of how I use MeetingBurner in `How to hold the fastest online meetings ever with MeetingBurner‘.

You can also record your meetings and download your webinars as an MP4 file or share the recording directly via email or social networks. I think webinars are a great way to offer a ton of value in one presentation, get feedback, answer questions and create fabulous leads for your business. Try this out and see for yourself.

Tools for Website Design and Social Media Marketing:

Website and Blog Design

I personally recommend and use Easi Business Blogs – mainly because they designed my site and I think it rocks. They worked with me one on one at all hours, across international borders (they’re based in the UK) and completely `got’ what I wanted. They build designer blogs and websites without the designer prices. I truly mean that, they have tiered packages to cater to your budget starting at US$350. I’ve actually worked with them to help design these packages based on what my community tell me they need most, which includes a newsletter optin sign up box, eCover for books and social media integration, so I think you’ll like what you see.

Customized Landing Pages and Membership Sites

I”m a huge fan of WordPress for building amazing blogs and websites. One of the coolest WordPress themes I use for my Ultimate Toolkit landing page, Premium Site and Passport to Business Freedom site is Optimize Press.

It’s quite amazing how easy it is to set up and squeeze pages, landing pages with optins, host videos and set up membership sites or even just a secure access to premium content with this theme. It’s ridiculously reasonable at $97 and you get access to a member site with great shot video tutorials from James Dyson, the designer, himself.

Pop Up Domination

I installed the Popup Domination WordPress plugin a couple months ago and I’ve been amazed! I’ve more than doubled the number of people who subscribe to my newsletter every month. I realized I had been missing out on telling people about all the benefits of signing up to my newsletter and this plug-in has made that obvious in a visually appealing way to my community.

It’s totally worth the $77 to have a professional looking pop-up on your website or blog. And for those who aren’t interested, they can easily click the X on and not be shown again.This is a no brainer if you’re serious about building your list.

Hootsuite

I’ve been extolling the virtues of Hootsuite ever since I started using it earlier last year. It’s made my life on Twitter immeasurably easier. It’s my number one most used tool for managing not only my two Twitter accounts but also post to LinkedIn, Facebook – both my page and my profile and even more.

I can manage multiple accounts, set up columns for keyword searches plus see and track all mentions of my twitter handle or my blogs so that I can easily respond back to those people. It’s so useful for sorting your your DMs from your RTs to your list and top people to follow.

I feed my blog RSS in to it for instant tweet outs and can see which of my tweets are most popular from analytics. Last but not least I can add members of my team to be users and help out when needed. There’s a free plan too.

Tweet Adder

I’m not normally one to automate anything on social networks but then I came across Tweet Adder and realized how much valuable time I was wasting not using this great tool. Not only will it bring you more followers – naturally it also allows you to automate a lot of those time consuming tasks. You can set up a friendly auto-responder for up to 5 Twitter accounts, thank people who RT you, auto follow people and bulk unfollow inactive accounts.

You can also schedule out your own personalized tweets in one hit. It’s seriously one of the handiest Twitter tools I’ve used. Plus you can do keyword searches to follow people in your industry rather than doing this manually. I recommend it to save a lot of time and to help you become way more effective.

MailChimp

Mailchimp makes sending out a newsletter amazingly easy – design and send beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign’s performance.

I really rely on Mailchimp because of its metrics tracking system, and also because it makes it so simple to schedule out newsletters. I feed my blog content and other special offers into Mailchimp to ensure my subscribers don’t miss anything, and I also use it to send out surveys to make sure I’m providing my readers with what they want to read. It also makes unsubscribing to things super easy as well.

EventBrite

EventBrite is the quickest, easiest way to promote your event and to get people to register and pay for it in one fell swoop. Typically, services like this are used for events happening in real life, but it’s also possible to adapt it for webinar registrations.

Tools to Improve Your Productivity:

Dropbox

Dropbox has to be my favorite tool for syncing documents across multiple computers. And since everything’s saved to the cloud, your data’s safe from hardware failures!

Their free account is great – it gives you up to 2G of space, and allows you to earn up to 6G more through referrals. Dropbox’s paid versions give 50G and 100G for $99 or $199 per year (respectively).

Tungle.Me

Are you finding it harder and harder to schedule meetings between your schedule, your coworker’s schedule, your boss’s schedule, and that contractor coming in from across the city? Or are you finding that there’s a lot of double bookings, or missed meetings because your calendars didn’t sync properly with your phone, your computer, and the web?

Tungle.Me is the solution to all of that! It looks at ALL of your calendars and makes sure they’re synchronized properly. It truly isn’t just another calendar application – this one really works.

Rapportive

Ever get that email from that person you vaguely remember, and know that you should probably know this person better? And they just said they’re going to give you a call about that thing you guys talked about last week, but you can’t, for the life of you, think of what that one thing was… and a quick search in Gmail isn’t pulling anything useful up?

Well, Rapportive is the answer to that. It’s a very handy app that works right inside Gmail, giving you a real time report of who the person on the other end of the line is. It’ll show you their name, picture, location, company, social media accounts, other basic information, and then a somewhat comprehensive google search on their latest web hits. It even has a section for you to save your own notes about each contact! This is a definite must have, especially for all those ninja networkers out there!

RescueTime

It’s really easy to get distracted by well, just about everything on the internet. One minute, you’re researching something on YouTube… the next, you’re looking at cute kitten videos. Aww, kittens. Wait, I’m getting off track.

RescueTime is exactly what I need to keep me on task and productive. It’ll record what you’re doing, how long you’ve been doing it, and spit out a report that’s comprehensive and… kind of scary. RescueTime’s been said to save the average person 3.5 hours per week just by using this. Imagine that – another 3.5 hours of sleep! Sign me up!

For lots more, check out The Ultimate Toolkit where I’ve gathered up 85 amazing tools complete with write-ups and reviews.