Over the years we’ve used some tools but recently there’s been a lot of really awesome tools that it’ll be a shame not to share them with you. Now I know anybody can benefit from cool apps to help get things done more easily and efficiently, but the list I’ve compiled below are ones that are particularly helpful to those who do online-based work (like bloggers, writers, infomarketers, virtual assistants, etc.) or have internet-based businesses.
Get inspired by great minds in TED Talks
Many of these tools and applications are free or have free versions. Enjoy!
Get Organized
Mindmeister.com, Bubbl.us, Mindomo, and Mind42.com – free mind mapping tools with sharing capabilities.
RememberTheMilk.com – Never forget the milk again. Getit? Free online to-do list.
ActiveCollab - Project management and collaboration tool.
Ubidesk – excellent team collaboration tool. Share files, documents, and project manage collaboratively. (Thanks to Ashley from Ubidesk for sharing this with us)
Web-Appointments.com – let others book appointments with you online.
Doodle.ch – Schedule dates and times that work for everyone who wants to attend.
Google Docs – needs no introduction.
Productivity Boosters
FocusBooster – boost your focus when doing a task by timing yourself.
RescueTime – Awesome tool that measures how much time you end up spending on which tasks. Perfect for scatterbrained workers prone to distractions and procrastination but would like to be more disciplined and focused when they are working.
Evernote – An idea pops into your head. Quick! Jot it down before you forget! And make sure you remember where you actually wrote your idea down, so that you can access it again in the future. Eeerr, yeah right. Well, Evernote lets you do exactly that for free! You can put type notes, clip a web page, snap a pic, grab a screenshot , whatever. You can index them, tag them and organize them in folders to make them searchable, too.
LastPass Password Manager – Never forget a password again. Auto log in saves so much of my time. Especially helpful for those who frequently encounters password amnesia.
Content/Info Product Creation
Screen Steps – Create step by step tutorials easily. Great for creating info products or sending instructions with screenshots to your team/clients.
Sclipo.com – A must tool for thought leadership. It lets you publish, teach and manage online courses. You can lead live classes & webinars for 100+ attendees. It’s even got a library you can use to store and share all types of files. You can organize off-line events and stream them live. You can even collect payments on the courses and events you conduct.
Need-an-article.com - pay someone else to write articles according to your specifications for as little as $5.50.
MTurk.com - Get small tasks done for dirt cheap.
iStockPhoto, FreeDigitalPhotos and sxc.hu – get free, royalty free stock photos/images.
Audacity – free, open source software for audio recording and editing. Great tool for creating audio content to add to your info product.
Kunaki - have your CDs and DVDs created, distributed and manufactured – on demand. They will even dropship your CDs and DVDs for you.
Gliffy.com – Get your ideas easily understood by others by creating professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more.
Super – a simple tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file.
TED – Videos featuring today’s greatest thought leaders. Worthwhile watching everyday to feed your mind as an emerging thought leader.
Get things Done Better, Faster Cheaper
Video Marketing
TubeMogul.com – Like Traffic Geyser but don’t have the budget? TubeMogul will distribute your videos to numerous video networks for free.
Animoto – Create videos using pictures and video clips easily, quickly and cheaply. Choose your music/song and the clever software edits the video for you.
Heyspread – Cool tool that lets you mass distribute your videos. You can also manage, analyze and track your videos’ performance. Very affordable prices and you can even pay as you go – nice! (Thanks to Eric Fontaine for the heads up!)
Online Survey Tracking/Creation
Zoomerang.com – perform marketing research and get customer feedback easily and in an automated fashion using this free survey tool.
Survey Monkey – Find out what your customers / prospects want with this free survey tool.
Survey Pirate – Create, post and publish your surveys all for free. We love free. (Thanks to Linn Lindström for suggesting this).
File Storage/Backup
DropBox.com Free file storage, sharing and remote backup from a folder on your desktop!
Mozy – Simple online backup solution
SugarSync – Online File syncing/storage
Testing/Tracking
If you have a business online and you’re still not testing and tracking, you’re going to be out of business soon. Harsh but true.
Testing and tracking is a must because they let you determine what is working and what isn’t, allowing you to discard the duds and focus on the things that make returns.
Google Website Optimizer – lets you conduct split testing and multivariate testing for free.
StatCounter / Google Analytics- gain detailed insights about your website traffic and marketing effectiveness
Clicktale – view videos of how exactly your visitors are interacting with your web pages. It’s like looking over your visitor’s shoulders! Freakingly awesome.
Crazyegg / Clickdensity – See Heatmaps and track your visitors’ clicks, mouse hovers, entry pages and exit pages.
Woopra – Got loads of websites you need to track and measure? It’s all so easy with Woopra. Great for those building an online empire.
