Technology has been my greatest ally for running my business.  I often say that if it were not for technology, I am not sure that I would have a business.  Over the past few years, we have seen a rise in tech start-ups; that are creating a slew of online applications, mobile apps, and services that are a great benefit to small businesses.  Many of them offer free trials or stripped down services for free.  I have compiled a list of five free tools and services that are beneficial.

Dropbox

“Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer.” – from the Dropbox website

Dropbox is one of my favorite and most valuable tools that I use for my own business.  I have been using Dropbox for about three years or so.  I started off with their free 2 GB of storage plan that they were offering at that time.   I used it to store photos and music to save space on my computer.  With time, I found myself incorporating it more and more into my business.  I have a paid plan now, because I use it to store all of my client files and as a graphic designer, my files can get to be pretty large.

Dropbox makes it easy for me to share and receive large files with clients.  I can send them a link to download a large file from my Dropbox and I can setup and share folders with them to place large files like images in.  This takes the place of sending 10 emails with one attachment.  Another benefit is that because it is cloud storage, I can access my files from anywhere, on any computer and on any mobile device.  This is great for meetings and cuts down on the number of things I need to bring to a meeting or presentation.  Last year, my computer died and if my files had been stored on my computer, I would have been in trouble.  Instead, I borrowed a loaner computer while mine was being fixed, downloaded Dropbox and Voila!  I had instant access to all of my files again.

Dropbox still offers a free plan that comes with GB of space.  There are also several different opportunities to earn more free space.  You can earn an additional 125 MB for doing each of the following:  giving them 120 characters worth of feedback, tweeting that feedback, connecting your Twitter account, and connecting your Facebook account.  You can also earn up to 32 GB of space for each person that signs up for an account from your referral link (1 GB per person).  Additionally, the person that signs up from your referral link will gain an additional 500 MB of space so it benefits both people.

LastPass

“LastPass is a password manager that makes web browsing easier and more secure.” –from the LastPass website

Do you ever get frustrated with trying to remember your password combination for all of the sites that you visit?  Well, that is where LastPass swoops in to save the day.  With LastPass, you all of your passwords are saved in one place locally on your computer and they are encrypted.  To log into sites online, all that you need is a mouse click.  I am pretty new to this service myself, but everyone that has referred this service to me, loves it.

SlideShare

“SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations.  With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world.  Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.” – from the SlideShare website

SlideShare is a great way to put your content in front of a larger audience.  You can create informative presentations to share virally or you can use it as a tool to virtually send presentations to prospects. SlideShare offers additional paid plans that allow you to upload content that is larger in size, and comes with additional features, but it is free to sign-up and use.

Join.Me

“join.me combines instant screen sharing and powerful meeting tools in an app that anyone can use to present, train, demo or concept. join.me is designed to be intuitive and accessible, providing features that you’ll use every day for everything from show-and-tell to formal presentations.” – from the join.me website

I have been involved in several virtual meetings online that utilized this service and I believe it is a great presentation and collaboration tool for meeting with groups in different geographic locations.  Like most services listed on this page, join.me has paid plans that offer more functionality, but some of the meetings I was involved in were using the free basic plan.  I was able to join in on a conference call for the audio portion and watch the presentation and examples through the join.me link that was provided for the meeting.  There is also a chat functionality that can be used as well if you need to mute your phone.

HootSuite

“The leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks.” – from the HootSuite website

Managing social media profiles can be tedious and using a social media dashboard can help take away some of the headache in managing your social media profiles in-house. HootSuite has a great free plan to help you get organized, schedule postings and manage all of your social media networks in one place!

Take a few or all of these services for a spin see if you are able to add value to your business with them.  After all, what have you got to lose?  They are free!

 

This article does contain an affiliate link for the Dropbox service.  If you click the Dropbox link and sign up, we will both receive extra storage space.