7 Free Productivity Tools

By Sarah Kaufman, Manilla.com | More Articles 
May 8, 2013 | Comments (1)

Whether you own your own business, work from home, are going to school, or all of the above, everyone is looking for a way to get more done quicker, better and with fewer resources. In today's busy world, technology has made it possible to easily increase productivity with the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen. Check out these seven easy-to-use apps or websites that will help you be more efficient at home and at work, improve your organization skills, and better manage your time.

1. RescueTime: Available for Android, PC and Mac

RescueTime forces you to ask yourself: Am I really spending my days the way I want to? The reason this productivity tool is at the top of the list is that it's designed to train you to spot inefficiencies throughout your day, manage your time better, and help you to avoid unnecessary distractions that may be preventing you from maximizing your workday. The app runs in the background on your computer's status bar and measures all of your activity throughout the day: applications, websites, documents, and other tools that you're using. It tells you how much time you've spent on each site, and you can view your easy-to-access dashboard that features graphs and timesheets of your activity. If you find that you're not as productive as you'd like to be, you can put RescueTime on Focus Mode, which will block any potentially distracting messages from popping up.

2. Manilla.com: Available for the iPhone, Android and at Manilla.com

Manilla.com is an award-winning, free and secure service that helps you simplify and organize your daily life by managing everything in one place. Using just one password, you can manage your financial accounts, bills, travel rewards, daily deals, magazine and Netflix subscriptions, and more. We send you reminders when your bills are almost due and when your rewards points are about to expire. We even provide unlimited online document storage forever, for free, so you have access to your bills and statements whenever you need them. While Manilla is a valuable tool for the busy consumer, it's also ideal for small-business owners who need one place to manage all of their company bills and accounts.

3. Task Rabbit: Available for the iPhone and at TaskRabbit.com

Task Rabbit is a service that allows you to outsource your to-do list -- literally. Need to pick up your dry cleaning? Go grocery shopping? Get computer help? Check Task Rabbit for a long list of people who will be willing to do it for you. The site is free to use, and then you pay based on your task. TaskRabbits bid on your tasks, and you pick the most qualified person for the job. This service is available in Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Antonio, Seattle, and San Francisco.

4. 24Me: Available for the iPhone (Android app coming soon)

24Me is an iPhone app that not only acts as a digital to-do list, but it also provides the tools necessary to get your tasks done. The app is linked to Task Rabbit, so while 24Me will remind you it's time to do something, like pick up your dry cleaning, it will also let you use Task Rabbit to find someone to do it for you. 24Me lets you pay bills, greet friends when it's their birthday, and even share tasks with others.

5. Shoeboxed: Available for the iPhone, Android and Chrome

Shoeboxed is a web and mobile app that lets you manage all of your receipts right from your phone. To upload, all you have to do is snap a photo of the receipt. You can sort them by date, and they are automatically categorized for you into different groups, like meals, travel, office supplies, and more. The free version captures all of this data for the first five receipts, and then you can choose to either manually enter the data or pay a monthly fee for Shoeboxed to continue uploading the data automatically.

6. IFTTT.com

You know that feeling of convenience you get when you create a "rule" in your email account? For example: "If subject line says 'Daily Report,' then move to 'Follow Up' folder." Now you can get that feeling of convenience for almost anything. If This Then That is a service that lets you create what they call a "recipe" for all sorts of things in your life. Here are some examples:

• "If I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook, then send me a text message."
• "If I check in on Foursquare, then send an email to Sarah."
• "If I post a photo on Instagram, then add the file to my Dropbox."

The recipes check for new data as often as every 15 minutes, and you can turn them on and off whenever you want.

7. Fancy Hands: Available for the iPhone, Android (in beta) and at FancyHands.com

Using Fancy Hands is like having a personal assistant at the fraction of the cost. It's a website that provides virtual assistants who will complete any chores or tasks that don't require them to physically go anywhere, such as providing driving directions, making restaurant reservations, researching nearby clothing stores, discovering the least-expensive cable plan, and more.

