Many of times, as small business owners we are consistently challenged by the limits of time we have. Especially for start ups that doesn’t have a huge team behind to support the whole business process, it’s very difficult for them to find a balance between time spend on unproductive yet important tasks against time spent on work that yield results. So for start ups its very important to find the right tools to work with and to increase work efficiency and shorten time spent on administrative or operational tasks. So I have complied a list of really useful tools that could save you lots of time and improve on your work efficiency.

Trello is a great tool for organizing and planning of your schedule. The great thing about Trello is that information and schedules created are live shared among your office members. Meaning any updates in the schedule, your members will be able to see the those changes and updates. Trello also allows freedom of categorizing your dashboard to fit different business. The dashboard is interactive enough for you to just drag and drop notes, pictures, post, video etc. So overall really great tool for company level organizing.

Clear is for mac, iphone or ipad. It relatively easy and simple to use. just touch to create your important notes and you can delete, edit or create new entry at any time any where.

Evernote is a writing platform where you can sync all your written notes, articles from any where. You can use it on your phone, laptop or tablet. You can also snap pictures with your mobile phone and sync it directly to your notes. Evernote quick sync allows you to access your notes later on your mobile without any internet connection. So if you are always travelling, be sure to try out Evernote. Evernote also comes with many apps like Evernote Skitch, clearly and many more.

WriteorDie is an really interesting tool that aims to increase productivity by being able to set certain criteria such as maximizing the app to full-screen or disable save function until work is fully completed. The app also have a consequence level where you can set the severity of the punishment if you cant finish within the time limit. So challenge yourself to end your procrastination by using this tool. It works really well.

If you haven’t been using Topsy yet, then you better get started now. Topsy in my opinion is one of the best sites to do research on any niche. In Topsy, you are able to use it’s search query with any of your keywords to find out which are the topics and trends that are mostly shared among people within your niche. From there you will be able to identify which topics are more popular to give you great ideas for your researching. They also have social analytics where you can identify trends by comparing keywords or mentions or even websites. Be sure to check Topsy out if you haven’t already done so.

Reddit is another really good site to get innovative ideas for your research. You may have already been using it for some time, but there’s more to Reddit than just a social media platform. One advantage of Reddit is that it also allows you to do a search query on any keywords within your niche. So go ahead and try it, try searching for a keyword related to your niche and on the results page, you will see many sub-reddits and a long list of results. Then organize the results by “Top” and set date to “all-time”, the results will then be sort to the highest voted post appearing on top. Now you can look through the list and take down anything that catches your attention. Keep and eye on sub-reddits too as you can find niche communities related to your topic.

These 2 are sites that provides good research ideas on trending concepts. especially buzzfeed where you can get really bizarre ideas that may conceptualize to become viral. Trendhunter on the other hand picks up all sorts of trending concepts. Make sure to try both.

Google alerts are a good way to get latest information on your niche keywords. you can schedule any time for Google to send you results base your niche keywords and they will send you an email with the latest updates base on those keywords.

Nowadays, info-graphics have become a popular way to communicate. Just like the saying “picture speaks a thousand words”, its much easier to illustrate ideas and concepts through info-graphics. However creating one may take up a lot of your time without the right tools. So over here, there are 2 online tools that allows you to create your info-graphics easily. Both Piktochart and Prezi utilize the usuage of ready made templates where you can just pick one that fits your niche and start adding in your content.

Picmonkey and Lunapic are online sites that allows you to edit and enhance your pictures photos etc. They are something similar to Photoshop but have ready made presets for you to use on your pictures.

Evernote Skitch is an Evernote app that allows marking important parts of your pictures with annotations and markups. Evernote allows uploading of pictures taken from your mobile phone and this app works perfectly to compliment that function. So after photo is taken you can use Evernote Skitch to add arrows or draw circles to mark out important areas in the pictures.

Buffer is a “Must Use” Sharing tool. This will be one of the best tools for sharing which you won’t regret using. Buffer allows you to share any page you see in your browser’s screen. Apart from that, you can share information across all major social media platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google +. Buffer also have their own scheduler that allows automated post to your social media platform. Overall Buffer can be used for both personal or business level as they can post not only on profiles but also company pages and group pages.

Hootsuite is a multi-social media platform that allows you to connect all your social media platforms to one dashboard to track all feeds and post to all your profiles or business pages. Its a little similar to Buffer but able to support a few more other social media platforms.

Do you know that you can actually automate a lot of your admin tasks? Some task like keeping track of your followers in Twitter or adding your google contacts into your autoresponder etc, all these administrative tasks can be automated by using Zapier or IFTTT to connect channels together. You can create automation such as a trigger that takes place upon entering a new contact into your Google Contacts, it will then automatically be added to your Mailchimp or Aweber autoresponder list. Both are really great tools to automate process so do try them out.

With so many social media platforms nowadays, tracking all of them can be really time consuming. Social Crawlytics allows you to track most social platforms on one channel. It will show you how many shares you have got for your articles.

Followerwonk is only for heavy twitter users. Its a really great tool for socializing and networking as you will be able to track who is following who thus able to identify your audience.

Ahrefs and OpenSiteExplorer are free tools to track website’s backlinks for SEO. Ahrefs is also able to track your anchor text distribution while OpenSiteExplorer provides metrics such as domain and page authority.

To sum up, for small business start-ups or online businesses such tools are definitely essential to building a strong business foundation. So go ahead and start creating your own business process with these tools.