Sunday, March 25, 2012

The 10 Best Digital Tools for Entrepreneurs in 2012


As the global economy writhes and rattles, entrepreneurship has ever more clearly emerged as the solution to economic recovery. Young startups not only create nearly two thirds of America’s new jobs, they also bring forth innovation that often revolutionizes humanity and provides widespread prosperity. The best part is, ease in creating businesses has increased dramatically due in large part to apps and sites that help entrepreneurs.
Here are 10 of the best digital tools to help you launch and grow your startup:
1) Weebly
Using a simplified drag and drop engine, Weebly makes it possible to create a content rich website in minutes, with loads of features. The best part: it’s completely free. Created in 2006, Weebly has become a go-to for startups.
2) Legal Zoom
Founded by a team of legal and tech experts, Legal Zoom provides users with legal documents without the lawyers. In doing so, they’ve made it cheap and quick to get those legal papers you need for your business.
3) Rock the Post
Rock the Post is a social networking platform for entrepreneurs to fund and swap resources. The free site is a great tool for entrepreneurs to leverage their networks and reach new ones, to fill the missing pieces of their projects. With thousands of users and many success cases, Rock the Post is emerging as one of the best crowdfunding sites for entrepreneurs.
4) Square
Square, a creation of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, turns your smartphone or tablet into a credit card reader. For 2.75% of every transaction, you have the ability to accept credit card payments for your business. No card reader, no credit check, more profit.
5) Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to manage the social media madness by cross platform message scheduling and extensive data tracking. Seamless analytics across every platform ensures less time managing and more time growing your business.
6) Expensify

To reduce the burden of managing your business’ expenses, Expensify has provided a range of apps to monitor, track, and regulate every dollar spent. The result means more security and less hassle to manage your company wallet.
7) Asana
Asana, the brainchild of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is a project management program that leverages the full capacity of organizational technology so that you can be connected with your team anytime, anywhere, and in an organized way. This means less phone tag, more collaboration. And it’s free!
8) Mailchimp
Mailchimp, started in 2001, seeks to make it simple to manage even the largest of newsletter lists, which is a great tool to stay connected with customers. Besides providing extensive tracking data, the service is free for up to 2,000 subscribers.
9) Docstoc
Co-founders Alon Shwartz and Jason Nazar created Docstoc to be the repository for business documents. Ease of access for transferring large documents and unparalleled choice of templates means great business documents delivered fast, for cheap.
10) Highrise
Highrise is a user-friendly CRM software that allows you to share contacts, assign tasks and track history of correspondence. Some great features include the ability to update accounts via email and assign permissioned access. The product is free for one user, and if you need multiple accounts, it is reasonably priced.

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