Communicate
Adobe Connect now – free webconferencing for up to 3 people. Handy when you outsource work overseas and need to meet with them regularly.
FreeConferenceCall -Does exactly what it says on the tin. No need to schedule, up to 6 hours conference call, and up to 96 participants per conference call.
Pamela – Manage and record your Skype calls, videos and chats. Make sure the wife knows Pamela is not a woman.
Google Voice –Transcribe voicemail, low cost overseas calls, get SMS via email, and much more. By invitation only.
Other Cool Tools
Jing – free screen capture/sharing tool. Handy for those moments and situations when words aren’t enough to explain your ideas.
VSO Image Resizer – create e-mail friendly versions of your images, load them faster, move them easily from folder to folder, change their format, edit large numbers of image files/batch image resize and thus save space on your hard drive.
Amazon S3 – store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Pixlr Image Editing – Free alternative to Photoshop.
Crossloop.com – Need technical support about anything? Don’t freak out. Log on to Crossloop and find Expert help instantly, 24/7. A real savior for the non-techies like me.
Logmein.com – Access and back up your computer from anywhere with an Internet connection. Even access your desktop from your iPhone!
We haven’t used all of them…yet. So if you want to share your experiences about these services please feel free to share them here.
We’ve probably missed out a lot of other cool tools and websites so if you have a suggestion just pop the details below on the comments section and we’ll add them here.
Thanks!
And oh, if you love this list make sure to share this post with other entrepreneurs. Put that on your to do list, will you? 
13 Comments
HourDoc is tool for Time Tracking. http://www.HourDoc.com Time Tracking Software is right treatment for time and labor management processes has to be an easy-to-administer and affordable solution for Freelancers, supervisors, employees and HR and payroll managers. They offer free application to companies less than 50 employees.
You may want to look at the HyperOffice Collaboration Suite. It’s one of the oldest in the business (since 1998), simplest and the most comprehensive (integrated tools for messaging, Outlook integration, document management, workspace publishing, calendars, project management, address books, forums, online meetings, web forms, workflows).
Wonderful article, seriously!
Doodle is awesome when it comes to arranging meetings with people from different timezones as it was the case in a project not too long ago for me.
I am going to use some of these for future projects.
Thanks again for filling my favorite-bookmarks folder
A very well prepared list of tools. Really very helpful! You can also add DeskAway (http://www.deskaway.com) which is an awesome project management & collaboration tool having some very excellent features like reporting & analytics, task management, file upload/share, messages, issue tracking, time tracking and much more. I have become quite addicted to it because of its neat interface & simplicity to use.
DeskAway is a project management tool. It is easy to use with powerful features. We have a free plan and reasonable upgrades. Very useful for startups to manage their work.
Great Article. Have you tried out Injoos Teamware. I would reckon that they have the most comprehensive integrated collaboration platform. With their latest release they have added a new twist to track and execute projects “the social way”. Checkout their Blog http://injoos.com/blog/2009/10/09/seamless-collaboration-with-release-35/
Hi, I am the Marketing Director at HeySpread.
Thanks for this good article.
That is true, Tubemogul is a good service.
But you should really have a look at HeySpread for Professional Video Analytics and Video Distribution – http://bit.ly/4Kxy9. Far cheaper, with exclusive features such as YouClone (copy/paste your YouTube videos to any other platform automatically and in one shot), powerful and user-friendly interface, REST API for an easy and fast white label integration.
Thanks Eric. I’ve added it to the list. I really like the user interface of Heyspread.
I really like FreeMind as a mind mapping tool (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) – totally free desktop app.
Also regarding surveys I would like to push for http://www.surveypirate.com
As opposed to many other “free” survey tools – this one is actually 100% free! No caps on answers & number of questions. It’s a pretty new tool and lots of stuff is going to happen over the next year, but all basic functionality is there, reports are available as pfd’s with ready-made graphs, or as data download in csv format.
Disclaimer: I work for SurveyPirate and therefore I would say it’s great – but please, try it out and leave a comment on our blog or at Twitter @SurveyPirate and @DangerousDolly (that’s me)
Thanks for this, Linn. I’ve added Survey Pirate to the list as well.
Great list!
I’d like to add one more.
The latest tool, Ubidesk, makes up for the weakness of those existing tools in terms of integration. It provides document collaboration, task management, file sharing, group calendar, timeline and discussion board. All features are connected to one another. You can link a task to documents, files or another task.
Ubidesk is such an excellent tool, Ashley. I’ll probably have to whittle down my list now cos of all the awesome new discoveries here!
I’m actually trying out Ubidesk now thanks to your comment. So far I like it a lot, gonna try it on some internal project over the next couple of months!
We’re using the free version so far, but it seems like that can take us a pretty long way. Thanks!
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