Sarah Kaufman is the managing editor of the Manilla Blog and marketing manager of Manilla.com, the award-winning, free and secure service that lets you organize and simplify your bills and accounts in one place online or using the mobile apps. She does not own shares of any company mentioned here. For more information about tools that improve personal productivity, visit Manilla.com.

The Death of the PC
The days of paying for costly software upgrades are numbered. The PC will soon be obsolete. And BusinessWeek reports 70% of Americans are already using the technology that will replace it. Merrill Lynch calls it "a $160 billion tsunami." Computing giants including IBM, Yahoo!, and Amazon are racing to be the first to cash in on this PC-killing revolution. Yet, a small group of little-known companies have a huge head start. Get the full details on these companies, and the technology that is destroying the PC, in a free video from The Motley Fool. Enter your email address below to view this stunning video.

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The Next Industry To Crumble...

Imagine owning Amazon.com (up over an insane 4,000% since 2001) when Internet sales rendered big-box retailers obsolete...

Or Apple (up over a mindboggling 6,000% since 2004) when smartphones made landlines irrelevant.

Now an industry 99% of us use daily is set to implode... And 3 established companies are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this game-changing economic shift. That's why I urge you to click below to find out which industry is going the way of the dinosaur... and how YOU can take advantage.

Click to see the stunning presentation.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED BY LEADING A STARTUP--AND TAKING ON GOOGLE

BY: TONY HAILE

JUMPING INTO A FIGHT WITH GOOGLE IS SOMETHING MOST COMPANIES WOULD AVOID. CHARTBEAT CEO TONY HAILE EXPLAINS HOW HIS COMPANY CLEVERLY CARVED OUT A SLICE OF THE ANALYTICS PIE (GRAPH), AND WHY YOUR TEAM AND CULTURE TRUMP ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE.

1. Do the opposite.
I am not the founder of Chartbeat. I inherited it from the brilliant Billy Chasen and preternaturally sage John Borthwick days before we released a beta. And to be honest, I was a little unsure of what the hell to do with it.

Chartbeat was an analytics service in a world where Google Analytics was not only dominant but had one serious price point. The one thing I knew was that if we attempted to be "Google Analytics but faster," Google would eventually get faster and we would all be looking for new jobs.

Seeking advice from David Kidder, who was CEO of Clickable at the time, I sat in his office and talked through the dilemma.

“Do the opposite,” he suggested. “You can’t win by emulating Google, so why not just do the opposite of everything they do and see how that works. It might be a disaster but at least you’ll be different.”

And that’s exactly what we did. Google focused on the historical trends of data over time, we targeted what was happening right now--finding out what was useful about real time or go bust trying. Google kept persistent history, we moved to archive all data after 30 days, cutting off 99% of the traditional use cases for analytics. Google enabled exports to reports, we had an API but refused to enable exporting. Google was free, we decided to charge.

It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

We were able to identify new use cases and a new audience for data within the organization. We grew fast and built differentiated services to the point where we are now 50-people strong and Chartbeat pulses under the hoods of 80% of the top content sites across the United States.

So I will happily steal from David Kidder and say, when facing a Goliath in your industry, don’t try to be incrementally better, try doing the complete opposite of what they do and see where that takes you.

2. Experience matters. But so do intelligence, drive, and guts.
There’s nothing quite like hiring people with experience--those who’ve been there before, have made all the mistakes and know the path to follow. However, experience can have its limits and issues. Too often people will default to what worked at a previous company with a different culture, market, and set of challenges, leaving them frustrated when history doesn’t repeat itself.

The best kind of experience comes from those who are students of what they have done, who understand why the choices were made in their last company and the conditions required for success. It’s easy to mistake one set of experiences for the other, especially when interviewing, which is why I’ve learned to value curiosity, intelligence, and drive as much as a long resume. Some of my proudest hires at Chartbeat have been people with little direct experience in the roles they’ve taken on and yet have shown a speed in learning and improvement that still amazes me.

So yes, value experience but don’t let a hefty CV blind you to the opportunity to hire someone who is short on resume but long on everything else that makes a team member great.

