Make Technology Work For You – iPage Productivity Hacks

Here is a conundrum: technology makes tasks, processes, and actions quicker and more effective. Yet most of us are busier than ever before and struggle to find enough hours in the day to get things done. Shouldn’t technology makes things easier and free up our time? That is not an easy problem to solve, and this article is not going to try. What it is going to do is give you some tips on getting things done in a more efficient way. So buckle up for some productivity hacks that will make technology work for you.

Communicate, Store and Collaborate

Communicate, store and collaborate – every business needs to do these things, and most have separate solutions in place for each. For example:

• An email provider
• A server in the office to store files
• Skype to talk to members of the team
• Microsoft Office on individual computers to carry out tasks and complete work

There is a solution that pulls all of this together into one service – Google Apps for Work. It harnesses the power of tools provided by Google, sets them up and configures them properly, and integrates them with your iPage account. This results in more efficient working and less costs (when compared to running your own servers, buying software, etc).

It includes:

• Gmail
• Hangouts (which is ideal for holding meetings with people in different locations)
• Calendar (so that your team works off one integrated system)
• Drive (storage for your company’s files that are accessible from any device in any location)
• Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms (to replace expensive software applications and improve collaboration)
• Sites (to quickly and easily set up websites without writing any code)

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing for many businesses – online or offline. But setting it up properly can be complicated and expensive.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers an alternative as it is easy to set up, and offers all the tools you need to make email marketing work. It is also one of the most widely used and respected newsletter services which means email servers, and individual internet users, trust it.

Some of the features that Mailchimp offers includes:

• Tools to help you build your list
• Drag and drop newsletter creator – all newsletters are mobile friendly
• Social media tools to increase the reach of your emails
• Analytics so you can measure results.

Contact Contact

Constant Contact is another alternative to email marketing. It’s easy to set up and offers all the tools you need to make email marketing work. The costs are simple and easy to understand – you pay for how many contacts you have in your list. This means you can send as many emails as you want without incurring any additional charges, and you can scale up as your list grows.

Here are some of the things Constant Contact offers:

• Tools to help you build your list
• Drag and drop newsletter creator – all newsletters are mobile friendly
• Social media tools to increase the reach of your emails
• Analytics so you can measure results

The Local World Wide Web

The internet is global, but it’s powerful for most businesses on a local level. Research has found that product and company searches result in greater in-store and local online purchases. This particularly applies when you look at mobile device use.

But for this to work, you must be visible on the internet’s specialist local search tools. This includes Yahoo, Mapquest, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, Whitepages, Foursquare and more. These are time-consuming to set up and maintain, and simple mistakes can negatively impact on search engine performance.

Local Lift lists your business, ensures the accuracy of those lists, and updates them when required. It also has a notification system to notify you of new reviews about your business.

Sell, Sell, Sell

Selling products or services online via your website used to mean expensive ecommerce setups and heavy maintenance. Not anymore. Ecwid allows you to add ecommerce functionality to any website quickly. Your customers will be able to view and make purchases on any device through a secure checkout. And here are a few things that you don’t need when you use Ecwid:

• A website developer
• To redesign your website
• To spend days (or weeks) getting payment methods setup
• To manually setup the security of the system
• To wait

Ecwid, like the other examples on this list, are practical tools that help America’s businesses trade, communicate and work online more effectively, efficiently, and with lower costs.