Useful Online Tools for Your Work-at-Home Business: Work-At-Home Success Expert Tips
With so many online resources and tools aimed towards remote workers and home business owners, it’s hard to decide which ones to use. These experts give their advice about the ones they prefer and use to stay productive and profitable.
Will Schneider from Fulfillment Companies
One of the most useful tools for me personally is Calendly.com. As a business owner, unexpected calls eat up valuable time and resources. By forcing customers and prospects to schedule calls within a predetermined time-frame, I’m better able to manage my schedule rather than allow my schedule to manage me.
Nick Chandi from SlickPie has these great tips:
1) Get the best from your existing customers: Keep the relationship warm with existing customers and find ways to get more business from them. This is the easiest way to keep you cash-flow positive and reduce churn. Use tools like Mailchimp and reach them at least once a month.
2) Spend minimum time on social media: Social media is important but has one of the lowest ROI as a marketing channel. It’s very important they schedule and automate your messaging using tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck, etc. Stop leakage in your productivity and plug the gap.
3) Introduce automation. Either use tools like IFFTT or Zapier, or opt for online tools that have built in automation. For example, MagicBot from SlickPie can cut your work week by up to 4.5 hours due to built-in-automation. Savings can be used to build more business or planning for new innovative ideas or just spend more time with family.
Lori Cheek, Founder/CEO of CheekD has these great tips:
One of my favorite home productivity hacks comes with the help of an app called Stay Focusd When working from home, Facebook and Twitter can be a major distraction. StayFocusd helps avoid these distractions by restricting the amount of time you can spend on them. The Google Chrome extension lets you set specific time restrictions on certain websites with a 10 minute default option. Once your time has been used up, the sites you have selected to block can’t be accessed for the remainder of the day.
Also, working remotely from my team, a Software Program called Quip comes in extremely handy. Quip is a project management and task collaboration tool that help users work together and communicate without emails. Users can create and edit spreadsheets, documents and checklists in the system, and team members can chat and comment on files in real time. It helps us, as they say at Quip, “work smarter, better, faster.”
Leslie’s Tips: There are so many great tools and resources out there to help you get things done. The challenge is finding the one that best fits your needs and how you work. I use many online tools including Gmail, Hootsuite for social media, and Google Calendar (although I have a print planner as well), and Aweber. One new tool that I’ve been using is CoSchedule, which allows me to schedule social media of my blog posts within WordPress. It’s fast and easy to do it at the time I write it. It also comes with a browser app, so I can share/schedule social media when I’m on the net. What I really like is that it has easy Pinterest pin scheduling.
