- The Best Free Business Tools – To Make Your Life Easier and Your Business More Profitable
Here are some of my favorite free tools that I use to help me in my business. They may be able to help you in your business too.
OpenOffice – While Microsoft office is a great software suite, there’s no doubt that it costs a pretty penny, and many times it’s these very pennies you’re pinching when you’re starting your business. OpenOffice comes to the rescue by offering a complete office software suite. Not only is the price lower than the Microsoft version, it actually is compatible with their applications, such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There are the aps you use everyday. If you grow your business and need multiple licenses, no problem, it’s still completely free. I’ve been using a copy on my office desktop PC for about 3 years and have never had a problem. Check it out at:
http://www.openoffice.org
Paint.net – This is a fantastic image editing program. It’s the perfect ap for doing anything you’d do in PhotoShop. For content creation or marketing purposes, it hits a pretty nice home run, and it’s fairly easy to use too.
Get a copy here:
http://www.getpaint.net/
Note Tab Light – This is an impressive, yet free, text and HTML editor. If you still roll your own HTML, this is just what the doctor ordered. I recommend you have at least some familiarity with HTML if you do anything in the online business space.
http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php
SmartFTP – When you need an FTP application to upload or transfer files, ease of use is typically one of the more important attributes, after functionality. SmartFTP is easy to use, has great a feature set, and is once again, free. It even gives you success or failure emails so you don’t have to keep watching the file transfer process to make sure everything went through alright.
http://www.smartftp.com/
Search Status – This handy little firefox extension lets you know at a glance the Google PR and Alexa ranking any site you visit. You can dig deeper if you want, and find if they’re using nofollow links, check the keyword density, backlinks, metadata, and more with a couple of mouse clicks. It’s great for checking out your competition’s websites or blogs. It also works to make sure your own site’s pages are up to snuff.
http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
Inc. magazine has some great free business tools and other goodies, such as sample letters, forms and documents available here:
http://www.inc.com/tools/
Have a great weekend, and here’s to your Home Based Business Success.