Small business owners and entrepreneurs are getting some very helpful tools that can even the odds and even give you the edge.

Though I am a venture capitalist, I’ve never sought venture capital funding for my own company because I’d don’t want to deal with outside investors. (Sound familiar?) Without millions of bucks behind me, I’ve had to find free/cheap resources to monitor, market, and manage my business.

 

Come to find out, owners of small businesses can choose from thousands of websites to make their organizations more successful. One of the biggest barriers to using these websites is simply knowing that they exist. I’ve compiled this list of websites that are valuable for my efforts (note: I do advise some of these companies). I hope that they can help you rule the Internet.

 

1. Jigsaw. Have you ever wanted to get in touch someone and not known her phone or email address? Jigsaw can help you. It contains a database of twenty-one million contracts. Users of the site contribute information from people they meet in exchange for access to the database. If you don’t to contribute information, then you can pay a monthly fee. LinkedIn is useful for making contacts too, but I often use the direct approach.

 

2. Spokeo. When you’re about to hire someone, wouldn’t it be nice to know a little about the person’s background? How about a new vendor? Spokeo enables you to enter a person’s name or email address, and it searches the social networking sites for them. Then it displays links to their accounts on the sites.

 

3. Knowem. If you’re using social media to market your business, you should stop by at Knowem at least once. You can enter the user name that you might want to use on social networks, and Knowem will determine their availability on over two hundred at one time. You can even pay Knowem to register your username so that no one else can grab it.

 

4. Evernote. This is a giant filing cabinet in the sky. You can send your invoices, receipts, business cards, airline confirmations, pictures, and contracts to it. Then you can access them from any computer or smartphone with Internet access. It has built-in character recognition so you can scan in any document and then search for text in it.

 

5. DropBox. Like Evernote, DropBox is a filing cabinet in the sky except where Evernote is for printouts, DropBox is for files. For example, you’d store your airline reservation confirmation in Evernote, and your PowerPoint files in DropBox. I keep all my speeches and book draft in it, so that I can access them from anywhere and if I lose my laptop, my files are safe in the cloud.

 

6. Google Voice. I have three phones where people can reach me: home office, cell, and office. With Google Voice, you get one number. When people call that number, it rings in all three places at once. If you’re not available, it records a voice message that you can listen to via email. It also transcribes the message and sends it to you as text.

 

7. Tynt. If you’d like to know how many times people copy text on your website, all you have to do is install one-line of code. Then Tynt keeps track of how many times people copy that text. When people paste the text—for example, in an email, Tynt includes an attribution link back to your site so that you get more traffic.

 

8. BagTheWeb. Have you ever wanted to make a quick and dirty collection of websites to send to other people? Maybe it’s a collection of sites to see on your next vacation! BagTheWeb allows you to do what its name implies: place websites from around the Internet into a “bag” that you can share.

 

9. Email Extractor. Sometimes I get files or spreadsheets that are full of email addresses and other tidbits of contact information in an unstructured form. If I want to send these folks an email, I just go to this site to separate the wheat from the chaff. The same company makes a product called Email Merge to use these addresses in mailings.

 

10. SmartBrief. Some really smart people are reading everything they can every day about business topics. Then they pick the best ones, summarize them, and display them on a page and email them in a daily newsletter. This is a very quick way to stay on top of your industry—for example, the restaurant business.

 

11. Alltop. Alltop is my baby. Think of it as an online magazine rack. We aggregate all the best websites and blogs from over 900 topics ranging from Adoption to Zoology. At each topic, we display the headlines from latest five stories from each website or blog. For example, you might find Smallbusiness.alltop particularly useful.

 

12. Twitter. Don’t believe people who tell you Twitter is **bleep**. It is the best marketing tool since the invention of television. And it’s better than television because it’s fast, free, and ubiquitous. You will see the light with Twitter when you use it to monitor your company, watch the competition, conduct research, and find sales prospects. Look at, for example, @DellOutlet and @KogiBBQ.

     12a. I use ObjectiveMarketer for much of my tweeting and Facebook updates. It’s a system that enables you to create campaigns, automate your updates, and calculate extensive analytics.

 

 

by Ellen_Yu