Small Business Tools To Help You Be More Productive

As more and more business is being conducted online, we’re seeing more and more tools become available to help the intrepid entrepreneur stay on top of everything they have on their plate. I know that for me personally, I feel like I’m being pulled in a million different directions and if I’m not careful things can spiral out of control pretty quickly.

With various businesses and client projects on my plate at any given time, I’ve found it absolutely necessary to find tools that help me get things down quickly, efficiently, and without a whole lot of effort. Well, at least not in the long term. They all take a little time and training in order to get accustomed to them, but once you’ve climbed that learning curve it should be smooth sailing.

Here is a list of just a few of the tools I’ve found to help me stay on top of my various responsibilities and keep my sanity intact:

• Google Alerts – Because I have a lot of different markets I’m in as a result of my various clients, I have a lot of information to keep up with.  Google Alerts allows me to setup specific alerts that notify me anytime a new piece of information has been found online. 

  It’s great for coming up with ideas for blog posts or articles, for staying abreast of what’s going on with your clients or in their industries, and it’s especially good for reputation management so you can know what other people are saying about you online.

• MWSnap – This is a handy little tool that let’s you capture screen shots of any size. 

  It’s great when you want to send someone an image of just one section of what’s on your screen.  When I’m creating tutorials I’ll use it to capture an image of a particular step in the process so people can see exactly what I’m talking about.

• Basecamp – If you do any type of project management and your teams aren’t always in the same place, this is a GREAT tool for keeping everything organized. 

  You can create projects and then assign people to the projects so everyone can stay on the same page.  It’s got a lot of great features that allow you to communicate with your team members, share files, and even create project milestones.

• TweetLater – If you’re on Twitter then you already know how difficult it can be to post multiple times a day.  Doing so is important if you want to build a relationship with your followers and this handy solution allows you to create tweets and then post date them. 

  I’ve become a huge fan of it lately as I’ll log in first thing in the morning and queue up 3-5 tweets scattered throughout the day.  I’ve been quite amazed at the conversations my tweets have generated and it’s definitely helped create some new relationships.

• iGoogle – This is another great tool from Google that helps me do a lot very quickly.  iGoogle is basically a portal page you can set up with various pieces of information that YOU SELECT.  The real power is the ability to add tabs and then add RSS feeds to your different tabs. 

  Again, because I’m in a bunch of different markets, I have a bunch of different tabs set up and each tab has a bunch of different information feeds on them.  This allows me to quickly scan through literally hundreds of different feeds so I don’t have to actually go the page to see what’s new.

• Remember The Milk – This one is really my favorite.  RTM is a solution that allows you to create and track task lists. 

  Again, because I have a bunch of different responsibilities I have a bunch of different lists, each for for each responsibility.  On each list I think have a bunch of tasks that need to get done.  You can assign due dates and priorities, and you can even delegate tasks to others thereby allowing you to keep track of EVERYTHING that needs to get accomplished.

  One of my favorite features is the ‘Overview’ which allows you to print out a task list for the week so I usually do my weekly planning on Sunday evening, then print out my RTM ‘Overview’ page first thing Monday morning so I have a good handle on what exactly needs to get done that week.

Again, I use each and every one of these tools and they’ve all helped me tremendously in my quest to be less scatter-brained and be more efficient.

So, what tools or resources have you found to help you be more efficient and effective?