Andy D Day

Free, Cheap And Money Saving Tools For Online Entrepreneurs

There are many tools available to entrepreneuers for free or very cheap that you should know about if you want to make your day more productive or improve your business. Here are a few tools that I use daily or have used to improve my online businesses.

Google Apps

Google have provided a whole suite of tools for business users that include group calendars, document editing and email hosting. This is a must have for any business on a budget. On setting up a domain for use with Google Apps you have a suite of online tools for your staff. The most central to this is your own company email on the Gmail platform, once you have that you can easily set up groups and mailing lists for your staff to use internally. The email server can also be used outside of the browser with Thunderbird or Outlook as well as your Blackberry or whatever. There is also a very useful group calendar available and the ability to set up a group wiki with a few clicks. While setting up your domain initially might be a little tricky for the technophobe, everything else is straight forward to use.

Amazon Web Services and Scalr.net

Not free this one, but an extremely cheap way to get dedicated hosting. If you have a busy web site and have been paying through the nose for your hosting then this could be one way of saving a lot of your monthly budget. Also known as cloud computing, hosting on Amazon’s servers will make your websites (with a little bit of work) scalable. This will mean that when your traffic grows so can your sites. If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty with your website but you’re not a computer scientist you can pair up AWS with Scalr.net which will handle all the technical side of scaling your sites.

Open Office

Open Office is an open source productivity suite that you can install directly on your computer. If you’re not comfortable with leaving everything in Google’s hands then this could be a viable alternative to purchasing a usuable copy of Microsoft’s Office. Open Office has everything you would expect from Office with wordprocessing, spreadsheet, databases, graphics and presentation packages included in the package. You can’t really get a much better software product for free.