3. Don’t let speed of growth undermine culture.
When you’re running a startup, there is always a ton of pressure to grow and hire rapidly. At times the urge to just hire qualified people and not sweat the other stuff can be overwhelming.

Early on at Chartbeat when we’d just raised our first round of funding, there was tremendous pressure to grow the team. I hired two people with great pedigrees and omitted the usual tests for cultural fit, ignoring the concerns of others who thought the candidates were “not quite Chartbeat." Within three months both were gone, leaving significant challenges behind them.

What I learned from that experience was that culture trumps everything. That doesn’t mean you want to hire heterogenous people who all act and talk the same, but that each hire should contribute to your company’s fundamental culture in some way--they should inform it and help it evolve. And now when given the choice between growth and culture, I choose culture every time.

4. Your team is smarter than you are.
Over the last four years I’ve learned repeatedly that whenever I delegate and give someone ownership over a specific discipline or project rather than trying to manage it all myself, Chartbeat gets better.

This may reflect my level of competency in general. But being more optimistic, I think it speaks to what’s important in company development. Not until I hired my Head of Product did I realize just what I had been missing when it came to building and iterating Chartbeat. When I finally gave another team member the autonomy he needed to explore a completely different product space, Chartbeat started to move in an awesome new direction.

As a corollary to that, one of the best exercises that I don’t do regularly enough is a 360 review of my performance. As CEO, it can be easy to make assumptions about what’s being communicated effectively and what’s not, to think that you’re doing great when in fact you’re letting the team down in some fundamental way. My team knows me better than anyone else. They know my strengths and weaknesses, and making sure there is a way for me to understand where I need to improve is an occasionally painful but always incredibly helpful experience.

Your team is smarter than you. They can do parts of your job better than you can. And they know how you can be better too. Listen to them.

--Tony Haile is the CEO of Chartbeat, a web analytics company based in New York City. In 2012 he was one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. Follow him on Twitter at @arctictony.

8 Steps to a $50/day Income Online

There are countless ways to earn a living online. The following is a list of steps that I refer to as the “Shampoo of Online Success”. What do you hopefully do in the shower regularly? Wash, rinse, repeat, wash rinse, repeat, etc. Repeating digital products or duplicating success on the Internet can be surprisingly easy. Here’s a great list of steps that I found scouring the forums.

1 Find a niche

Check out some forums, usergroups, and places like yahoo answers. See what kind of questions people are asking. Look for popular topics.

2 Keyword research

You can use the free tool over at digitalpoint.
Suppose you type in ‘any keyword’;

It will return to you a list of related key words and how often they are searched a day. Then go to Google and search the keyword (with ” ” around it) and see how many sites it will return. The fewer the better for now. Once you get the hang of online marketing I wouldn’t really worry about competition. Just build the better mouse trap.

3 Get a web hosting account

They are pretty cheap. Around 10 bucks a month for a good shared host. Stay away for free web hosts. They are not worth it. I strongly recommendhostgator.com. You can host unlimited domains there, and there price is under $10 a month. If money is an issue, do a search for hostgator coupons enter the code when you signup and the first month is only 1 penny.

4 Find or create your product

You can write your own info product or you can go to clickbank.com and chose a product for there. You will get a commission for each sale. (There are novels I could write about in this step, but to keep this post readable I’m assuming you have a product in mind.)

5 Create your site

Now you will want to create a content site. This only needs to be a few pages. You will want to put 10 articles on the site. Make good use of the keywords you researched. Also put out product on the site.

6 Set up an auto responder

This is optional if you REALLY don’t have the money, but it’s something you will need to do eventually. This will collect peoples emails on your website. You write a small report (you can base it off of your articles to save time) Have your visitors sign up to get the free report. Make sure you include a link to you product in the report.

7 Marketing

Remember those forums you looked up to find a good niche? You should start posting (not spamming) on them. Help people out, become an expert in your niche. You don’t really have to be an expert…but you should look like one. Share and help as many people as you can. Include a link you your site in you signature. Also places like yahoo answers. You can answer peoples questions and include a link in your resource box.

You will also want to submit articles to article directories such asEzineArticles.com.

