It’s kind of funny that when I was back at the University studying computer science, me and my friends couldn’t find an effective way to collaborate on assignments and projects.
If you don’t follow my sense of humor, the thing that’s funny about it is that even among the future computer scientists, we were still running around with USB pen-drives, and communicating exclusively over email or our private online forum. This was constantly resulting in data getting lost, old data overwriting new data, and no one knowing what their task was in a given project in general.
Oh the good times…
Fast forward seven or eight years and all these problems – plus a bunch of other ones – have been solved for good. It really is remarkable how these days we can use the modern tools and solutions to help us achieve both our personal and business goals.
In this post, you will learn:
- How to choose the right tools for you and your business.
- What are the main challenges awaiting businesses in this modern online age.
- How to build your own task impact scale.
- How to improve your work productivity, not go crazy among all this technological noise and get your job done.
Tools vs. business
Back in the day, the only two business tools available were MS Word and Outlook. But now, we’ve gotten to a point where there’s an overabundance of all kinds of stuff and we somehow have to pick the exact tools and methods that are going to benefit our businesses, instead of just adding more things to our already quite busy to-do lists.So to get started, we’re going to divide the different activities you do in your business into a handful of categories. You can start with the ones I’m sharing below, but feel free to add more if you think it makes sense.
- Research.
- Client outreach / management.
- Project management / collaborative work.
- Social media.
- Selling and marketing.
- Content creation and management.
So what I like to do, personally, is take a look at what I call the task impact scale.
The scale itself has a rather simple construction. It shows the relation between the time spent doing certain task and the impact it has on your business. So whatever task you’re doing on a regular basis, try to put it somewhere on the scale.
For example, for me, reaching out to new clients has its place somewhere over here:
It’s roughly in the middle of the time axis but right at the very top of the impact axis. It’s clear that in my case, I have work because I do outreach.
For you the story might be different, and probably is. So spend a while and create your complete task impact scale. You should end up with something that looks roughly like this:
On another note, such a thing can be a great resource on its own as it gives you a lot of clarity in terms of what you’re spending most of your time doing at work.
Next, take some colors, assign one color to a single category of tasks, and then mark every task with its corresponding color. This will give you an even better look at what categories of activities are the most important for your business.
Here’s my situation (still work in progress):
So for me, the category of tasks that makes the most impact is client outreach and follow up.
Improving the things that have the most impact
The next big step in this process is to do some thinking and pick the categories that could benefit the most from some optimization.Now, the funny part is that this is not necessarily about taking the tasks that consume the most time and trying to make them consume less. This would only be a short term fix. The approach I actually encourage you to take is to start from the far right side of the scale – the categories that have the most impact on your business, no matter how much time they consume.
By taking the category that has the highest impact and reducing the time the individual tasks require, you can achieve either of two things:
- You will be able to introduce new tasks in that freed time slot – tasks that have the potential to become high-impact ones too. Or:
- You will be able to spend the same amount of time on your existing high-impact tasks, but do so in a much more time-efficient manner, effectively letting yourself achieve even more results.
* Extra tip. See those tasks that sit on the top of your time axis yet have almost no impact on your business? Ditch them completely, automate them or delegate them to someone who can take care of them for you.
Okay, so let’s get to the fun stuff! What follows is my own list of tools – tools that have either worked for me personally or that have been recommended to me by people whose opinion I respect.
Tools to improve your research
BuzzStream or Inkybee. If you’re spending any amount of time searching for influencers in your niche either through Google, Twitter, or some other channel, BuzzStream or Inkybee will both introduce big improvements into your process.
You can set those tools to look for people and blog posts based on keywords, and then you get a nice dashboard listing every prospective contact that has been found. The list is clear and surely easier to navigate than an Excel spreadsheet you would probably build for this otherwise.
At that point, you can either reach out to those people directly from within the tool, or take the communication somewhere else.
Open Site Explorer. This is one of the free SEO tools at Moz.com. It’s designed to help you find the sites that are linking to your competition, so you can examine them closer and maybe land similar placements for your site. The tool displays incoming links, new links, top pages, linking domains, anchor texts, and a bunch of other stuff.
