I wanted to share with you some tools I've come to use regularly. These tools are great time-savers for working online. All are free, some with upgrades for a fee.

Google Reader

Do you have blogs or news streams that you like to follow on a regular basis? Do you bookmark those pages and then browse down through all your bookmarks to find the site? Here's an easier way: Google Reader.

You provide Google Reader with the url of the website ("subscribe"). Google reader checks the site frequently for new content. It then provides a one-line title and the first line of text for each article it finds on that page without you having to go to the website. If it looks interesting, click on the title and read the rest of the article. Google Reader also keeps track of what you've read. There are a few other nice features as well. Every site you like to follow on one screen!

Evernote

As I came across interesting articles or quotes or diagrams or pictures on the web, I was trying to keep track of these in Word or Notepad files, appropriately named so I could find them again.

Evernote makes this process a whole lot easier by keeping all the notes in one place, but organized and easily searchable. You give each of your notes a title and you can keep adding to them, or start a new, unrelated note. You can assign tags to your notes, then find all notes with the same tag or tags to view all related information. You can even organize your notes into notebooks, so that you could have a personal notebook and a business notebook, for example. Very cool!

HootSuite

This web application allows you to post to all your social media sites from one screen! They currently support Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Foursquare, mixi, and Ping.fm, and continue to add support for other social media sites. You can also plug in any RSS feeds you follow. HootSuite also shows any comments or feedback in your network.

I currently use the free version which is still adequate. It's such a time savings to log into one site and be able to post to my social media network without logging into each site individually.

These applications come up everyday for me along with a browser, Outlook for email, and either Pandora or iTunes for music. I'm all set for a productive day.

Do you have a Facebook business page yet? How's that working for you? LinkedIn? Twitter?

Here's an interesting article I just read: "6 Stages of Social Media for SMBs (and everyone else)". Yeh, I'm going through those stages. How 'bout you?

Contact us if you need some assistance. 

When do you take time to look back on the past year of business and set goals and make plans for the upcoming year?

Next newsletter I'll share feedback and pose some thoughts about the process of evaluation and reflection and setting new goals.