THE TOP 5 BEST APPS FOR SMALL BUSINESS -
WHY YOU SHOULD BE USING THEM NOW
Is Your iphone Groaning Under The Weight Of All Your Apps?
We’ve noticed our iPhones are always full, no matter how many times we move our photos and videos over to our computers, We’re constantly running at 95% capacity. Upon further investigation we realised this is because we have so many apps… and we’ve really tried to do a little cutting back …. but found it very difficult.
There are some of the best apps that we all use every day without fail, some apps we use on a weekly basis and some we only use a few times a year (such as travel apps). But those apps that we all use infrequently are absolutely essential at the time we need them, and it’s a real pain if you’ve deleted them off your phone the day before you travel.
We saw this great article on the fastcompany website discussing 10 great apps that entrepreneurs can’t live without, and thought we would list our favourite small business apps.
1) Dragon Dictate
Bar none this is the most useful application on our iPhones (and my computer for that matter as I am a terrible typist). Some people are extremely good at typing fast with a blackberry or even an iPhone (which is pretty hard), but we’ve always thought.. who needs to type? when there is an unbelievably accurate dictation app like this one around. If you remember to send an e-mail while you're walking the dog you don’t even have to take your gloves off.
2) Private Internet Access
This is the iPhone app linked to the great VPN service “private Internet access”. Security vulnerabilities among iOS devices when accessing public Wi-Fi can make it surprisingly easy to hack into your iPhone. So for all you people out there having meetings in Starbucks or ‘hot desking’ in Costa coffee, this is now considered an essential measure for any mobile worker. It’s fast, it’s secure, and it works.
3) Things
In our view the best daily task app out there – it syncs across all our computers in the office (and at home) through the cloud and has completely eliminated the confusion as to which device was most up-to-date with all our to-do lists across the company. It works brilliantly on the phone as well as the PC
4) Flipboard
This is the one place where we do all our industry reading, previously we had to go to three or four separate apps containing the content we wanted (Google reader, Mashable, Summly) but Flipboard will pull in all your feeds and present them in a much easier to read fashion than many other ones out there. It looks fantastic and it works very well.
5) FreshBooks
Until we ran our business FlycastMedia, we didn’t realise how many different receipts we all generated on a daily basis, rail tickets, plane tickets and client lunches etc
There is nothing worse than giving your accountant a box full of old receipts before tax deadline, it will cost you more money because it makes his life harder and sends everybody's stress level through the roof.
It’s pretty cool to take a picture of the receipt for your train ticket from your seat knowing it is uploaded to your system and logged for good. There are other more integrated apps such as Xero-but this is the one that suits our needs the best.
Continuing on, here's an additional list of popular small business apps we put together for improving productivity, management, and communication in your business.
You may also be interested in a FREE Websites List for improving local SEO and two Informative Marketing Guides on Social media and Content marketing our team put together which cover basic and advanced tips and strategies.
Shane McEvoy is a seasoned SEO and inbound marketing expert with nearly 30 years of experience in advertising. He established Flycast Media, a specialist B2B digital agency, and is a published author of two well-received guides while contributing to several industry publications - read his complete profile here.
