Six Apps to Stay Organized and Productive as an Entrepreneur

Using tools to streamline your project management, accounting, and other business systems can save you time and important resources. Many of these tools are either free to use or low-cost — making them a highly valuable tool to add. Not only that, tools can keep you more organized and productive, and save time creating value for your target audience.

 

Here are six apps to stay organized and productive as an entrepreneur:

 

Monday

Monday is a powerful business tool that can handle anything you need, from marketing to project management or sales and customer relationship systems. Automate any task you need, create quarterly road maps, and keep up with your project deadlines all in one interface.

 

Zapier

Zapier is a task management tool that not only organizes your tasks but automates them. Zapier integrates with many other important business tools such as Trello, Gmail, Facebook, and more. Create a zap to get tasks done for you automatically. When you create a zap, it creates an action that a trigger starts. A trigger first happens, causing the zap to do what needs to be done for your business and telling the zap what to accomplish. For example, a new lead follows your Facebook page, the tripper, Zapier then automatically sends an email to follow up. The action produced by the trigger can be changed for whatever you need to do.

 

Canva

Canva allows you to create as many graphics as you need to build and grow your business. Their monthly pro membership is affordable and will enable you to use as many images as possible to create profitable products or interactive and informative content. Create eBooks, Pinterest posts, flyers, presentations, and more.

 

Expensify

Keep track of your business expenses, receipts, business credit cards, and more all in one place with Expensify. A tool that manages your expenses to use your time where needed most.

 

Calendly

Calendly is free online scheduling software that helps to eliminate back-and-forth communication and make scheduling appointments more manageable and effective.

 

Trello

This is a free project management tool that helps to keep track of all the resources required for projects. It can also assign tasks, communicate with your team, and get project work done with an easy-to-use interface.

 

Give each of these tools a try if you want to run a more organized, productive, and streamlined business as an entrepreneur. These tools solve common problems that many entrepreneurs have to deal with, such as tedious or time-consuming marketing tasks. Allowing tools to take over these tasks and other difficult ones provides you more time to perfect your craft and be more successful as an entrepreneur.

 

 

 

Three Important Brand Community Practices to Follow

A strong brand community increases your reach, business revenue, and loyalty. However, to achieve these benefits, you must nurture, support, and commit to providing value to it. Only when you do the right work for a community can you expect anything positive in return – adopting the common practices that many find success in can get you started in the right direction.

 

Here are three important brand community practices to follow for increased member satisfaction and success:

 

Listen to and Engage with Your Target Audience

 

Everything you do in your business is about ensuring you’re reaching your ideal audience. The only way to be sure is to actually listen to and engage with your members in a deep way that ensures you find out the information you need to help them most.

 

While you can outsource to a community manager VA to get help with your community, you are the one who needs to show up occasionally to engage with the target audience because it will make them feel like VIPs that you take the time to be with them.

 

Address the Needs of Your Audience

 

Once you realize what your audience really needs, it’s time to address those needs with your messaging, education, products, and services. Everything you do is designed to provide solutions to your audience to help them solve their problems as easily as possible.

 

Use analytics, surveys, questionaries, freebies, engagement, contests, and more to determine what gets your audience’s attention based on the information and data you collect. The data you collect will inform you what their needs are and help create amazing content for them.

 

Choose the Right Platform or Community Structure

 

Today, community-building platforms are ubiquitous. Because of this, you can choose your perfect community to help you promote your business to a captive and interested audience. It really just depends on your own criteria. Do you want a message board that can be threaded? Do you have concerns regarding using the technology? Do you want to allow your members to make in-platform purchases? Do you want the ability to accept uploads or provide downloads? Whatever it is that you need to deliver to your audience is out there.

 

Write down what you need in a community, and then compare your needs to what’s available. You can always start easy with a Facebook Group, but there are many other options. Don’t assume all the different options are too expensive. Facebook may be free for you to use, but there are compromises to using anything free, just like there are compromises to be made even if you pay for a platform.

 

Many brands can get a community started easily; however, keeping it organized, engaged, and beneficial to your core audience is where many fall through. Not following or incorporating these top three community practices will only lead you down one road: failure. Adopt them today to build the brand community you want to achieve all your goals and more.

 

 

Community Engagement is Key to Growing Your Business

Daily Organizational Habit: Prepare Your Clothing in Advance

One of the things you can incorporate into your daily life to ensure more happiness and success is to be more organized. When you’re more organized, life just goes much more smoothly. While some people seem to be born organized, those who aren’t can simply start developing the habit of organization by getting prepared for everything they do in advance.

 

Developing the habit of preparing your clothing in advance for everything you do will help cut down on anxiety and encourage better daily cleaning and organizational habits regarding your clothing and bedroom. Plus, you’re going to look and feel better each day at the office, even if your office is at home.

 

Planning all your clothing choices in advance will do more for you than you may think, in addition to looking more fashionable due to choosing clothing based on what you’re going to do, the weather, and other factors instead of being in a rush – you’re going to get these benefits too.

 

  • You’ll Feel Less Stressed Out – When you’re not rushing around trying to match things, you’re so much less likely to suffer from anxiety about getting dressed. If you have thought it out and picked something that makes you feel good, you’re going to have a better day.

 

  • You Will No Longer Have Outfit Regrets – You know as well as I do that if you don’t plan your clothing choices, things go wrong. You don’t have the right undergarments for that thing, so you can’t wear it, or sadly, you did and saw the pictures later and regretted it. When you plan in advance, you know the outfit looks great and makes you feel great, or you don’t even want to own it anymore.

 

  • You’ll Save Time – When you are scheduling time to plan the outfits you are going to wear, you will actually spend less time doing it. The main reason is that you’ll cut down on the tornado effect of rushing around tossing things on the floor or bed that you choose not to wear and then having to clean that up at some point.

 

  • You’ll Get More Wear from What You Own – When you aren’t planning your outfits, you end up wasting. But something amazing happens when you start planning – you start wearing more of what you own and buying things you will wear. It’s a win-win side effect all the way around.

 

  • You’ll Appear More Professional – When you have planned an outfit, you’ll also take the time to get the cat fur off your coat, shine up your boots, and pick things that look good on your body for the purposes you need them.

 

  • You’ll Feel Better About Yourself – If you look like an unkempt person all the time, even if you say you don’t care what you look like, you’ll feel bad about yourself. You don’t have to wear makeup or business suits but planning a look and getting cleaned up each day feels good.

 

The best way to accomplish this is first to get your wardrobe to make sense to you. Most people like to change out their closets seasonally, and some people have good luck organizing their closets by style and color or season and color or type and color. How you organize it will depend on your own needs, space, and lifestyle.

 

Then, to prepare an outfit, check your calendar for tomorrow to find out what you’re going to do that day and check the weather conditions you’ll need to be prepared for to maintain your comfort and safety. Note what type of self-care you need to be comfortable in the outfit, including hair styles, accessories, footwear, and so forth, so that you aren’t caught off guard as you get ready in the morning.

 

Organize your Environment for Success!