Tools to improve your client outreach / management
Bidsketch. In short, this tool puts your client proposals on steroids. Bidsketch is an online solution that gives you access to a proposal creation tool and then also takes care of sending your proposals out and tracking their performance. You can check how clients interact with your proposals, which gives you a great insight into how to improve your methods over time. Plus, all templates at Bidsketch are built by professionals who really know their craft.
Nutshell CRM. Nutshell is a very simplistic and easy to use CRM system. It helps you store leads, manage contacts and accounts, plus generate reports regarding your conversion (leads-to-clients), sales, and more. It also helps you consolidate communications with your clients in one easy to manage place.
Tools to improve your project management / collaborative work
Trello. Trello is a very effective way to take care of your to-do lists, whole projects, and even collaborating with your team on those projects. Your things inside of Trello are based on boards, lists and cards. You can create different boards to represent different departments in your business. Then you have lists for projects, and cards for individual tasks. Everything is easy to use and very intuitive.
Slack. In simplest terms, I’d have to say that Slack is the ultimate freestyle collaboration tool. Where most other project management solutions tend to organize things in structures and blocks, Slack gives you freedom to organize your work in whatever way you wish. Because of this, every team member can communicate freely and just focus their efforts on the actual work that needs to be done.
ClickMeeting. A solution for everyone who needs an effective way to have a meeting with their team, clients, or even to conduct an online webinar. ClickMeeting will let you in on a clever audio and video conferencing feature, the possibility to share your desktop, Q&As and moderated chat windows, and more. Overall, a great tool if meetings are an integral element of your daily business life.
Tools to improve your social media
BuzzSumo. It’s really tough to categorize certain tools in just a single bracket these days. With BuzzSumo for example, it’s not only a social media tool, but also a great research tool that will help you find the content that’s performing the best on social media right now. You can even filter the results to see only the top pages for the day, week, or year.
And the story is quite similar with this next tool too…
IFTTT. IFTTT is short for if this then that. It lets you create powerful connections between the different platforms that you use (not only social media). For example, with IFTTT, you can have your Instagram photos automatically tweeted out as images, or for something more usable this time of the year, you can have the hottest Black Friday posts from Reddit emailed to you.
Tools to improve your selling and marketing
Selz. In simple terms, Selz is your best solution to launch an online store if you’re not experienced with code, building websites, or other web-related technical stuff. The platform just makes things easy again, like they should be. One more cool thing about it is that you can offer different kinds of products – physical, digital, and even services. Plus, of course, things like payment processing and other slightly boring aspects of selling on the internet are being taken care of as well.
Shopify. An alternative to Selz. For the most part, you will find the same set of features here. Just keep in mind that if you want to sell digital products, with Shopify you will have to install separate app to deliver them.
SendinBlue. A great tool for sending out email newsletters and reconnecting with your customer base. What sets it apart is that there’s a free plan allowing you to send up to 9,000 emails per month, and you also get access to a great autoresponder functionality.
Tools to improve your content creation and management
(Since these days most websites run on WordPress, and therefore content creation happens in WordPress as well, this section focuses exclusively on WordPress plugins.)
- Edit Flow. Improve your editorial workflow and introduce a publishing calendar.
- WordPress Backup to Dropbox. Back up your content automatically and store it in your Dropbox account.
- All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets. Make your Google listings more appealing with some rich snippets.
- Shortcodes Ultimate. Use simple shortcodes to introduce custom elements into your content, such as buttons, media, dividers, tabs, columns, highlighters, lightboxes, and more.
- Wordfence Security. Make sure your site and the content you have is safe and secured from common hacker attacks.
Conclusion
Whew, so there we have it! In total, there are 18 tools on this list, so I’m sure you will be able to find something useful for yourself here. Let’s just keep in mind that the goal isn’t to use a certain tool just for the sake of it, or just because the tool is popular at the moment. A much better approach is to only use what makes your work either easier, faster, or better. Or all three.For instance, if a given tool seems interesting to you, give it a complete 20-day trial run. The reason why I’m saying this is because all tools have at least some learning curve. So for example, just because one tool seems difficult during the first three or four days of using it, doesn’t mean that it won’t become a lifesaver for you later on. Just give it time and experiment.
One last thing, what tools are you using right now to help you achieve your business goals and make your work easier?
Source
http://www.steamfeed.com/technology-changing-modern-online-business-space-us/
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