In this article I will introduce you to some great online services you can use to manage your business or interact with customers, and best of all they are completely free.
These are all online service I have used myself and can really recommend.
1. Canva
If you ever need to create a quick and professional looking image, or even a complete flyer design this site is great. They have subscription options that will allow you build your complete brand identity, but unless you are using the site daily, the free version should do nicely. Just head over to https://www.canva.com/.
The design types on Canva are quite extensive. You can create letterheads, invoices, Youtube tumbnails, Instagram posts, posters, presentation intro pages, infographics, brochures, book covers, certificates, menus, lesson plans just to name a few! The options and styles are vast and the variety of templates seemingly endless – they even have video templates with text and graphic overlays.
Check out the comparison of subscriptions here.
Canva has a lot of options and features, but the site is still simple to navigate and use. Look for an in depth review soon.
2. Slack
If you have other members on your team, Slack is a great tool for communication. It is basically chat on steroids, allowing you to create channels and collaborate efficiently. It can completely replace email in your business for interna communication. It also has a lot of open channels – that are basically forums to reach out to people in your industry.
The free version keeps up to 10 000 messages in history, if you require more and love clinging to the past they have a paid version as well. Check it out on www.slack.com and https://slack.com/intl/en-za/pricing/paid-vs-free for paid vs free comparison.
3. Asana
Whether you are working in a team or going solo, Asana is great for organizing projects, tasks and priorities. You can create tasks, add dependent tasks, assign them to people in your team, and track the progress of each. You can create boards, with customizable sections for your tasks. For example create a Backlog section with all your tasks that still need to be done, and a Current Week section for the tasks you are working on this week. Simply drag a task from backlog to current week and you have a clear view of what you need to achieve this week. It even supports basic scripting to automate actions based on certain events taken on a task.
It is great to create a one liner objective now, and as its due date gets closer break it down into manageable sub tasks that are less daunting and easier to tackle. This makes sure you never lose sight of the big picture. https://asana.com/.
4. Tara
New kid on the block – https://tara.ai/ – is a competitor to Asana for project management using SCRUM methodology. A bit simpler and more user friendly UI but still great for managing your projects. It also has direct integration with https://github.com/ if you are managing a software project.
5. Clockify
I actually discovered Clockify through the Asana plugin portal, as it can integrate to track time on your Tasks in Asana, but it works great as a standalone time tracker as well, and has a smart phone app. So if you are working for an hourly rate – or just want to track your time spent on a project – this is a great tool for the job whether you are at the office or on the road.
6. Telegram
Telegram beats Whatsapp hands down as far as features and expandability is concerned. It supports larger groups, channels to publish content to your followers, and usernames to allow customers to talk to you without knowing your phone number.
Telegram is built around bots. Want to send an animated emoji – use stickerbot by typing @sticker, want to send a gif – use gif bot by typing @gif. It also has a web app you can use on your desktop, and you can run the same profile on multiple devices.
One thing that sets Telegram apart from the competition is channels. Channels allow you to post public messages to all your followers. It also gives you view counters, polls and the ability to link a discussion group to the channel. The contents of public channels can be seen on the Web without a Telegram account and are indexed by search engines – think about that for a minute. This means you can actually create rich content with polls, videos, images and text that will show up on google searches and drive customers to your channel and content – without needing any web hosting. It has special controls for podcasts, and you can send large files of any type and uncompressed images in full resolution – useful for content like infographics. You can also set your channels as private and invite only – for example when you have a subscription service. Read more on https://telegram.org/tour/channels, go get it on https://telegram.org/ and let me know how it changed you life on https://t.me/bronkode