Today we recommend best and reliable free online tools for business. With their help planning, creating and competition tracking will be easy as never before.
Planning and communication
- Asana: a wonderful tool allowing you to plan, assign tasks, and watch the progress.
- Trello: helps organize work by breaking big tasks into smaller chunks. Loved by kaizen enthusiasts.
- Google Calendar+ Google Drive: Have your office always with you. Tasks and documents in cloud, available on all
- Dropbox: documents shared, co-edited and safe in the cloud.
- Slack: whatever you use (Skype, Google Talk, etc.), drop it and try Slack. Everything is easy to tag and find and you have a separate tool for communication at work. Mobile app available.
Free CRM
Most of them are either freemium (free, but for some extra options you must pay) or free only to a limited amount of contacts.
- SuiteCRM(open source, free, based on SugarCRM)
- ZohoCRM(free for 3 users and 5000 records)
- Bitrix 24: (free to 12 users and 5 GB, flexible payment plan)
- Streak(operated from your inbox).
Automation
- Zapier: integrates applications you use. It automatizes responses to defined events. It can start writing an email for you, add a task to Asana or Trello, and post something in social media.
Content marketing: inspiration, resources
- Feedly: RSS reader.
- Buzzsumo: check what people talk about in social media! Top stories in the rating are free, more require buying a premium plan.
- Instapaper: for those who like to focus on reading. Instapaper collects and displays chosen content in simple, distraction-free mode. It can also send articles to your
- Pocket: organize your internet! You collect and tag links to important content on the web.
- Google Alerts: monitors mentioning of given phrase on the internet.
- Blinkist: don’t have time to read books? Consume them in a blink of an eye. Blinkist offers you concentrated insights from a book to be absorbed in less than 15 minutes. Can bring a lot of inspirations.
- Rescue Time: feeling like your creative time can easily turn into time waste? Track website you visit and programs/apps you use and time you spent on each of them.
Content marketing: creation. Text, graphics
- Evernote: your notes available on various devices, including mobile and online.
- Hemingway: great app which will teach you to write simply and clearly.
- Liberio: create ebooks in all formats.
- PiktoChart: for creating infographics.
- Picmonkey: for picture editing.
- Wordle: to make word clouds.
- Canva: graphic- creating for non-professionals. Intuitive, easy and free (some templates are paid extra).
Free photos
- Unsplash
- Little Visuals
- Death to the Stock Photo. On all three above you must register and you get weekly image packs (while browsing isn’t easy), but photo quality compensates that inconvenience.
- Gratisography.
- Everystockphoto: free photos browser. It includes many sources of free images.
Social media:
- Knowem: see if your user/ profile name is original BEFORE you register.
- Buffer: manage and plan content distribution in all your social media channels.
- Social mention: find mentions on a topic you are interested in in social media.
- Hootsuite: manage social
Competition tracking, research SEO
- Ubersuggest, SEObook: find keywords.
- Similarweb: estimates traffic and keywords for given website.
- SimilarSites, SimilarSitesSearch: find similar websites.
- Manta: finds companies operating in given branch.
- Browseo: how browsers see your website?
- Copyscape: finds content copied from your website.
The key is to know what you can have for free, and what is worth paying for. Therefore search for free options, but try also free testing periods or tools free to certain amounts of contacts, with price growing proportionally to your growth (SALESmanago works like that). That way you can see whether given solution works for you.
And what tools improve your work? Share with us!
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