Keith talks about the 5 tools that every business owner could benefit from using every day.
Laura: OK, Keith. I want to know five tools that you think every online business owner should have and use on a daily basis.
Keith: OK. Five, wow. You can only have five. There’s so many. But you want to bring it back to the things that are working. I think one of the coolest sites for productivity and for overall well-being, big statement, is a site called Focus@Will. I really, really love this site.
It’s not very dear. I think it’s $4.95 a month and they do have a free trial version. What it does is if you’ve got an important task like writing a blog or you’ve got to do your tax or something, if you just can’t get it, you just can’t be bothered, you just can’t – you just don’t want to do it, this site Focus@Will actually creates a series of playlists. It’s a really lovely music that helps you get in the zone.
I can tell you, I use this almost every day. It actually works miracles. The power of music to get you in that productive zone is well and above – well over and above the cost of $4.95 a month. The value that I get from that site is extraordinary and I think we chatted before and I’ve certainly done some studies on the idea that music has a very, very tangible benefit in terms of the productivity or mindset, yeah.
Laura: For sure. Yeah, I’m a huge proponent of it. So like I love – we have talked about this before and I love when you bring it up. For me, I have different playlists where each playlist has a certain number of songs based on how long I want the playlist to be, and the mood that I want for the energy that I’m trying to create.
So same sort of thing, but yeah, it’s a brilliant tool, Focus@Will.com. So that’s your number one.
Keith: Number one.
Laura: What’s number two?
Keith: So number two and number three are what we call dashboards in the social media space. I know you prefer HootSuite so I’m going to recommend that because it’s very popular. I personally don’t like it. But a lot of people I know love it. I find it to be clunky. I actually prefer a site called Gremln. It’s unbelievable. It’s almost identical to HootSuite. But it’s like the Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola analogy.
Some people prefer Pepsi. Some people are addicted to Coke. Some people hate both. But Gremln and HootSuite are tools, dashboards we call them, that allow you to be super productive over a number of social media sites. So put those two together. I’ve mentioned HootSuite because it is so popular. So I have to give them kudos for that.
But I personally prefer Gremln. I know you love HootSuite, don’t you?
Laura: I do. But when you take it back to the Coke versus Pepsi analogy, I love Coke too. I grew up drinking Coke though. So I don’t like Pepsi. Pepsi just doesn’t taste right. It’s kind of like how mom’s spaghetti is always best.
Part of why I love HootSuite is because I’ve used it for so long that I don’t have to think. The tools – because I don’t actually use HootSuite anymore. My team does now. So my team does all that for me and then HootSuite provides amazing reports. So I can make sure that my team is on track and on target with the initiatives that I’ve given them.
So there are so many great solutions and I know – I actually have a lot of friends that use Gremln, a lot of business partners that do. Both are great. The point is just to make sure that you have one of them, because they are such powerful tools.
Keith: They are an all-in-one shop. They allow you to do lots of stuff. So I want to give kudos to HootSuite because it is popular. I personally don’t like it, but I know that a lot of people do.
Four and five, I want to talk about social media as a business tool. So we talked about the “social six”. But I want you to pick two. I personally would recommend Twitter and Pinterest. They are my two favorite sites at the moment.
Pinterest is almost, for me, almost neck and neck with Twitter for me. I love it. I love it. I might be the most excited guy in the world about Pinterest. There are not many guys on Pinterest. Well, you might dispute that. But certainly in Australia, it’s not very popular here. But Twitter and Pinterest are social media tools. They’re tools.
There’s a lot of stuff about social media being a waste of time. But if you can leverage social media to build the buzz, build your community, generate leads, this is the new paradigm we live in now, the online world.
What I want to recommend here is they’re just the two that I would suggest. There are six in total that we as a group suggest. Pick the ones that suit you. Again, Pepsi-Cola and Coke. I love Twitter and Pinterest and that’s what I recommend.
So there it is. Focus@Will, HootSuite, Gremln, Twitter, Pinterest.
OVERCOME ONLINE OVERWHELM
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