Every online teaching entrepreneur knows the importance of finding ways to make their business run more efficiently without incurring additional costs or wasting time.
Between conceptualizing ideas, handling paperwork, interacting with customers, and running the enterprise, online teaching business owners barely have time to think of ways to make improvements. If you’re a one-person operation, these time constraints could be much worse.
The advent of new technologies has made it possible for online teaching entrepreneurs to leverage a variety of business tools. Some of these apps and platforms can have a direct impact on the profitability of your enterprise. In addition, others have indirect benefits, helping you save time to focus on the more strategic aspects of running the business.
In this guide, we cover 7 examples of online tools every online teaching entrepreneur needs at their disposal.
1. Trello
Whether you have a small team of employees or have a network of online freelancers working remotely from different parts of the world, you can’t go wrong having a project management tool to make sure everyone is on the same page. And when it comes to project management, Trello is easily one of the top names in the business.
Used by startups and Fortune 500 companies, Trello offers a visual approach to project management, The system uses boards where team members can create lists of tasks with cards. You can open a card and add comments, upload files, and place checklists.
The beauty of Trello lies in its flexibility. Online teaching entrepreneurs can use it to:
- Manage projects, such as research and development or a product launch
- Run daily tasks according to specific checklists with deadlines
- Run marketing campaigns
Trello is free to use, allowing users to create 10 Team Boards. You can also pay for Business Class and Enterprise to get unlimited Trello features for $9.99 and $20.83 (for 20 users), respectively.
2. Google Docs
The days when Microsoft Word was the only reliable word processor in town are gone. Google Docs isn’t just a word processor; it’s also a powerful collaboration tool, allowing multiple people to work on a single file at the same time. The web-based word processor is free, and part of the office suite found within Google Drive.
Where Google Docs shines is in its ability to be a powerful tool for collaboration. Everyone with editing privileges of a file can add or remove text, proofread content, and leave comments and suggestions for other users to see. You also get to see who is working on the document in real-time and chat with them.
Practical applications of Google Docs for businesses include:
- Creating collaborative reports (e.g., marketing, revenue, sales)
- Creating pitch decks for potential investors
- Draft invoices, quotations, and proposal letters
3. Canva
If you’ve always wanted to create beautiful, professional-quality posters, presentations, social media graphics, and banners but don’t have the expertise or patience to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, Canva has you covered.
Canva is a web-based graphic design platform that provides a full suite of tools you can use to create visual content from scratch or by using templates. The platform uses a simple drag-and-drop interface. It also offers a catalog with millions of images, graphics, and fonts. Business owners can upload their images and add their brand colors to create marketing collateral and graphics for daily social media posts (Canva even has a library of templates for the most popular image sizes on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), and letterhead and resumes as well.
Best of all, Canva is free. For team features, you can also upgrade to Canva Pro for $12 .95 per team member per month.
4. Slack
Slack is a gorgeous chat app with communication features that are perfect for teams within business organizations of all sizes. Its core features for business include:
- Facilitating communication in the workplace
- Helping teams communicate and collaborate across remote locations
- Encouraging the sharing of documents, images, and other files across teams and between team members
Despite being feature-packed, Slack’s design and the interface is smooth, making it immensely popular with users. Business owners can create dedicated chat groups for specific teams/departments or projects, rather than depend on SMS or email to get in touch with every single employee.
Slack’s Lite version is free to use while the upgraded version starts at $8 per month.
5. Yondo
For online teaching entrepreneurs looking to increase their revenue with additional service offerings, Yondo is an all-in-one eCommerce solution.
Yondo is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that lets business owners add a live 1-to-1 session, webinar and video-on-demand function to their existing business. For a starting price of $27 per month (Starter Plan), you get access to an administrator panel where you can customize an eCommerce site that works for you.
The starter plan also gives you access to valuable analytics data, as well as, integration ability with several other systems that you can use to improve your business operations.
6. Hootsuite
Any online business owner worth their salt knows that the enterprise has no chance of surviving without effective marketing. By now, it’s safe to say that your business already has a social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Instead of wasting time from each platform to the next, you can use a tool that gives you access to all of your social media accounts in one place.
That’s precisely what Hootsuite can do for you.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage multiple social media accounts across a wide variety of social networks. From a single dashboard, Hootsuite enables you to schedule posts and tweets, monitor engagement activity at the individual-post level, and monitor brand mentions.
Hootsuite’s plans range from a Free plan, which is perfect for solopreneurs looking to manage multiple social networks. They also have a Business plan, which supports up to 35 profiles and 10 users for $599 per month.
7. Ahrefs
Part of doing business on the Internet is knowing what your competitors are doing online. It allows you to keep tabs on their tactics. You can also see what they’re doing wrong and draw inspiration from their successful strategies.
One tool that helps you do this is Ahrefs, which gives you a full overview of a competitor website’s search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, their AdWords campaigns, content, and other crucial digital marketing metrics. Ahrefs can be intimidating to novice users. If you take the time to understand basic digital marketing concepts, its potential will make sense to you.
As an online teaching entrepreneur, it’s reasonable to want to be fully in charge of running the business. At times, things can quickly get hectic and take more time than usual. You can use these tools to organize your day. This will allow you to reach your strategic goals on both a professional and personal level. All of these tools are designed to simplify tedious tasks. In effect, allowing you to focus on the big picture which is what matters when it comes to business.