When you start a new website, whether in the form of a personal blog or a company website, there are quite a few things to setup before things start rolling out as intended and desired. This can be overwhelming and time consuming. So, here are 6 productivity tools that you should implement in your workflow early on and can provide some relief as well as help you speed up things quite significantly.
Evernote
The website is up, the hustle has just started. You work using your smartphone in the tube while commuting or your tablet in the taxi while posh-commuting, you work on your desktop at home on a Sunday morning or on your laptop on the kitchen table while cooking or eating. You work on bed before sleeping, you work in the toilet or in any other place imaginable.
Evernote is a brilliant tool that helps you work seamlessly across different devices and unforeseeable situations. The obvious reason is because you can synchronize your content and pick it up whenever you want from any kind of device and continue from the point you had left it. But it is not only that. The fact that you can save pretty much any kind of content you want – including emails, websites or photos you just take using your phone – with just one click in one place is really handy. In addition to that, the notebooks as well as the tags provide great assistance in keeping everything clean and tidy and give you the chance to organize your material in several layers of hierarchy in the first place without having to think of it too much. Plus, it is a very user-friendly and pleasant environment to work.
Google Docs
Google Docs used to be my preferred word editor platform till Evernote broke into my life. It is still a very good option if you like doing things old-school. But not only. I am still using it for all my excel spreadsheets. And some of the presets – like resume, letter and brochure – might come handy to some of you.
Being a popular Google product it is not going anywhere anytime soon and you should expect its constant development. The Google Docs mobile app is one of them – and one I really like and appreciate.
Canva
Canva is a wonderful web application, especially if you have no design background. It gives you a wide range of options and presets to create pretty much any kind of still visual content and look professional. You can create images for your website or support visual material for your blog post, inforgraphics – I have actually created this infographic on Canva, social media posts that come by default in the right aspect ratio for each respective platform and literally everything else you might desire.
No graphic design skills required. It does the trick for you! But even if you are an experienced designer, it might help you pull certain tasks a bit quicker.
Feedly
Apart from creating written or visual content for your own website, once you are online you should start having a close look on what others in your industry are doing and definitely staying up to date with recent developments – meaning you need to keep an eye on several other websites. Feedly is an e-reader and has pretty much become my electronic customized newspaper. You assign the websites that you want to keep a close look at and Feedly is updated live with their latest posts feed.
Everything in one place without having to individually visit every different page – which is both a waste of time and highly distractive. And I bet that the time when you were bookmarking favourite pages has been long gone. If not, well… it is never too late!
Buffer
You have put a lot of work to prepare your website and get it online and you keep producing support material. But everything would be pointless unless you share it. And Buffer resolves a lot of the hassle associated with sharing your content on social media networks. And it does that in several ways.
You have everything in one place, meaning that you don’t have to login separately to your social media accounts but you can prepare all your posts for different platforms inside Buffer – the free version allows you to have up to three different accounts connected, which are sufficient at least for the beginning.
But the most important option, at least for me, is pre-scheduling your posts. For two reasons. One, it saves you a lot of time. You can spend a few minutes and schedule all your social media posts for the day at once instead of keep returning to them throughout the day. Two, it allows you to post at your preferred times even if you are not available – due to no internet access while traveling, important meetings or even sleeping if you happen to be in a different timezone than the audience you are targeting. And post timing in social media does matter.
Last but not least, even the free version provides some basic analytics. For example, in Twitter in accumulates the potential reach of your posts by adding up the audiences of the people who re-tweet your content and counts the clicks that each post received. All very useful information to start getting some measures on how your content converts.
Google Analytics
This probably seems too profound. But the heart-breaking truth is that there are a lot of people out there running websites without using Google Analytics or any analytics at all! And I cannot stretch enough how important analytics are. Everything you do must be driven by analytics. Everything! This is how you really measure even things as simple as if your posts that contain an image have a higher conversion rate that the ones that don’t.
After you make sure that you have setup everything correctly and Google Analytics do track your traffic, start monitoring regularly. Keep an eye on where your visitors come from and create filters to exclude the spam referrals that will start showing up sooner or later. And then start making sense of your audience’s demographics and behaviour. And as you get the hang of it, you will gradually dive deeper into more sophisticated marketing analysis and consequently advanced strategies.
Even if you happen to know most of the tools above, I hope there were still a couple of things to take away and be of assistance. On the other hand, if all these sound new to you then, trust me, you need to implement them in your workflow immediately. And you will soon realize how big a favour you made to yourself!
Thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on what you just read, either good or bad ones, I would appreciate it if you leave a comment below and let me know. Feedback is invaluable in one’s strive for progress. And if you choose to share this post it would mean the world to me! Until soon!
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