It’s not easy running your own business. Your IT budget is slim and you’re not even sure how to operate all the tech toys you do have. You don’t want to sign multi-year contracts. You just want everything to work.
Good news. Right now, you have better options than ever before to get exactly what you want. No crazy upfront costs. Just easy-to-use, plug-and-play technology that you can use on the web and on your phone.
Here are 16 awesome technology tools that can help you in every area of your business, as you point your personal YouEconomy toward greatness.
Related: The YouEconomy: The Power Is Yours
For Productivity…
These tools help you plan out what needs to be done and assign responsibilities to the people who need to help you get there.
1. Todoist
(Free – $3/month)
This is the best tool to handle recurring tasks, reminders and team planning. They have native apps for more than a dozen different environments so you can take it anywhere and use it anytime to get things done.
2. Wrike
(Free – $10/month)
Imagine if Microsoft SharePoint and Project decided to build an epic productivity platform for today’s generation of Gantt Chart-needing professionals. It’s mobile-friendly, runs in your browser, and good-looking. And it’s free to start using.
For Security and Password Sharing…
These tools help keep your team safe and secure without emailing usernames and passwords around.
3. LastPass
(Free – $4/month)
Forget your passwords? Share your passwords over email? LastPass saves all your passwords for you and even allows you to set up sharing groups where you can allow family or friends to use your passwords—without them ever seeing what the actual password is. How incredible is that?
4. Blur
(Free – $1/month)
It’s the most technical personal security platform out there. It allows you to create disposable credit cards, phone numbers or email addresses. It saves your passwords for you and notifies you when you might have been hacked.
For Contacts…
These tools help you organize the people you know, the deals you need to close and the marketing that gets you there.
5. Cloze
(Free – $19/month)
We have used them all—every CRM on the planet (or so it feels). Cloze is by far the best to use if you need to build and maintain relationships with people. It collects, organizes and manages all the people you need to know—right beside your email (and social) inbox. It’s epic.
6. AgileCRM
(Free – $79/month)
It has CRM in the name, but with features like landing pages, social tracking, web tracking and smart email campaigns, it’s really the best all-in-one marketing (and sales) platform on the planet. And it’s one-tenth the cost of HubSpot or Infusionsoft. Use it and be delighted.
For Research…
These tools help you learn all you can about prospects with whom you want to do business sometime soon.
7. AeroLeads
($49 – $499/month)
In a cluttered category of lead and prospect research tools, AeroLeads has the best combination of capture and results. It works more times than the other guys out there. They claim to verify email addresses and phone numbers multiple times before they pass it along to you. And it seems like they do.
8. Capture
(Free – $99/month)
Ever want to zip through a website and vacuum up all the people and email addresses (and other contact information) you find there? Meet Capture by RingLead. Not only will it capture leads on a website, it verifies the email addresses and exports everything to Salesforce.
For Design…
These tools help you ditch Photoshop and make it super-easy to create impressive images for social media or your website.
9. DesignFeed
(Free in beta)
The hands-down, best-ever online tool for creating epic quotes for social media. It is incredibly easy to use, but to make it even easier you can pick one of their curated designs, swap out the content and post it live in seconds.
10. Canva
(Free – $13/month)
Ditch the fancy image layers applications and consider investing a few of those dollars in Canva. Edit images. Design new ones. Create social media content or designs for business cards or brochures. Share your designs with your team. Smile more.
For Scheduling…
These tools make it easy to schedule and prepare for awesome meetings.
11. Charlie App
(Free)
Connect Charlie to your Google calendar (or Outlook) and it will automatically research everyone you are planning to meet with. What?!? An hour before your meeting you’ll get an email with everything you need to know about those people.
12. Assistant
(Free)
At the push of a button, Assistant checks your calendar and suggests up to three days’ worth of availability for meetings. It runs in Gmail, right where you are sending emails, so it is fast and a tremendous time-saver.
For Calling…
These tools make it easy to collaborate with your team, partners or prospective customers.
13. Appear
(Free – $12/month)
Go to your Appear link (ours is appear.in/edgy) and do some video conferencing, or share your screen, without needing to download all those bloated desktop apps. It’s fast. And easy. And free.
14. UberConference
(Free – $10/month)
Instead of waiting on hold for people to join your conference call, let UberConference text you when the people who need to be on the call actually show up. Saves you time. Saves you from looking like a chump who uses a tool with “free” in the title.
For Privacy…
These tools keep you safe while sharing files or cruising the internet each day.
15. WhoHasAccess
(Free)
Connect it to your Google Drive account with a push of a button and wait for it to tell you who has access to any one of your files. Using the tools, you can take back sharing permissions, too. It’s a free and awesome way to stay safe.
16. Disconnect
(Free – $5/month)
Download one of their free apps or pay a little more to get unlimited secure and anonymous access to the internet. Makes web browsing safe while you’re traveling or using Wi-Fi from your local coffee shop.
For less than $100 this month, you can have a powerful set of tools to help you do more, sell more, grow faster and look like a complete business badass. Try one. Try them or all. Or bookmark this article for when you are looking for great tools down the road.