by Neil Patel on March 2, 2010
Running a small business isn’t easy! It’s hard to keep up with general administration tasks, stay on top of your finances, and even measure your marketing efforts. And lets face it, that’s just starching the surface… there’s a lot more that you have to do every day.
Luckily enough there are some useful web applications that not only will make your life easier, but they will also help you grow your business.
Simplify your daily life
From checking your email to dealing with employees, there are some things that you just have to do everyday. But by using applications such as Liquid Planner you’ll be able to do these things in less time so that you can focus on growing your company.
Google Calendar – keeping track of your daily meetings doesn’t have to be hard. Not only can you track your daily meetings, but you can share and collaborate your calendar with other co-workers.
Gmail – emails can pile up quickly, but with Gmail you can set filters so you don’t have to read useless emails. You can automatically filter messages that aren’t too important so that they won’t clog up your inbox.
Campfire – communication is an important factor to your company’s success. Through campfire you can communicate with everyone in one place and more importantly keep track of the conversation.
Liquid Planner – I can’t stress how important it is to get projects done on time. Liquid Planner will not only help you monitor your projects, but it will calculate the probability of you completing them on time.
Wufoo – whether it is registration forms or contact requests, Wufoo lets you create and manage forms with ease. The best part about Wufoo is that you don’t have to be technical to use it. [click to continue…]
by Neil Patel on February 25, 2010
I have been blogging on Quick Sprout for around 3 years now and the blog has been through 4 different designs. At first I redesigned the blog to have a better aesthetic look, but then I started to redesign it based on user feedback.
Over the course of 4 different designs, here are some things that I learned:
Categories
I tried placing each blog post in categories to make it easier for you to read older posts, but that didn’t work. You didn’t seem to click on categories as it takes too much work for you to get to the older blog posts.
When I removed the list of categories in my sidebar during the second design, a few people complained, but the majority of you didn’t mind.
My assumption on why categories don’t work well is because people have to work hard to find the “good” blog posts. [click to continue…]
by Neil Patel on February 24, 2010
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how I would never live in a rich neighborhood. Funny enough, when I wrote it a few of you called me out because you knew that I own a place in the Hyatt hotel.
Around a year ago, I moved to Seattle from Orange County California because they have a better entrepreneur community and no state income tax. And because I don’t believe in paying rent, I naturally bought a place once I found the right deal.
So, here is my place… [click to continue…]
by Neil Patel on February 22, 2010
It’s too often that you hear about successful entrepreneurs creating multi-million and billion dollar companies. The reason this is bad is because no one really talks about all of the companies that didn’t do well, so you’re left with a false hope that you too can create the next big company.
According to the Small Business Administration, only 44% of new businesses last more than 4 years. In addition to that 60% of businesses are either losing money or are breaking even.
So lets face it, neither you nor I are going to create the next big company. Due to this I asked 10 successful entrepreneurs who have all created companies that are worth at least 50 million dollars, what their biggest business mistake was.
So even if you aren’t going to create the next multi-million dollar company, it doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the mistakes successful entrepreneurs have made.
Here are the mistakes you need to avoid if you want to increase your odds of succeeding: [click to continue…]
by Neil Patel on February 18, 2010
As you already know the U.S. tax system is complicated. So complicated that in 1913 the tax code was 400 pages and today it’s 70,320 pages long. But instead of me rambling on for hours, I thought it would be fun to explain the complexity of the U.S. tax system in a visual format. [click to continue…]