Another good marketing tip is to exchange links with site in the same niche as you.

There are a lot of different marketing techniques you can use (too many to go into here, but this should get you started) Just search around the forumshere.

8 Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Do this with several different niches. The more sites you have going, the more money you have coming in.

Give it a try! 

PRODUCT LAUNCH 101 – 7 THINGS A GREAT LAUNCH CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

Over the last few months I’ve received a lot of questions from people about how to run a slam-dunk product launch. Since the stream of emails hasn’t let up, I thought I’d begin writing an in-depth tutorial on what factors separate the flops from the runaway successes.

And while I know that most of my readers already own my guide on how to sell your ebook via a launch, I’m going to cover a little more behind-the-scenes detail here based on questions I’ve received from clients and readers.

If you’re new to product launches, this product launch tutorial will be a huge help to you – but if you’ve been through the process before, keep your eyes peeled, because you’ll find ideas that will make your next launch a lot more profitable.

HowThisTutorialWillMakeYou Money

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go into detail about how to get the most out of seven key launch components:

• A Product That Sells Itself
• A Growing List Of Qualified Buyers
• An Offer That They Won’t Refuse
• A Sales Page That Makes Them Comfortable Buying
• A Team Of Affiliates Promoting Your Offer
• Pre-Launch Content That Builds Trust And Goodwill
• Emails That Get Readers Off The Fence

Get better at any (or all) of these key components, and you can’t help but make more money.

Firstup:CreateAProductThatSells Itself

If you want people to buy what you’re selling, you need to have a product worth buying. In fact, what you’re selling is irrelevant – whether it’s an ebook, physical product, professional service, online membership site – it doesn’t matter what it is, if money is going to change hands, it’s got to be a hell of a compelling thing to buy.

Most people I see hurt their launches before they even start, because their product or service is based on what they think the customer will buy, not on what the customers really want or need. (It’s an easy mistake to make, and I made it myself – quite painfully – early in my career.)

Having a “good idea for something people would naturally want” is a recipe for failure and frustration. Creating the perfect product for people based on an understanding of their needs, desires, fears and concerns is a much better path to success, and we’ll cover that in detail in the next part of this tutorial.

Next:BuildaGrowingListOfQualified Buyers

When I talk to people who are struggling with under-performing launches (or who feel like they’re not even ready to have a launch), I hear the same words over and over again: “I need a big list of people to sell to.”

This is as far from the truth as you can get. When it comes to selling your products and services, the size of your list doesn’t matter. What matters is their qualification for being on your list. If you’re not taking action to make sure the people who are joining your list are pretty likely to want the stuff you’re selling, you’re just adding names into a database.

I know people with lists of 100,000 or more who can’t get their people to buy for love or money. I also know people with 1,000 names on their list who make a comfortable six figures. The difference isn’t the size of the list – it’s that the latter people make sure they get the right people on there.

In this next part of the tutorial we’re going to cover how to engineer your list-building activities so that you’re targeting the most likely buyer and getting them on your list.

InThisCorner:GivingThemAnOfferTheyWon’t Refuse

In the old days, simply having things up for sale online was an easy way to make money. But over the last 10 years the bar has been raised, and people expect more for their money. It’s a lot harder to just sell an ebook or membership site or DVD anymore.

There needs to be more in your total offer package than just the product. Notice how DVDs go overboard in adding “special content” to the movies you buy. Notice how good ebooks have worksheets and bonus audios to help you get more out of the experience. Notice how good membership sites have forums, or group calls, and so forth.

What makes a good offer so effective is that it provides so much value that the buyer stops looking at the price, because what you’re giving them is so far beyond the money they’re laying out.

Take How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook for example – there’s a reason that this ebook sells every day of the week even though its $97 price tag is so much higher than the vast majority of ebooks – and it’s the offer. Between the worksheets and the audio and the content, the buyer can easily see that they’re going to learn exactly how to sell a lot more of their product.

In this part of the tutorial, we’re going to go into a few critical details for coming up with offers that make readers say “Where do I sign?”, not because you’re manipulating them with hype, but because you are giving them exactly what they need in a way that is understandable and accessible to them.

