This is the era of web applications. Web apps are classy, elegant, and can get the work done. While most of them are free, some are paid. Web apps are refreshingly cool and can get a lot of things done for you when you set out to market your business, engage with social media effectively, and to manage your business. Here are a list of 10 web applications for business that you will kill for ( but you don’t have to):
If you are a publisher, you know that success lies in variety. If all you do is write blogs that are plain text, it’s not really an exciting thing to do. If you’ve ever read Website Magazine or any of the publications from Zinio, Winning The Web Magazine, you might have liked the digital, page-turning Interface that they use. There’s a free application (ok, they have a paid version too) called Yudu – a digital publishing platform, a library, and a marketplace.
Using a state-of-the-art publishing system, it allows you to self-publish your content and share it, sell it, or just show off to your potential readers, clients, etc. For publishers, it would mean:
- More ways to showcase creative work
- More opportunities to share content
- Potential to make money selling content directly, etc.
For companies, Individual professionals, small business owners, and Bloggers:
- Create content in a different format
- Sell e-books or reports, publish white papers, or
- Prepare free e-reports to give away.
A curious cat that I am, I went looking for more publications like Yudu. I found flipsnack – a web app that’s a part of the overall suite of applications at snacktools. I first heard about them when they had this cool BannerSnack tool that helps you make banners for Internet Marketing.
It’s easy to register and create your digital document almost as good as the professional ones you see online today ( you have nothing to do with Adobe Suite of products, can you believe that?).
All you need is a PDF document and you can make magic. I had an old PDF document on “How Much Should I Charge?”, for freelance writers. Nothing fancy, just a plain PDF document. See how it looks like after FlipSnack renders it. You may download it too, if you like.
If you unable to see the document above for some reason. You may click here to check it out.
Most of you might already know Zemanta — it’s a web app that helps you to enrich your blog posts in real time, while you are writing them. I remember using it for a client once upon a time.
You can try it for free and see how you like it. They have upwards of over 10 million photos and tens of thousands of blogs and news sites that it would recommend to you when you go typing on your keyboard. It works across platforms and it also has a WordPress plugin so it should be easy to use.
Zemanta makes it easy for you to link to other active bloggers. It’s NLP ( natural language Processing) proprietary technology analyzes what you write and identifies active bloggers with content waiting to be linked to, shared, etc. It results in natural link building, pumps your traffic, helps you network, and boosts your SEO.
Social media is time consuming, isn’t it? Boostpost is social ranking button widget that helps your readers to vote on the “value” of a link, expands publisher outreach, allows you add or remove buttons as you join(and unjoin) new social media networks. It also helps you to monetize your social media links using a “boostpage”. You can get the Boostpost widget here.
Do you feel that you are spending too much time on Social Media? Wouldn’t it be nice to develop content and deliver to your multiple social media accounts instantly without having to log in to each network and do it manually?
It’s time to automate.Tarpipe is a web app that lets you do just that. You can create workflows — defined as a the visual description how your content should from from source to destination — and then easily publish content on several social media destinations. Further, all of those unending streams of content across platforms will reside in a backlog.
They have a free account allowing 2 destinations ( 2 separate social media channels) and then have paid plans if you need more than that.
As you must have guessed by now, I am an “alternative man”. Dlvr. it is another web application that helps you to post your blog content to your multiple social media accounts.
You may also gauge your audience engagement, your reach across networks, the impact your tweets or your Facebook Fan Page shares would have had on your followers and fans, and much more. Real time stats and automatic integration to multiple social accounts is a blessing, isn’t it?
See if dlvr.it is something you might like?
Creating a logo is always a tricky thing. If it isn’t tricky, it’s important, expensive, and your branding almost depends on it. If you have an in-house design team or if you can afford a contractor/vendor to do the logos for you,it’s all well and good.
What if you don’t? I didn’t have the logo design skills nor could I afford a logo designer. I had to rely on free web-based alternative like Sumo Paint. You can see how crappy, depressing and unprofessional my logo is, can’t you?
It looks like Logoease can solve your problem, if you are like me, that is. featuring a simple, design interface you can now create your logo — as many as 10 different versions at one time — within minutes. They even send out files in various formats back to you.
Are you a freelancer, business owner, or a sales person? If you are, you do know that first impressions matter. Further, almost everyone uses email or a normal word document to send out a proposal. Why not make your proposals stand out? BidSketch allows you to create professional proposals in minutes.
Keep all your proposals in one place, play around with the designs, tweak your sections, format to hearts content, export it to PDF and render your proposals on a “web view” in a special portal created just for you and your client. Your clients just fire up the proposal on their browser and even send you comments on it.
That’s awesome, isn’t it?
If you are familiar with excel, you’ll love SmartSheet. I first used it when a client gave me access to it when I working on their content and I had to work with a team of other collaborators, web designers, and freelance writers(like myself). It’s a super-charged, excel spreadsheet like “The Hulk” — their green color interface made me think about it 
Project Management, sales invoicing and pipeline management, task management, human resources,crowd sourcing, IT management, online work management — you name it, smart sheet can do it for you. It can also integrate with Salesforce and Google Apps, if that’s your kind of thing.
Bubbl.us
It’s been 1.5 years since I know and use this application but I still can’t type it out right. I still use Google to find it. Only recently, I bookmarked it
Mind Mapping is an incredibly effective way to communicate what you “think”, or explain “concepts” to your clients, readers, or even to your granny. There are plenty of web applications for mind mapping.
Bubble.us is a free mind mapping solution I stumbled over years go and I still use it when I have to share my ideas with my clients. It’s free, and it’s web based. Dabble, create a mind map, and download it to your computer.
Please do share any of your favorite applications. I’d love to hear from you.
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