productivity online business tools

[Business Ignite] 5 Must Have Tools To Run Your Online Business

Tool Time! In this episode of the podcast I share my favorite tools..well at least 5 of them! Admittedly, I’m a bit of a tool-junkie and love experimenting with new ones. Shiny object syndrome? Nah..not me! Okay, fine..maybe just a bit. The upside? You get to save time and hear about the best of the best. So, in no particular order, I bring you my must have tools to run your online business.

Schedule Once

Ever try planning a meeting with someone and you end up in email ping-pong hell? Where not only are you trying to figure out availabilities you also have different timezones to deal with?

Enter Schedule Once.

As the name implies, you schedule once.

When you create your Schedule Once account, you set your availabilities. It connects with your calendar and blocks off any existing meetings.

When someone wants to book time on your calendar, simply send them your schedule once link and they can select the time and zone that works best for them.

You get a notification and it’s booked in your calendar.  Et voila! End the email back and forth madness.

Boomerang

Boomerang is a  plugin for Gmail.

Just because you are hustling and working all hours of the day and night…*does not* mean your clients need to know.

Enter Boomerang. Reply to emails on your own time but schedule them out to go out with Boomerang at more appropriate times.

Have emails that you don’t need to deal with right now (webinar reminders, concert tickets..), Boomerang them to return at a specified date.

Social Media Management

Social media dashboards and scheduling tools. I personally use a combo of Hootsuite and Buffer.

Why not just use Twitter.com, you ask?

I use Hootsuite’s dashboard to get an overview of my Twitter lists, if there are conversations, keywords or hashtags I want to follow. I also use it to schedule out evergreen content like past episodes of my podcast or relevant blog posts.

I use BufferApp to curate and share content on the fly and like it’s ease of use as a browser plugin.

DropBox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you access your files from anywhere.

I use DropBox to easily share my raw podcast files with my podcast editor. With a shared DropBox folder, I can share files and access the edited files once they are ready. No need to email large files back and forth.

Similarly, when working with coaching clients, I use DropBox to share call recordings and pdfs.

And the beauty of it? It’s all in the cloud…accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Google..well..everything.

Google Drive is first on my list. I do *everything* in there..from working on documents (like coming up withe new product ideas) to collaborating on retreat planning (with my partner who is 3000 miles away!)

Analytics: you need this on your site. And it’s free. Enough said.

Google+ and Hangouts: I looove this platform and especially the hangouts and hangouts on air. Super easy to jump on and broadcast panels, shows, coaching calls, webinars…you name it!

 

What are some of your favorite tools? Let me know in the comments! 

8 Time Saving Social Media Tools For A Product Launch

Guest post By Jen Havice

Whether you are launching a new product or a service online, being efficient with your time and resources are a must. There’s so much to do and inevitably not enough hours in the day to get things done. Using social media to work for you is the key.

Have Your Ducks In A Row Ahead Of Time

Get your systems in place and tested well before your launch date. Chances are you might end up feeling a bit overwhelmed no matter how well you’ve planned things out. If you’re scrambling just to keep up with your regular influx of emails, think about how stressed out you’ll be remaining full steam ahead when it’s crunch time.

  • Get familiar with a management system such as Hootsuite. It allows you to post across several different social media channels from one hub. It’s free up to five profiles. The best part is that you can pre-schedule to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ along with a few others. Plus, it’s an easy way to look at several profiles quickly to see who has been sharing your content and interacting with you.

  • Think about implementing a way to organize the content for your blog. A launch is not the time to abandon adding fresh content to your site. If you have a WordPress website, installing plugins that keep content writing on task can be a lifesaver. There is the Cleverness To Do List plugin which allows for the creation of an internal To Do list that can be shared between multiple users. The WP Editorial Calendar plugin provides a post overview of your blog with the ability to drag and drop pending posts to different dates. This makes it a lot easier to know where the content holes are by the week and month.

Be Interactive Not Reactive

Knowing what people are saying about you and your products are a good idea at all times. During a launch, it’s a critical time to engage with your target market by responding to questions or comments made via social media.

  • Whether it’s launch time or not, having search queries set up on Google Alerts makes good business sense. Google Alerts allow you to monitor the Internet to see who and what is being said about you, your product, service or competitors. Depending on your need, you can receive an email immediately, once a day or once a week.

  • Mention.net works in a similar way to Google Alerts but seems to be far more powerful. It does a far better job of finding mentions across the social media platforms and you can look at all your mentions in one place. It’s free for up to 3 alerts and 500 mentions per month.

Keep The Content Stream Alive

Encouraging the people buying your product to share your message and help promote you never should leave your radar screen. With everything else that needs to be managed it can be tough not only to come up with snippets of great shareable content but ways of getting others to do it for you.

  • Click To Tweet is a handy little tool that generates a custom link of whatever tweet you want to create. When someone clicks on the link, the message automatically gets added to that person’s Twitter status box. Basically, it creates a ready made retweet of whatever you want shared.

  • Graphics are always a great way of getting attention. Between Facebook and Pinterest, image quotes have become one of the most shareable pieces of content. However, spending any significant amount of time putting them together rarely makes much sense. Using either Quozio or Recite This makes short order of creating this kind of content. Quozio has a bookmarklet that when clicked will bring up a box on top of whatever web page you are looking at. This makes it extremely easy to highlight and paste whatever you want.

  • Quozio.com

    You don’t need to be everywhere at once. Be where your customers are and make your message count.@jenhavice http://bit.ly/12g5r2u    Click to Tweet

Give some of these a try and see what works for you. They may help implementing a launch a little less daunting and a whole lot more enjoyable.

jenJen Havice is a forty-something blogger, writer, and social media consultant. When not helping small businesses navigate the social networking jungle or writing commentary for her humor blog, she chases after two large dogs and rides an even larger horse. She and her husband call Minneapolis home.

 

 

 
TechTrainingVault

Blogging Productivity Tip: Save Time With Duplicate Post

If you blog regularly, you’ll soon come to realize that there are things that you do repeatedly. In this video, I go over the Duplicate post plugin that lets you-as the name indicates, easily duplicate a post and its content so you don’t have to start from scratch each time. This is especially useful if you have certain types of posts that you post regularly.


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{How To} Automate Online Tasks Using IFTTT

In this short video we look at how to use If This Then That (IFTTT) and put the power of the internet to work for you. Using IFTTT you can automate tasks that you do often such as having your Instagram photos tagged with a specific keyword posted to your Facebook page. In this example, I look at how you can create a recipe to have your videos uploaded to Youtube automatically shared to your Facebook page with a specific URL and description. What a time-saver and great way to be more productive!

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{How To} 3 Ways To Find Targeted People To Follow On Twitter

In this short video, I show you how to find targeted people to follow using the tool Tweetadder.

In particular, we look at how to do a Profile Search, Location Search and Tweet search.

For example, you can search Twitter profiles that have “women entrepreneurs” in their profile.

Resources Mentioned:

Tweetadder (aff link)

Have a question? Leave me a comment below!