Last Updated on April 28, 2020 by Learn Digital Marketing
Being your own boss is a common career goal for many professionals everywhere. However, once you actually start your own business, you realize how hard it is to keep everything together. You slowly start to realize that working for someone else has its own benefits. However, you are determined that this your path is entrepreneurship and you have set yourself to succeed as a business owner.
This article is here to help you in those troubling times as a beginner, and give you some great tools to help you be more productive. So let us check a few free latest productivity tools available online.
So let us start with the Latest Productivity Tools.
1. MeetUp
Every business person will tell you that a big part of one’s success lies in mingling with the right people and having good mentors. MeetUp is a free app designed specifically for that.
One of the main reasons to love it immediately is its highly simple and intuitive user interface. You will immediately figure out your way around and start browsing for events that interest you.
As this is a location-based app, you can use it on the go, even if you are on a holiday, it can tell you if there is some awesome event near you that day and to make sure you don’t miss out on any opportunity to build your business.
When it comes to networking, its features are also pretty user friendly and dedicated to the avid mingler. You can see who will be attending an event and thus message him or her prior to or post the event. You can also message the group attending as a whole and start networking even before the event takes place.
Lastly, if you prefer, you can also invite your friends and colleagues too. With this app, it is very easy to send invites to anyone.
Thinking of a cool and catchy name for your business is difficult enough. Yet even if you think of a perfect name, when you check out its .com domain availability you figure out it’s either taken already or parked (taken but not used). This tool is a solution for an increasingly common problem – finding available domain names.
To be more precise, all domain names with 5 characters or below for the .com TLD are already taken. This is why Google has its expanding list of top-level domains from .net, .org, to fresh new ones like. yoga, exchange, photography, and many more.
However, everyone who knows something about SEO knows that .com domain is one of the most desirable you can have, so if you want to have it for your business too, Lean Domain Search can help you think of a solution. This tool basically uses your business keywords and adds other words to it that are available. It literally gives you hundreds of new ideas you can use for whichever top-level domain you chose to take.
Without this tool, you could spend endless hours just figuring out all possible solutions, and you wouldn’t even come close to the number of suggestions Lean Domain Search can give you within seconds. Best of all, it’s completely free.
This tool is great for quickly finishing your accounting work. As an entrepreneur, you’ll often find yourself stuck with mundane day to day operational activities such as finances, rather than thinking about strategic choices that lie ahead of you. In the end, you need to steer your business in the right direction.
This is why having tools that speed up daily operational tasks is crucial.
With PDF to Excel, you can easily convert all your bank statements in PDF into editable Excel sheets. Afterward, you can easily insert them into the ERP software of your choice, or use them in your own personal books where you do your budgeting. In either case, this tool is very easy to use, it’s free and it takes only 3 steps. Depending on how complex your finances are, this tool can be a real time saver.
Additionally, you can also use PDF to Excel to unlock information from extensive PDF reports and transfer the statistical data into Excel, create graphs from there, and use them for your presentations when pitching for funding.
4. Angel.co
A lot of today’s startups do not necessarily make money right away. When we look at examples from today’s world many of the most famous brands did not earn any profits for years before they found a business model that worked for them. However, this did not deter investors from giving money to potentially great ideas.
This is why today a lot of entrepreneurs think about solving problems first, then figuring out how to profit from their idea later. However, this can be a financial challenge sometimes. This is why Angel.co has made it easy to apply online for investments that could help any type of small business develop. If you need any advice always take the help of financial advisor Ontario.
Angel is basically a social network where entrepreneurs and investors can connect. Apart from looking for investment, you can also post a job offer, depending on what is a bigger priority for you right now.
Lastly, it is hard making any list of amazing tools without mentioning Google’s free solutions for entrepreneurs and professionals alike. If you do not have MS Office installed in your computer (frankly, it can be expensive) use Google’s Drive to have free access to Excel, Powerpoint, and MS Word and share it with anyone you like. You can also create different documents, and have up to 15 GB of free storage space.
If however, you want to analyze your website traffic, and that of your competitors, use Google Keyword Planner and google analytics. While keyword planner helps you with SEO efforts, Google Analytics will tell you the nature of the traffic coming to your website, what stream is it coming from, how long do visitors stay, what are your most popular pages, and more.
If you have a bit of a budget to spend, Google’s Adwords will help you create marketing campaigns to reach your potential customers and convert more visitors.
It is easy to get lost among all of the tools Google offers to us for free, while it might be a bit difficult to figure it all out at once, Google’s simple user interface will help you along the way and master each of these tools as you progress.
BONUS Digital Detox
While all the above advice was related to digital apps, there are still a few old school things you can do to be more productive. First of all, many studies have shown working next to a window can be a great productivity boost as natural light affects our brains that way.
Also, having plants in your working space is not only a great thing to purify the air, but can also be a nice decoration to dull office life.
Lastly, taking 17 minutes breaks every 52 minutes of work is proven to be a very effective way to recharge your batteries and keep your concentration.
What are some of the challenges you faced as an entrepreneur and did you use any tools to help you along the way? Please share it with us in the comment section below!