10 sites that make running a business easier
For the launch of the new Digital Central website, I've written a feature on useful web tools for business. Have a read, or visit the site itself. The site is aimed at digital media companies in the West Midlands as a web hub to help us connect with eachother. It was designed and built by a group of web agencies. Pete Ashton and I are working just on content side of things - he's blogging anything he can find on digital media and I'll be doing some interviews and articles.Here's our first feature:
The web has a wealth of useful tools to make running your business easier, but in these time-pressured times it's rarely that a business owner can find a minute to find out about them.
For our first feature on this site, I'll be taking a look at some of the most useful things on the web that can save you time, money and help you grow your business.
"It's not what you know, it's who you know" is the old adage that still remains true to this day and you could think of Linkedin as is its modern incarnation. This site helps you keep in touch with your network of trusted business contacts, as well as to find people you want to contact based on their trusted connections. It's a great site for finding a job, advertising a position, generating new business and finding the name of the person you need to speak to at that important potential client.
The site is only as good as the effort you put into it, and starting is easy. Just upload your contacts database and it will tell you who is already a member - you'll be surprised! Then, add each of them as a 'connection.' Once they've approved that connection you'll be able to see the people they are also in contact with, but only their name and personal information. . If you know Anne Other at Apple, and you want to get in touch with Ian Ewan at Microsoft whom she knows, you could send a message to Ian through Anne as long as she approves of it and forwards it on.
As you add more of your business contacts to the site you'll start to see the 'three degrees of separation' effect where the number of people who know someone who knows someone who you know starts to expand constantly to the point where every day there could be another few thousand people in what LinkedIn calls 'your network'.
These days nobody seems to stay in a job for very long and I regularly receive emails from people saying 'they've moved' or 'new email address'. Plaxo is a way of keeping all of your contacts up to date. Whenever someone changes their details, everyone they have shared them with will receive an update. Some people combine using Plaxo with LinkedIn to good effect.
If you run the kind of business that involves lots of emails and files flying around a number of project partners spread over several locations, then Basecamp helps make the process of communicating with eachother much easier. It's a subscription-based service that allows you to set up a number of separate project spaces, one for each project and/or client you are working with and then to have all of the project-relating information for each in one place.
It also has a built in time tracking tool, a shared calendar and multiple to-do lists for each person on each project. If you think that you'd like to take control of the projects you're working on and make collaborative projects easier, then this is the system for you!
You should also check out Backpack (all the files you need for the day) and Highrise (customer relationship management) by the same company, 37signals.
One of the best rules of business I ever learnt was not to call a meeting if it's not necessary. So, assuming you haven't already sorted out the issue you were going to meet about using Basecamp, how do you go about getting ten people from three different countries and eight different companies together in one place at one time?
Simple - you choose some potential meeting dates and add them as options on Diarised and add the list of participants who you'd like to attend. They all receive an automated email which they can respond to by indicating the dates on which they can or can't attend. Once everyone has done this you all get an email back saying which is the best date and time.
This can save everyone hours of emailing or phoning back and forth!
"Organise the World's information" is the stated aim of the World's biggest search giant, but what does that mean for the world of business? Google is much more than just a big search engine and has a number of very useful (and free) tools to help businesses organise their information:
Calendar This tool enables teams of people to share and organise their calendars via the web. I could invite you to an event, and by clicking "yes" in an email response, that event will automatically be added to your calendar, or you could check what days I'm on holiday to organise a meeting on my return. It's a great tool if you access your calendar from multiple locations - your laptop, office computer, home computer and maybe your blackberry. Rather than having to laboriously 'synchronise' all of them, you just go to a website. Mail (Gmail) If you're in that position, with multiple places you use a computer (as many of us are), then you're probably familiar with web-based email. Google's Gmail offering is especially powerful and also has the added ability that you can chat with another Gmail user live through the website if you're both online at the same time.
