Free and Affordable Technologies Make Running Your Business Easy

SMB owners find themselves tasked with quickly becoming business operations and strategic executives. While your talent might be sewing children’s clothes, interior design or photography, you also have to balance the check book, hire the staff, run the payroll and market the business. Today’s Internet-based technologies can help.

If you are a small business owner or individual professional, there are many options for making the operations of the business easier so you can concentrate on the core business – the reason you started the company in the first place.

Financial Management
There are many options for an online payroll service, including Intuit’s QuickBooks Online and ADP EasyNet. I use both at my business for different elements of financial management and payroll. We previously compiled payroll manually and then called the information in to our payroll service provider. Now we just go online and simply enter the hours. The calculations take place automatically so that we now finish payroll in 10 minutes rather than the hour it previously took.

Affordable Communication
Many tools help enable virtual communication with customers, prospects, employees or other constituents. Save on travel costs and use GoToMeeting for online presentations. Utilize Sosius or other online collaboration tools for keeping track of projects and shared calendars. The product is free. Rafe Needleman talks more about Sosius on Webware. And of course a plethora of Google business solutions continue to make life easier and more productive for any business.

Marketing
For marketing, often times nothing is better than an email newsletter that can reflect your brand and help you to tout successes, promote specials or simply look larger than life. Constant Contact offers a very easy-to-use email marketing service that you can try free for 60 days! Their templates make it easy to design a newsletter very quickly – from restaurant owners to franchisees, religious organizations to non profits, email marketing is one of the fastest, easiest and most affordable ways to elevate your market presence and connect with your customers.

You have a website, right? Conduit toolbars are a wonderful tool for improving customer retention, building online communities and persistently engaging users via their browser. Conduit's innovative search monetization model, with Google as the search partner, allows the service to be completely free and without adware, malware and spyware. You can join major brands such as Major League Baseball, Fox Carolina TV, TechCrunch and other small and medium organizations in 112 countries around the globe by building a community toolbar in seconds.

If you have a blog, you can offset some of the publishing costs with Tumri. Tumri offers a way for you to monetize your blog with an embeddable widget. The widget is loaded with customizable products, stores and brands of your choosing. As your visitors click on and buy those products, you get to share in the revenue. The best part is you have the discretion to choose the brands and products that you’d like to be associated with, rather than blindly going with Google AdSense, or the like, which gives you no choice whatsoever.

Other great marketing tools are for promoting your events, products or news are the numerous social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace – where you can ask questions of other entrepreneurs, post answers as an authoritative expert, or simply share information and expand your network.

Sales
SalesGenius is an incredibly easy-to-use, online sales tool that enables you to learn more about your prospects so you can better sell to them. Used intelligently, you can send email communications to prospects and view where they visit on your website – it’s like TiVo for their website visit. This enables you to understand several elements: what areas of your website are of interest, how long prospects visit, what they read and what products or services they are interested in so you can cater your follow up sales pitch and increase your chances of closing the sale.