Asana
Named after the Sanskrit word meaning yoga pose, Asana lives up to its etymological heritage by taking away the stress, burden and clumsiness of old-fashioned email messaging. You may have found that when you try to organise a team over email, as everyone starts responding and discussion begins, things become very difficult and ungainly to follow. Asana takes the idea of emailing and puts it under a rolling pin.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNzZrnuqLBM&list=UU2BoogM0AqwOJyoSp1S4ClQ&index=7]
You can set goals and tasks that need to be completed, assign your people to specific jobs and talk directly to a single person, everyone involved in a task, or everyone in general. All chatting is done via a simple chat-log style system where everyone is able to see what everyone else is working on. This transparency and simplicity allows all your employees to be on the same page and therefore able to work together much more efficiently.
Asana is especially interesting because as of January this year, their Android App was released which frees you from the shackles of a computer all together.
Plus as an added incentive to check it out, Asana is free for small groups of up to 15 people.
Harvest
So now you’re communicating well, how do you make sure that your time is being managed properly?
This is where Harvest comes in.
Harvest allows you to track your time spent on the job – wherever you are thanks to its mobile-friendly nature – and automatically calculate your billing along the way. It’s simple to set up client lists, employees, billing amounts and then let the application do all the hard work for you while you spend more time actually working.
At the end of the day (or whenever you feel like it thanks to its long-term recording) you can look back over the hours worked by your team and see what’s being prioritised and what isn’t. You can easily collate reports that give concise information as to how many hours you’ve worked, how many of those hours are billable and to whom as well as for how much.
For those of you who are on the go you are also able to, quite conveniently, record expenses and attach copies of receipts and track paid invoices, keeping all your billing information in one easy place.
SEO tool: Moz Pro
Ok. You’re talking with your team and staying on time. All that’s left now is the actual work! But work’s no good if no-one knows that you’re doing it. A website is, as we’ve strongly hinted before, crucial to helping you get ahead. So, it’s a good idea to make sure that your website is doing its job. We’ve previously talked about some free tools that can help you test the effectiveness of your website, but Moz Pro is another beast entirely. The free tools tend to focus on a single aspect of a website, it’s load speed or its social media reach for example.
Moz Pro however, is pretty much a one-stop shop. Everything you could possibly need to know about your website is here.
It analyses your SEO, ranking, traffic, measure marketing performance, see where you’re visited from, growth, keywords that lead to you and issues that affect your performance in the popularity game.
Information is key to making the best of your website, and Moz Pro gives you all that and more. It’s in-depth auditing of your site gives you the information you need in order to see what’s working in your site and marketing campaign, and gives you advice and insight into what isn’t.
Social Media Tool: Schedulegram
Everything’s going according to plan. All that you need to do now is start becoming active and engaging with your audience on their level with social media. As dedicated as you may be though, you still have to a life to live. So how can you be active without having to be constantly online? Schedugram is the answer.
In addition to having a clever URL, Schedugram is also clever in that it allows you to post to Instagram with incredible flexibility. You can upload images or video to be posted before you need to, and apply any cropping or filters needed. You can then schedule your posts to take place whenever you want. Mark a photo to be posted in a few hours and then sit back and relax and let the application take care of the timing for you. If you have multiple Instagram accounts you can access each from within the program; there is no need to log in and out for each account. And, if you aren’t the only one on the team who posts, you can share access with multiple users to divide the work-load, and keep track of who posts what.
If you want to make your business more visual through Instagram, Schedugram is a great tool to have by your side to give you that fine-tuned and simple control to schedule your post so you won’t have to mention them in the future.
These are four great tools to help you improve your company and employee efficiency in critical areas of your business. Communication and collaboration: sorted; timekeeping and expense tracking: handled; web design testing and SEO monitoring: done; customer interaction and social media connectivity: nailed. These are some of our favourite tools, but there are other systems and applications out there to help give you that streamlined edge that lets you focus more on what you do rather than how you do it. Explore and try what you find until you land on something that works well for your business objectives.
