Constant improvements and new additions can make all the difference in keeping your business relevant. However, it’s hard to keep up with the highest standards due to the overwhelming amount of different tools.
The following five are some of the current must-haves for any and all business owners.
1. Ahrefs
One of the most important aspects of a successful business is the ability to outperform competitors. Ahrefs attempts to make this job a whole lot easier with a bundle of six different tools, most of them based on slightly different characteristics of SEO.
With the help of transparent graphical representations of various analytics, you’ll be able to deeply research your competitors and see how to attract a bigger audience. Some of the included tools are:
Site Explorer – everything you need to know about a specific website is right here. Backlink crawlers, outgoing links section, paid keyword analysis and other features conveniently organize a website’s profile all in one page to save you time.
SEO Toolbar – as the name suggests, this is a browser extension that presents you with instant SEO metrics for any visited web page. A fully detailed report is automatically available and it can be accessed with a single click.
2. Spokeo
The more details you can uncover about your competition, the better you’ll be able to analyze their approach. With the popularity of social media skyrocketing, this is probably where they’ll put most of their marketing efforts in.
Because of this, it’s highly probable that they won’t keep them in plain sight. But that doesn’t matter, as long as you have Spokeo – a phone number lookup tool and an email search engine. By finding out any of these two details (which should be easy), Spokeo will run a cross-search on them through its array of databases from over a thousand sources. Since Spokeo is able to reach more than 120 different social media networks, you could be sure that if the business does have a profile, you’ll know about it.
Searching with different parameters could yield slightly different results. For example, if you’re unsatisfied with the amount of information you got by inputting a phone number, try it with an email address. Chances are high that you’ll get some additional details.
3. Clockify
The aphorism “time is money” isn’t far from the truth. Smart time management is crucial for business owners – the employees’ productivity and the ability to meet deadlines might very well depend on it.
Clockify is a time tracker software specifically designed for larger teams, with the ability to categorize time by projects, assign different activities, see each employee’s productivity, etc. Anyone from the team can access their specific projects, regardless of the type of the device from which it originated. Clockify is able to work cross-platform since all of the important data is synced online.
End of the week reports can be generated with ease and exported into three different formats, with complete visual time breakdown. All of these features (and others) are available for no charge at all.
4. Hunter.io
Hunter.io specializes in emails, more specifically their correlations with website domains and specific people. The tool has multiple different filters, with the ability to look for certain patterns in order to pinpoint the correct result.
If you need to get in touch with another business but can’t find any contact info, all you have to do is input the domain name and Hunter.io will search through over 100 million indexed email addresses. Each address goes through a rigorous verification process consisting of eight different steps, where it’s checked for validity. If there are no matches found, Hunter.io returns the best possible guess instead. Its data is fully transparent – all addresses come from public sources that are indicated.
5. Slack
For successful and productive remote work, good communication is crucial. Slack brings all of the employees together, even if they’re miles apart. Team communication is done in channels, which are essentially virtual rooms that can be divided based on whatever you want – projects, teams, or anything else.
Besides audio, Slack supports video calls, screen sharing and even mutual exchange of PDF, image and video files. Alongside the standalone release, there are over 2000 different apps with native integration. Slack supports syncing with some of the most popular storage platforms such as Google Drive and Dropbox for large-scale file sharing.
6. Mailshake
Email remains an unavoidable form of communication among business owners, even though it can be fairly time-consuming. Mailshake aims to automate the whole process through mass email sending. Users can choose from a variety of different link-building templates, and even personalize messages in order to better connect with their customers. All leads can be processed at once without having to repeat the same process over and over again.
In addition to that, Mailshake has automatic follow-ups that vary depending on the reply. instead of wasting hours, you’ll be able to process more than double the amount of emails in just a fraction of the time.
Author Bio:
Maguire Haigh is a marketing manager for Spokeo. He is interested in the latest technology trends, marketing strategies and business development. He also prefers traveling, exploring the world and meeting new people. Maguire has great experience in creating and editing articles on different topics.