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Let’s keep it real. Running your own business is incredibly stressful. You have to juggle sales, marketing, accounting, and more. Sometimes it can feel like you don’t have any time or energy left for yourself!
You often hear people talk about the importance of hard work. “Hustle!” they say. And yes, if you want to get a business off the ground, you better be prepared to work hard. However, it’s also possible to work too hard, and burn out.
This is more dangerous than you might think. There are countless entrepreneurs who are battling severe depression at this very moment. When you fail to draw the line between your business and your personal life your mental health suffers.
This is why it’s so important to .use your time and energy wisely. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Whatever it is you are trying to do, chances are there is a tool for that, and using that tool could make you much more effective. Use the technology that is already available!
Here are 6 tools that we found to be very useful…
#1 Depositphotos
You might think that worrying about design is silly. After all, your product should be all that matters, right?
But design is important. Think about it. What do you do when you land on a website that looks terrible? You leave immediately. Well, guess what? Your potential customers will do the same if your design isn’t visually appealing.
One easy thing you can do to improve the way your website looks is to use high-quality, professional images. Depositphotos.com has 80 million stock photos and videos to choose from. It only costs $29/month to download 30 of them each month. So make an effort to update the images on your homepage, blog posts, and marketing materials. It will pay off in the long run!
#2 Apptivo
When you are an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get carried away with your big vision, and to neglect the practical aspects of running a business.
You should never forget that money is the lifeblood of any business, though. Most companies fail because they simply run out of cash. It’s the harsh, cold reality of running a business.
That means that you should always keep a close eye on your finances. Use this expenses tracking solution and make sure that you know where every penny goes. It’s very easy to lose control of your spending if you are not dilligent about it.
And be as scrappy as you can. You can do a lot of things yourself by using the tools that are already out there. Don’t hire expensive customer support reps, web designers, or coders. You can easily bootstrap all of that. Only outsource once you have a healthy cash flow!
#3 Lorem Ipsum
Placeholder text plays an important role in web design. Whether you are building a website for yourself or for a client, you will have to test it with mock content, because otherwise you would run a risk of it not functioning properly. But should you be writing that placeholder text from scratch every time?
Absolutely not. With this lorem ipsum generator you can generate placeholder text in a matter of seconds. This may not sound like a big deal, but if you are building websites regularly, it will save you a lot of time!
#4 Heroic WordPress FAQs
You should do your best to provide excellent customer support. It’s important to keep people who are paying for your products and services happy!
However, customer support can quickly turn into a nightmare, especially if you don’t streamline it. It all starts with a few emails here and there, but it can snowball into dozens of queries every day. Do you really want to spend your time answering the same questions over and over again? You need to find a better solution.
So go through your customer support emails. What are the most common questions? Write down detailed answers to them. Then, use this WordPress FAQ Plugin to set up an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section on your website.
#5 4k Stogram
Okay, so you have put a lot of work into your Instagram account, and now it has great content and a lot of followers. But what if it gets hacked?
You should always have a backup of all your content. You can use this instagram downloader to download all your photos and videos straight to your hard drive. That way you will be able to easily restore the content once the issue is resolved.
#6 NovoResume
An argument could be made that in modern economy being an entrepreneur is safer than being an employee. After all, if you are your own boss, you can’t be fired, right? However, while that might be true, the reality is that most business fail. What does it mean for you?
No, I’m not saying that you should give up on your entrepreneurial dreams, but you should be pragmatic about it. There are a lot of things that you can’t control. You might do everything right and still go out of business (remember 2008?)! That’s why you should always, always have a plan B.
Yes, I know it sounds terrible, but there might come a time when you might need to work a 9-5 job again.So make sure that your CV is up to date. Use a resume template to make it look professional. Keep your skills sharp. That way, if you ever need to find a job, you’ll be able to do so quickly… And then you will have the financial stability to work on your next project!
Conclusion
Your time is valuable. The less of it you waste, the more of it you can spend on things that matter. It can be tempting to try to do everything on your own, especially in the beginning when you don’t have much money, but it’s just not feasible. So don’t hesitate to invest in tools that will make your life easier in the long run.
