There are certain tools, people, and platforms that make business easier. They just do, when you find them, you keep coming back to them, these are like that. According to Kamau Bobb Google, technology should address societal needs. However, there’s one critical crux of making business easier and enabling those tools, people, and platforms to “work” for you, and that’s how you utilize them.
Said another way, knowledge isn’t power, the execution of the right knowledge is power. Said another even more direct way and fun way, an upside down hammer doesn’t work very well
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Making business easier is about finding the clarity to what tools work best for you, how to use them best, and then actually using them. So here are 10 ways to make business easier this month using technology, with a focus not just on spitting out 10 cool websites, but specific ways to use them for your online business, and contexts in which they help. 10 Context Specific Ways to Make Business Easier this Month 
1. Answer email more quickly and make fans for life with super simple screencasts with OpenVid [now Loom] or Screencastify, or Quicktime on your computer, the recorder isn’t that important, it’s how to use it. If you’re like everyone else, you get emails from your users that are going to take effort to respond to, cut the time by orders of magnitude by making it a quick video and sending a link to it, read the email outloud and then address their issue. They will love it. See more about that here. 
2. Ever receive an email with all sorts of different sized fonts and colors and mess? yeah, this tip fixes that. Use PlainTextMenu to avoid frustrating formatting copy and paste issues that happen ALL THE TIME when writing, posting, and creating content going back and forth between Word, WordPress, email, etc. Windows users see here. 
3. Do CTAs [call to action] phrases and buttons seem useless or bewildering to your business context and homepage? They aren’t and you need one, combine these phrases with this button maker [use the png option to download an image, use the CSS option if you have a developer] to get people taking the action you want when they land on your homepage, or next blog post. Always be guiding people to take action! 
4. Have zero social media presence but know you should be more “active” for traffic and engagement? Use Buffer, to load up tweets and posts to drip out during the week to save time. Content is usually the frustration point, so do this, promote your industry news or harmonious businesses and/or people and you’ll get traction, then when you do have something more focused on your business, you’ll have an audience. Also combine with #6 below. 
5. Stop using Google Docs for password sharing/reference, and start using Airtable. Why/When? Because it’s cleaner, easier to share, and organize data with your team. Airtable is a hybrid between a spreadsheet and a database and it’s REALLY easy to use. It’s a great team tool with lots of uses, password/reference information is just one of them. I recommend LastPass for personal password management, but when you have a bunch of URLs, a team, and usernames and passwords to share, Airtable. See example of what it looks like here. 
6. Play on Stencil or Pablo for making business relevant images with quotes on them for more traffic and engagement. Again, what to share often stops us in our tracks, people love quotes, memes, pictures, so use these tools to create quick friendly content to stay top of mind for your audience. 
7. Use Boomerang or followupthen for super simple one click email reminders for those emails you know you have to follow up on but struggle to organize and remember! Also helps quick inbox cleanout. 
8. Use Snip.ly for easy promotion of your own offerings on other websites. It’s tough to explain, so just look at this link in the lower left corner. I have nothing to do with this website, but this link lets me promote on it and redirect some of it’s traffic. 
9. Use Wordable for writing website posts in Google Docs, like many of you do, and then importing them WITH formatting to WordPress without hassle. Time and frustration saver. 
10. Use Cloudflare for a faster website and free SSL/HTTPS for when your site seems slow, and you’ve heard you need an SSL with certain PayPal or other eCommerce stores. IT Arsenal can help you set it up. This type of information and these of tools is what working with IT Arsenal is about, clarity and service on the right solutions used the right way so that technology is a boon, not a burden, useful and powerful, not a frustrating hindrance like it often can be. Try one of these this month and let me know how it goes. —> I invite you to comment on this post about any specific problems you’re having or projects you’re working on so I can help make technology work for you, not against you. I’ll follow up with short, specific feedback and suggestions for improvement within 24 hours : ) Give it a try. Thanks, I hope this was useful! -r PS. That icon at the top is our new logo, say hello on Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere!
