This article is the written version of my “5 online tools to turbo boost a small business” piece with Claire O’Brien on Midlands 103, available via podcast. The idea behind the radio piece came from a conversation we were having, where we discussed the latest online digital Tools available for business. We whittled the list down to the 5 that we felt offered most value for time input. The first 3 are Apps with the final 2 being available directly in the cloud. They all have a free version but can be upgraded to a premium account if needed.
This radio piece is the first in a special series of 4.
Tool 1 – CamScan App
Have you ever been asked for information and thought “if only I had a scanner”. Well now you do. Cam Scanner is a super little App that turns your phone’s camera into a scanner. This is fantastic for those awkward moments that usually arrive when you want to get paid! “Oh, did you send us such and such?” You can scan invoices, notes, business cards etc. It has built in cropping and auto enhancing to ensure the scan is of premium quality.
You take the photo as normal but Cam Scanner then converts into an actual document. This is a brilliant tool for copying Tax Clearance Documents, insurance documents etc. and saves you lots of time. You can share the scanned document with Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive.
If you upgrade to the Premium version, you will get OCR (optical character recognition) functionality. This means you can extract text from images for further sharing or editing. Premium is $4.99 mthly. It’s available on Android, Blackberry & iOS.
You can find our more here: www.camscanner.com
Tool 2 – TripIt App
TripIt consolidates all your travel plans into a single place, making it easy for an entrepreneur to stay on top of their travel plans. This App manages all of your travel information, regardless of what website you purchased your ticket on. (how cool is that?) It will also keep track of your insurance documents, car rental, destinations etc. Instead of logging into all the various accounts, you now just log into TripIt. Via TripIt, you can check departure times, directions to the airport, and even weather reports.
It has a super easy to use Interface, you just swipe to the right to see your past events. Swipe left for upcoming trips.You can also add it to your Google Calendar if you sign in with your gmail account. TripIt will automatically notify you about any delays.
TripIt’s most basic app is free, but there is also a TripIt Pro version for $49 a year and a TripIt for Teams version for $29 a month. If you’re reluctant to take the leap, sign up for a free trial. The app works on all phones, using both the iOS and Android operating systems, and on all desktops, including Macs and PCs. Find our more about this business App over on www.tripit.com.
Tool 3 – Evernote App
In the tech world, Evernote is one of the main go to organiser Apps used. Evernote is really super for entrepreneurs & creative people who always have lots of ideas & nowhere to store them (or who work out of 10 different notebooks). The idea is that you type the idea into Evernote where it’s stored, and easily added to at a later date. Great for those of us who wake up at 4am with that “really brilliant idea” and then fall straight back to sleep again.
Last year it was integrated with LinkedIn. Now, they’ve added a new feature to it called Work Chat. You can now send chats to share and discuss things you’re working on with your team. You can share the document by dragging and dropping it onto the desktop version, start a work chat and get input from your team. We find this invaluable for collaborations and projects where there are a few of us working together. You can also set reminders so that you don’t forget your big idea.
It goes from free up to 4.99 a month and is available on Android & IOS.
Tool 4 – Picmonkey
Picmonkey is not an App but a fantastic free online image software platform, available directly in the cloud. This is great because it will save you small fortune on putting images together and making your website look more professional. You can easily resize the images to fit into anything. It’s also great for making branded banners for Facebook & Twitter or even for making copyrighted website images or flyers.
Just by using the overlay button (butterfly) on the tool bar you can add your logo to any image, ensuring your business website is being promoted around the web. You can also use the Text icon to add your website to images getting even more promotion for your business. The promotional card for this radio programme (left) was made using picmonkey.
Just remember that you are working in the cloud so save regularly as if lose the connection, you lose the work! Picmonkey.
Tool 5: Hashtagify.me
Our final top online tool to boost a small business is one of our favourites, hastagify.me. As Twitter has just been indexed by Google it’s really important for the businesses online visibility that you use relevant hashtags for your business. Hashtagify.me will let you see data and information about the # you are thinking of using. They have currently indexed over 47 million #’s and counting. This saves you lots of painstaking research using the Twitter search box. It’s a good way to ensure you don’t associate your brand with a bad hashtag.
Use it to test how popular a # is. It will tell you about related #’s you can use when tweeting. It will also show you who the top 6 influencers are that use the # so this will save you lots of research time. You then target those influentional users in the hope that they start talking back to you or retweeet what you are saying about your industry.
Hashtagify.me starts out FREE and if you need to access more detailed data you can get it for 9.99 a month. Just be careful if you do decide to upgrade, as the dearest (ie Enterprise pricing is the first option on screen and it costs $299 a year !!!!
You might like to read about some of our other favourite Apps here. On next week’s programme, we’ll be talking about what Google wants from your small business website.
