Elijah Masek-Kelly — March 27, 2018 — March 27, 2018
Starting your own online business doesn’t need to break the bank. There are loads of awesome free tools online to help you run your businesses efficiently.
Below is list of 10 brilliant free online tools, with some instructions for how you can use each of them.
NameStation
If you’re struggling to think of the perfect name for your online business, NameStation can help. Type in one primary keyword and a bunch of secondary keywords and NameStation will generate thousands of ideas for a domain name. It automatically excludes URLs that are already taken.
If none of the computer-generated options take your fancy, you can even hold a contest to get ideas from the NameStation community.
Bitrix 24
Bitrix24 allows you to provide an intranet service making it easy for employees to keep up to date with whatever each other is up to.
As online business becomes increasingly remote, this is a great tool to create a sense of community.
Through Bitrix24, you can add and track holiday requests, expenses, business trips and general requests.
There’s a ‘Like’ button and you can award badges to your employees.
As online business become more globalised, this is a tool that can help you to build a community out of your remote employees.
Slack
Slack is the newest messenger app on the block, and it has already gained a huge following.
Although it doesn’t do anything revolutionary when you compare it to the likes of Skype or Google Hangouts, it does offering everything you’d expect and does it well.
Its intuitiveness on both desktop and mobile is a major selling point, plus there’s a plenty of useful business features such as the ability to set reminders or email notifications.
Hubspot Invoice Generator
Hubspot Invoice Generator makes the practice of sending professional-looking invoices seem like a piece of cake. Simply type your details in the invoice template (pictured below), choose a design, send to the client then wait for your money to arrive. Piece of cake.
There are so many colours and designs to choose from that it should be easy enough to find one that matches your brand image.
Doodle
Doodle simplifies the often-troublesome process of trying to set up a multi-person meeting at a time that is suitable for everyone. If everyone in the meeting uses the same online calendar function is easy enough, but if there are people from outside your company, organising a time and date quickly explodes into a horrific flurry or back-and-forth emails with everyone saying what date and time they can and can’t make.
Using Doodle, the meeting’s organiser can suggest a range of time and dates, send a quick survey to all attendants, then sit and relax as each of them tick boxes to signal their availability.
Vidlogo
High-quality professional-looking imagery and video has become crucial to business marketing in this day and age. Adding a watermark onto either, not only helps stops people plagiarising your work, it also adds an extra spot of professionalism.
VidLogo makes the task simple. Simply uploaded your image or video and your watermark and let this free website to the rest.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
This Google Chrome plug-in makes it easy to learn valuable information about people emailing your Gmail address.
Once this app is installed, the LinkedIn details of every person that emails you will pop up on the right hand of your screen.
Suddenly, rather than having only their name email address and what other information they choose to disclose in their signature, you can easily access details about their website, their career and who your mutual connections are. An essential networking tool.
The app works automatically as soon as you download from the Chrome Web Store.
CreateBrief
You can create and send professional-looking design briefs within a couple of minutes using CreateBrief. This website holds your hand, asking for a project title, basic instructions, a colour scheme and mood palette. Once you’re done, your brief will have a unique URL that you can email to designers. Alternatively, use the ‘Share’ button that appears below your brief after it’s finished.
Canva
Canva makes professional image design so simple that you might not need to commission professionals at all.
When you log in to the Canva website, you’re presented with a huge range of templates to meet all your online and offline needs.
The social media templates are sized to take as much capital on that platform as possible.
Among the dozens of templates are Facebook Post, Twitter Post, LinkedIn Cover,‘EBook Cover, Flyer and Menu.
Once you choose your image size, you’ll find dozens of professional-looking templates. All you need to do is change the, text, fonts, colour scheme and imagery….
The graphic I put together for this article (below) took about two minutes to create.
Why pay for something if you can have it for free?
There are 100s of free business tools – you just need to look!
Which of your favourite tools were missed here?
Let me know in the comments 🙂
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