NextOut:WritingASalesPageThatMakesThemComfortable Buying

Most sales pages focus on how great the product or service is with a level of hype or heavy-handed sales tactics that do little but win over the most gullible or worn-down reader. They convey a level of pressure and style that reminds people of used car (or snake oil) salesmen.

Or worse, the person writing the sales page is so afraid of coming off as “pushy” that they swing to the opposite extreme and create such a soft-sell presentation of their offer that people are barely aware of the fact that there’s something to buy.

Neither of those approaches put food on the table (and they don’t exactly serve the people you’re trying to help, either).

Instead you’ve got to make sure your sales page does it’s primary job: making your reader comfortable with the buying decision so there’s no unnecessary resistance to purchasing your stuff. You do that right, and there’s no hard sell necessary.

We’re going to cover how to make readers comfortable buying from you and confident they’re buying just the thing they’ve needed in this part of the tutorial.

NowAtBat:RecruitingATeamOfAffiliatesToPromoteYour Offer

One of the most powerful parts of the product launch process is your affiliate team (not to be confused with joint venture or “JV” partners, who actually have more skin in the game in terms of creating the product). A good team of affiliates will drive up interest in your launch, do some of the pre-selling for you and lend credibility to the launch itself.

The challenge most people tend to have is getting that “good” team of affiliates. They often associate with people who don’t resonate with their audience, or have incompatible (or heavy-handed) promotion styles, or worse yet – never actually do the promoting when the time comes.

You don’t want to have any of this bad juju going on in your launch. You’ll want to find people who can actually make your launch strong by participating in your pre-launch activities, effectively pre-selling to their audience and getting the word out when the time comes.

In this part of the tutorial we’ll get you on board with some helpful tactics for getting affiliates to build your list and promote your offer in a way that drives real sales.

TheHomeStretch:Pre-LaunchContentThatBuildsTrustAnd Goodwill

If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ve probably seen the onslaught of sales videos that come before a launch. Often they tend to be nothing more than rah-rah videos that try and build up excitement for this “really amazing thing!” that’s “coming soon!” – but there’s no real substance behind them.

You see these a lot because they work extremely well on the gullible (or the uninitiated). But these fluffy pre-launch buildup videos don’t work as well on people who have seen it all before. And quite frankly, they’re a pretty weak way to start building pre-launch excitement.

Instead, you want your pre-launch content – whether it’s videos, audios, PDFs or blog posts – to be something useful and meaningful to people, something that actually makes them glad they stopped by and were exposed to the content.

For example, I created free workbooks on “A-List’ networking, creating income streams and “playing a bigger game” [click here to see them] as a way to build up excitement for a launch, and people loved it.

With good pre-launch content, people don’t feel they’re being sold, they feel like you’re actually helping them, whether they buy or not. And that builds trust and goodwill that will significantly increase the conversion rate on your sales page and put real money in your pocket. We’ll cover more on this in the tutorial later.

WrappingItUp:EmailsThatGetReadersOffThe Fence

One of the most challenging parts of a launch for many people is the email component. Questions like “How do I get them to open?” “What if they think I’m emailing too much?” and “How do I get them to click-through?” are ones I hear so often it’s almost textbook.

While all three of these questions are important, the last one is most critical because a lot of your readers will put off opening your emails or won’t be sold on the idea they need to click through to your pre-launch content or your sales page.

If you can’t get them off the fence and clicking, you’re not going to get your pre-launch content viewed. You’re not going to get your sales page read. And ultimately, you’re not going to get your products or services sold.

Fortunately, there are are simple, effective, and non-pushy ways to make those clicks happen and get your stuff sold. We’ll cover that in detail in the final part of this tutorial.

Here’sThePartWhereITellYouWhatIWantYouToDoNext 

If this article is doing it for you, I’d like you to do one simple thing for me right now:

• Click the retweet button below to share this article with others.

(Oh, and if you want those free workbooks I talked about earlier, you can get them right here after you’ve tweeted.)

Thanks for spreading the word,

Dave