10 Essential Small Business Productivity Tools

Your Business Success

Online and offline utilities that make running your business easier

There are a handful of tools and software utilities that I couldn't imagine doing without. Here's my list of productivity tools that every small business should embrace. I'll list them by category and then give my favorite.

Spam Blocking

Spam, buckets and buckets of it, can choke your inbox, disgust you and allow bugs to creep in and take over your computer. Spam filtering and blocking has become an essential small business tool. I use an online service called Spam Arrest. Once you get it set-up and trained it works very well. You can upload your Outlook contact list to allow those folks to send you email. The system does a great job of blocking the robot spam because senders must verify that they are real before they can send to you.

Virus Protection

Viruses come in many shape and forms and can range from annoying to system draining to security risk to fatal. I use the original and still the best in my opinion - Norton. They call these programs Anti-Virus but they have become full security programs with firewall, system monitoring and adware fighting.

Feed Reading

Reading Blogs and RSS feeds is a fact of life - or should be - for small business owners. Get all of your reading done in one place with a feed reader. I use an online version known as Bloglines - free and very popular

PDF Creation

PDF files are the standard protocol for sending and receiving business documents. Adobe Acrobat is a great program for creating PDF files but does much more and cost a bunch. Pdf 995 is a free utility that allows you to create and save files in the popular PDF format.

Project Management

Online project management is a great way to stay organized and an even better way to offer a powerful collaboration tool to your clients, vendors and teams. Basecamp is my tool of choice. It gives me everything I need to store messages, communicate, share files and collect input with and from my clients. It is like having a client portal instantly created with every new client.

CRM tool

CRM stands for customer relationship management but for the small business the software and services in this category are really about tracking sales opportunities and looking for ways to convert more sales and do more business with existing clients. For this I like ACT 2006. This program, once set-up and mastered will allow you to automate many of your marketing contact activity and make sure that every prospect gets planned attention. There is an army of ACT consultants out there that can help you customize the program for your business and I suggest that you look into that option.

List Management

Capturing data from online visitors and beginning to educate them with newsletters and white papers is a proven marketing strategy. I use a service called AWeber to manage my online mailing and email marketing efforts. I'm also experimenting with a service called Swiftpage that integrates with ACT

File Sending

Sending big files can be difficult or even impossible through email channels. I use a service called DropSend to upload very large files. The service then notifies my recipient that they have a file to download.

Keyword Selection

Choosing the most popular keywords and search phases can be an essential tool to help web surfers find your web site. It's also a good tool to employ as you write article headlines and blog post titles. By knowing what words and phrases your prospects search for most often when looking for your type of business you can begin to strategically lace your writing with those terms. I use a free utility called Good Keywords to get a picture of what terms people are searching.

Spelling and Grammar

Sometimes you need a more powerful way to say something or maybe just the right way to spell a word. I use a free utility called WordWeb. The thing I like most about WordWeb is that it doesn't matter what program I am using, I can still access it. Even surfing the web I can highlight a word and get the word's meaning and other useful information.

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John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide published by Thomas Nelson - due out in the fall of 2006

He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com