5 FREE Tools to Help Businesses

5-free-business-tools

Throughout my career as a Sales Consultant I am usually researching different things to help improve a clients business.  Sometimes I come across really neat tools that help save time or increase productivity. A lot of the time when I share these tools with other people, a lot of people have not heard of them.

I guess if you were not in the industry you wouldn’t know. So I thought from time to time I could share some of these tools on this Blog, so here are the first 5:

1. Hootsuite – I thought that since Hootsuite is a Vancouver based company that everyone would know about them. But the more and more I tell people they, the more I realize that if you aren’t that into Social Media then you probably haven’t heard about it.

What it does is it gives you the ability to manage your Social Media accounts in one place. It also gives you Analytics so you can see how many people are clicking your Tweets or your posts. In addition it gives you the ability to schedule posts for the future. That way you can spend a day scheduling all your posts and not have to worry about it for a while.

2. Google Analytics – If you don’t already have this on your site you should! It will cost you a little bit of money to get it installed if you don’t know how to do that, but you will be glad you have it.

This tool gives you the ability to see how many people are visiting your website, you can also see it in real time too.  But the best thing is you can also check how they are finding you. Google, Facebook, Blogs or just typing in your URL in the top bar; all these are different ways that people find your site. So for instance if you have a listing on a Directory and you are paying for that listing, well now you can see how many people are coming to your site through that directory, if it’s none, you might want to consider cancelling that.

3, Google Webmaster Tools – With this tool from Google, you can see how your site is performing on Google. For example you can see what position your ranking for the different key words.

It also gives you all the critical issues so you can fix the problems to better your positioning.

4. DropBox – They give you 2 GB of free space, basically it’s cloud storage. You download the software onto your computer and you can “Drop” files into it.  Once they are uploaded to the cloud you can access the content anywhere by visiting their website and logging in. It works the other way too, I once needed some pics from a friend I forget my USB stick. I just uploaded them onto my DropBox from her computer.

Another great thing you can do is collaborate together, for example I have spreadsheets in my DropBox, I share them with my Colleagues and Clients, whenever those files get updated everyone that the files are shared to sees the most up to date version.

One problem I found today though, Sandro and I had our computers on and we had the same spreadsheet opened. He updated his I updated mine, he saved; when I saved it didn’t save his updated version, it saved the old version I had opened at the same time as him. So be aware your not spending hours on something and then someone save over it.

Last thing they have an App too, works great!

5. MailChimp – Great for Realtors or any Company or Person that sends out regular emails. As I am writing this I just thought of a great idea! Teachers would love this! Now they can see if their students are actually reading their emails!

So what you can do is create email newsletters and send them out to a list of people, it is free for up to 2000 Subscribers and 12,000 Emails/Month. Find out who opened your email, unsubscribes, activity reports and a plethora of Analytics, I guess you can tell I love Analytics by now 🙂

So there you have it! Please share your favorite FREE tools below or comment on Facebook or Twitter.