The 7 Best Free Software Tools for your Online Business

It can cost quite a lot of money in software expenses to run a successful online business. You've got to pay for Word Processing, Presentation and Spreadsheet Software, Professional Email software, File Sharing & Transferring software, a Website, and Image editing software. Going out and buying this software and hiring a web designer can easily cost you a few thousand dollars! That's why i've compiled a list of FREE software solutions for online business owners, that work as well as or even better than their commercial competitors!

1) Office Productivity Software Smackdown - OpenOffice.Org Vs Microsoft Office Home And Business 2010

Pound for pound, OpenOffice offers all of the main features and functionality that online business owners need without the $279.00 price tag.

OpenOffice includes: Writer (Their version of Word) Calc (Their version of Excel) Impress (Their version of PowerPoint) Draw (Their version of Paint) Base (Their version of Access)

I've been using it for two years now and I love it! The best part about open office is that it's fully compatible with any version of office, and you can even save your work as native office extensions (like .doc and .xls). There are no hidden fee's, no premium upgrades, and no license fee's. You can install it on as many computers as you wan as well. For more information check out OpenOffice.Org.

Honorable Mention: Google Apps

2) Web Design Smackdown - Wordpress.Com Vs Paid Blogging Service

If your running an online business, it's a no-brainer that you'll need a Blog or Website. There are plenty of online services that will help you get a blog and running fairly quickly for a price. There are also plenty of designers out there (like me) that offer web design services that cater to small businesses. But if you are just starting out or on a budget, you'll need to save every penny that you can. That's why Wordpress.Com is a great too for small business owners new to blogging!

Wordpress.Com lets you create a new blog in minutes. They offer 3 gigs of storage for your files and images, offers over 75 different themes (templates) to choose from, provides free site visitor statistics and even lets you use your own custom domain (like yourbusiness.com for example). In case you didn't know it, Wordpress is extremely user friendly, and there are hundreds of tutorial sites available that show new users how to work with it. It's actually the most popular blogging platform in the world, and is used on over 202 million websites.

You can sign up for a free wordpress blog at wordpress.com.

3) Financial Management Smackdown - Mint Vs Quicken

Mint is a free financial management web application owned by intuit. It helps you to create budgets, create savings plans, and even lets you track interest rates on credit cards, loans and mortgage. This helps you to identify and pay off the ones with the highest rates first, to reduce your debt. It will also help you track your investments, such as 410k's, mutual funds, brokerage accounts, and IRA's. It will even alert you of upcoming due bills, which will help you to avoid late fee's!

Mint will let if you if you've overspent and blown your budget in a particular category – which is great for a small online business trying to keep expenses in check. It will also notify you if your financial institution has changed their rates or terms, and alert you of high purchases or unusual account activity. The funny thing about its primary competition, Quicken, is that they are both owned and operated by the same company – Intuit. Quicken Online has even been replaced by Mint as Inuit's primary online financial management system! Mint is also available as an App for Android and for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

You can sign up for Mint at Mint.Com

4) Image Editor Smackdown - Gimp Vs PhotoShop CS5

This is a tricky one. This article is about free alternatives to commercial software that match or exceed their counterparts in capability. Except here – Photoshop C55 IS BETTER than Gimp. The good news is, for most online small business owners it doesn't really matter. For 99.99% of the things you may need photoshop for – image resizing, cropping, create simple logos, change image formats, etc... Gimp does the job and does it quite well.

The best part is that Gimp is completely FREE and doesn't include Photoshops $699 price tag. It's available for Windows and Mac at gimp.org.

5) Photo Editor Smackdown - Picasa vs Photoshop Elements

Often, Small Online Business owners need to edit photo's for profile images and printed materials. You may need to edit photos to reduce red eye, crop, or adjust brightness/contrast. You can do this relatively inexpensively for $99 with Photoshop Elements, but can do it for free with Google's Picasa. Picasa offers color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping, and simple image compression for reducing file size. It's both a desktop application and a web-based “cloud” application. Integration between to two is one of Picasa's best features!

Some of Picasa's cooler features are name tags (similar to facebook tags) and geo-tagging support. Picasa's name tag feature scans all your photos, groups photos with similar faces together, so you can label them to the name of the person in the picture. Once you've tagged someone you can find their photo's by searching by their name. Geo-Tagging lets you identify where you took each photo so you can sort by location. You can then easily upload your newly organized and sorted images to Picasa Web Albums!

You can download Picasa at http://picasa.google.com and get started with Picasa Web Albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/home.

6) File Transfer Smackdown - Filezilla Vs WS FTP Pro

Filezilla is an extremely popular free alternative to WS FTP Pro which lets you remotely manage your web server. It's allows you upload and download files, and manage folders and directory permissions. It's a must-have tool for anyone managing a website or blog. It'll save you a minimum of $55, which is the cost of the single user license of WS FTP Pro. I create and manage websites professionally, and I can tell you first hand that Filezilla gives me all the features i'll ever need to manage my website remotely!

You can download it at http://filezilla-project.org/.

7) Business Collaboration Smackdown - Google Apps Vs SharePoint

Google Apps lets you create and deploy internal intranets, host your own email, and share documents, files, spreadsheets, and presentations in real time, for free. It's basically providing tens of thousands of dollars in equipment, infrastructure, support and maintenance costs for nothing. It's stabile, scalable and enterprise ready. This is really a no brainer!

Imagine you wanted to run an online publishing business and had to work with editors, writers and designers all over the world. With Google Apps, you could create a password protected internal website that your staff could access anywhere in the world. Your designers could upload cover and interior artwork in docs. You could edit your writers work in real-time with Google Docs, and collaborate on a business proposal with your designer in Presentation.

You could also use Spreadsheet to manage your budget with your co-editor across the country, and to collect form data from your website. You could also provide your entire staff with a customized corporate email address such as you@yourname.com, or you@staff.yourname.com. Sharepoint cost's THOUSANDS to license and maintain, for similar functionality... is there any doubt which is a better solution for you?

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The 7 Best Free Software Tools for your Online Business
Thursday, 11 June 2009