Running a business can be a rewarding experience if you relish the opportunity to put your entrepreneurial skills to good use. But a lot of hard work goes into building a good company.
While it’s virtually impossible to have zero overhead, there are some free and inexpensive business resources that you can take advantage of. Following is a list of 10 such free or low-cost business resources:
Conference Calls
Conference calls are a very effective way of keeping in touch with staff especially for businesses that have small offices in multiple locations. There are services such as FreeConferenceCall where you can conduct conference calls for free — anytime and anywhere. All you have to do is sign up for an account, invite all callers and distribute the dial-in information, and then initiate the call.
Website
In today’s digital age, you definitely need an online presence if you want to successfully run a business. With websites such as Wix or Webs, you can create a professional website quite easily and at no cost. The website is fairly easy to set up and is customizable for a large number of products and services. In addition, there are other specific services also available through these sites at minimal costs such as domain registration, hosting etc. In addition, there are also several public domain image websites that provide images that are free to be used by almost everyone for both personal and commercial purposes
Project Management
Part of running a successful business is keeping track of deliverables. Doing so will help you keep your clients happy and it will enable you and your team to stay on track. One free tool is Trello, which is a free, flexible and visual way to organize anything with anyone and open up discussions on relevant topics and tasks.
Social Media
If you aren’t using social media to promote your business, you’re not doing enough. Fortunately, you can use a tool like Hootsuite which allows you to post to all of your various social media accounts from a single place. When you go to the site, you can choose a free account. You can, of course, scale up to a paid account for even more functionality but the basic services are absolutely free.
Credit Card Reader
If you want a convenient way to allow customers to pay for products and services, you will need a credit card reader. With Square, you can use your smartphone of choice to accept credit cards. In addition, most websites now offer the option of setting up online payment methods through PayPal.
Email Marketing
You can use MailChimp for no cost if you have 2,000 or fewer subscribers and if you send out 12,000 or fewer emails. If you think email marketing is an effective way to keep in touch with customers, an email marketing type program like MailChimp is the way to go.
Alerts
If you want to keep on top of keywords used across the World Wide Web, then Google Alerts is the way to go. It’s free, and you can use it to get daily or weekly digests focusing on the keywords you’re interested in.
Free Tweets
Sites like Twitter are great for marketing purposes if used the right way. But it can take quite a bit of work to send out tweets and to build up a following. Fortunately, there are tools such as Like4Like.Org that you can use to get free Twitter followers, retweets and favorites.
Legal Advice
Retaining a lawyer can be quite expensive. But a site like FreeAdvice.com can help you get the information you need at no cost. Specifically, you can go to the Ask a Lawyer section of the site and ask your questions.
Free Training
HubSpot Academy is a no-cost certification program that provides courses in things like landing pages and website optimization — the kind of skills you need in today’s digital age if you want to expand your business.
The above list shows that there are plenty of free business resources that you can take advantage of. From website creation to building e-commerce enabled platforms, the right tools at the right price can offer your business significant opportunities.
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