Reader If you've noticed recently, the amount of news and information around us seems to be increasing, and sorting out what's relevant from what isn't can become difficult. How do you get the latest business news and intelligence without continually surfing, reading the paper or checking out Sky news?
You could use Google Reader instead. It's a News reader, which means that you can set up 'subscriptions' to your favourite websites, say the BBC Business News, Digg, CNN's Business 2.0 Magazine, or even this website. Once you've subscribed you can quickly skim through the updates on all of those websites in one place and pick the ones you want to read. This saves lots of time. Make sure you install the Google Toolbar first, then sign up to Google Reader, and then when you're on a website you want to keep track of just click the orange Subscribe button in the Google bar.
Analytics If you're running a website (as every company these days should be) you need to know how successful it is and what changes you need to make to it to improve its performance. This applies across the board from small companies to large, but what I've found is that many people running small businesses often don't have access to any statistics on their websites and even if they do are unsure on what the results mean.
I regularly get quoted words along the lines of "I get a million hits on my website a month". A hit counts as any kind of access on your website. Loading that little icon that appears in the menu is a hit, as well as every image on every page. So one person clicking on a page can actually generate upwards of 30 'hits'. So your very impressive sounding "million" quote suddenly becomes a much more realistic, "I get 7000 visitors per month who look at an average of 5 pages and there are 30 images on each of those pages".
But the real questions are about those visitors. What pages did they most look at? Did they find what they were looking for? Did they buy my book? Why, or why not? Did they get lost in the process of making an order? How did they get to my site?
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you get information to help you answer these kinds of question. To add it to your site, have your web designers install it for you, or if you're technically minded follow the simple instructions on the site.
"90% of your business comes from 10% of your clients" is what I've always been told, I'm not sure I agree with it, but as a concept it basically means "Keep in touch with people - there may be a project you could work on in the future". So - why not send out a quarterly email newsletter?
The easiest and best system that I have found to do this is CampaignMonitor. It allows you to set up and manage multiple lists of names and emails, send out properly-formatted and constructed emails to them, handle 'unsubscribe' requests, remove email addresses that are no longer in use and also to see in graph-form how many people opened the email they received and which links they clicked on. If you don't have a design team to do it for you or you're not comfortable with producing a professional-looking email template, you could also take a look at MailBuild, by the same company, that does even more of the hard work for you.
If, like me, you still send the occasional printed letter using 'snailmail', then the Royal Mail's SmartStamp system is a must. You sign up for an account and you are then able to print an electronic stamp in the form of a barcode onto your envelope or label. This cuts out the need to constantly reorder stamps and means that you pay only for what you are sending.
Love it or hate it, we operate in a world where Microsoft Word and Excel documents are pervasive. ThinkFree is a free, online equivalent to Microsoft Office. You can create, edit and share Word and Excel documents, and just like Google you can then access them from any computer you want. Irritatingly, with the new version of Office just out, all new Microsoft Office documents don't work on a Mac, with this website or with older versions of Word. I'm sure that will be ironed out.
You're looking for an expert in something that's just landed on your desk. There's a project to be done and a client you want to do a good job for. At this point you pick up the phone to the person you usually work with on these kinds of things and find out they're away on holiday. The deadline is close and you're desperate to find someone else you can trust to help you out. It's at this point you should pull up Guru.com - it's a site that connects employers with freelancers and professionals across multiple industries. You post up your project or question and you should have someone to help you out within the hour.
This last site, Fresh Business Thinking, is less of a tool and more of an information resource. If you're in business, however small or large, it's good to keep on top of issues that affect us all, hear about new trends and any new legal requirements we have to meet. This site does that for you in a clean, easy to use way. There are also online documents to download (£20 for an employment contract) and a handful of great newsletters called "The Virtual CEO" and "The Virtual HR Director" - great for someone starting out running a small company.
So that's it - I hope you find some of these sites useful. I'm sure that I'll have missed some big names from my list here so feel free to post suggestions to other sites or tools.