5 Free Software Tools For Entrepreneurs

When you begin a new project in your company, keeping an overview can become a day job in itself. Trello, a project management tool, can help. 

The program is a sort of electronic bulletin board, made up of lists that in turn contain various ‘cards’. You can add checklists, or photos, or to-do lists, or e-mail attachments, or team member chats to a card. You can give each card a specific color (for example: green for ‘still to do’, blue for ‘done’, red for ‘important’ ...) and rank it randomly within a list. 

In an SME (where the number of teams or the number of aspects of a project can still be monitored fairly easily) this is a particularly easy and visual tool for keeping projects at cruising speed. 

Is your computer screen covered in twenty-five post-its reminding you of things you shouldn’t forget? Then it’s high time you cleaned up and switched to Evernote. 

Evernote enables you to create lists in which you can put text, but also stick photos, save audio fragments and e-mails or even share websites. Every user also gets an e-mail address, for mailing important items to the Evernote list. 

One very interesting function is that Evernote can synchronize between different PCs and your smartphone. This means that your lists are always up to date on every device you are consulting. 

The Web offers various services enabling you to design your own posters, flyers, banners, business cards, invitations and adverts for free, but Canva (without s!) is one of the best. 

Without knowing much about editing programs, you can quickly and easily create a graphic masterpiece in this program. All you need is a bit of fantasy and imagination. The site offers hundreds of templates on which to base your design, and which you can completely adapt to your own needs. You can add text in dozens of different fonts and choose from all kinds of backgrounds, designs, icons and other graphic bells and whistles. 

The site also contains hundreds of stock photos (though not all free), but there is an option to add your own photos. Once your design is finished, download it as a PDF. 

Sending electronic newsletters by e-mail is an excellent way of staying in contact with your customers. However, if you are sending more than a handful of mails, the manual entering of addresses and drafting of newsletters becomes a bit laborious. Time then to take a look at Mailchimp. 

This site enables you to launch a successful e-mail campaign in an instant. Here too there are dozens of professional templates that you can use as a basis for your mails. You can manually enter addresses, import CSV lists or connect to your CRM system with Mailchimp. There is also an in-built module for making Facebook adverts of your mails. 

After the campaign, Mailchimp will send you an extensive data report (how often your mail was opened, how often it was clicked through) so you can improve your next campaign. 

As a business in today’s world, you can’t afford to ignore social media, but managing all those accounts can often be tedious. With Hootsuite you can organize and analyze all your social media campaigns from one program. 

Instead of having to log into each network separately, you will be able to see all your messages in one go. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr and all the rest. You can also easily manage several channels on the same network from Hootsuite. Or you can create a message for different networks at the same time. 

In addition, you can let Hootsuite automatically choose the best moment to place a particular message and you will of course receive reports about how often your messages were clicked on and shared.