Building and running your own business or blog can be challenging. Especially with a newborn and not enough time on maternity leave. When I decided to have a family, I was on a mission to finding new ways to maximize my time and efficiently work to maintain a life/work balance. I personally was working 24/7 to grow my business and it’s a lot of work if you don’t have the right tools. You have to promote your services, manage work flow, deliver quality products/services on time & maintain good relations for repeat business – all at the same time. Sometimes, while balancing all of these task maintaining your online presence and marketing can take a backseat.
Here’s a list of tools I use regularly to manage & grow my own business (in no particular order). My life would’ve been super stressful if I didn’t use these applications and subscription. I hope they help you too! Let me know what are some of the tools or apps that help you with your business.
- Skype – I use them to chat and have video calls with my clients. I also use them for subcontractors and freelancers I work with.
- Drobox – I started using dropbox to share documents/assets with my clients. You can use it for free but I pay a monthly fee to have 1TB of space.
- WordPress-is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. It’s the CMS I use for my website.
- MailChimp– Excellent email management system. I personally use their RSS-driven campaigns which help you save time pushing out new content.
- PayPal-I use this to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account.
- Google App– This is a great way to make sure you have a professional email address. Instead of having yourbusiness@gmail.com you can have info@yourbusiness.com. It’s also very affordable.
- HelloSign-My go to platform for business contracts.
- Buffer-This software is designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. It’s convenient to me as a new mom and avid traveler.
- Asana–Not only is it a popular project management tool. It allows me to create a project for each of my clients, and communicate with them. Once I add their projects I’m able to share mockups and receive feedback on the revisions.