5 Free Productivity Tools that Can Help You Do Things Better and Faster

So much work to do, so little time.

I personally am having problem organising my time because there are so many things going on in my mind.

 
More often than not, I try to do multiple things at once. Although multitasking ability is generally good, but the downside is its ability to drain your energy just to catch things up.

 
5 free productivity tools I use
I try to organise conventionally – post-its, notes, etc. – But I ended up with a pile of papers that look like a scrapbooking in progress on my office desk.

 
This gotta stop!

 
Luckily, technology offers tons of possibilities to help you be efficient and effective. Although some of them are paid services, of course for an obvious reason – more functions, more perks, I use several tools that are free.

 
Without further adieu, these are 5 free productivity tools I often use to actually free some time to do other than work – family quality time, hobby and interest, and more:

 
1.    Brainstorming and Mind mapping
I use Bubbl.us for my brainstorming and mind mapping. It’s free, innovative, easy to use and you can save your mind maps into your account. One of the best mind mapping tools on the Net, well at least for me.

 
2.    To-do list
For a simple to do list on the go, I use our traditional Excel and very old fashioned also use a note pad– You can create to-do list, strike-through on completed ones, etc. I am also starting to use my blackberry as a little *tap on the shoulder* reminder. I guess for a more comprehensive planning tool, that includes to-do list, you can use Zoho Planner. A friend once recommended to me. Apparently you can create notes, reminder, to-do list – like many good organiser can do.

 
3.    Bookmark
I bookmark most of the sites I found interesting on my browser. Its great to go back and read those saved web pages.

 
4.    Stickies
One of the most interesting tool I found, MyStickies actually ’stick’ notes on the web page you saved, for free. It works like bookmarking sites, such as Del.icio.us, but for a more private use.

 
5.    Start page and dashboard
The start page of all start pages :) iGoogle is free and you can put almost everything inside – Calendar, weather, news updates, interesting quotes, etc.

 
There are way many more tools I use, but the 5 above are the ones I often use and recommend.

 
What tools do you use? Please share by commenting to this blog post :)
 

A One Page Marketing Plan Anyone Can Use

Planning sucks. None of us like to do it and if you’ve had any corporate experience in the process, it’s no wonder. But planning is an absolute necessity if you want to be successful.

So how do we reconcile our need to succeed with our propensity for procrastination?

Simple: Re-frame how you look at planning.
We hate planning because we remember the endless meetings, hours of research that doesn’t seem to get you closer to an answer and documents the size of War and Peace. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Developing a Marketing Plan is nothing more than setting goals and making a to-do list that will get you there. It’s really not much different than planning a party. You’re basically creating a plan for inviting more people you love to give you money and then tell other people why they should give you their money too. Sounds like a party to me.

I found a few really simple, one-page templates that can be used to develop marketing plans. I’d like to share two different ones with you. They’re designed to get you thinking and planning and making money, not writing lengthy documents.

(1) One-page marketing plan # 1 – The first marketing plan template is one that I’ve loosely adapted from learning’s from the original marketing guru, Philip Kotler. (Even he doesn’t believe in hundred-page plans). It’s a simple single sheet of paper that outlines the basic marketing components or categories like your Mission/Objectives, Target Market, Offering, Pricing, Distribution, and Communication— you know, those 4 Ps we love so much in marketing. But the good news is that that’s really all there is to it.

You can find something roughly along these lines in an old “Marketing Management” book that Kotler wrote over 20 years ago, but I think the principles are still valid.
You can use this format as a place to put your big thoughts so that you can focus on what the strategies are.

I am making the template available as a Word document — both a blank template and a mocked-up sample plan, which you can use as a guide for how to fill out the template.

Download blank template #1 (.doc format)

Download mocked-up sample plan #1 (.doc format)

(2) One-page marketing plan #2 — The second one-page plan format I use is a combination of the Kotler plan and the Guerrilla Marketing process as advocated by Michael McLaughlin. This one’s not much different from the Kotler plan, but it’s less academic and more focused on emotional triggers that will get your ideal customer to choose you.

I am also making this template available as Microsoft Word documents for you to download use to guide your marketing planning.

Download the blank template #2 (.doc format)

Download a mocked-up sample plan #2 (.doc format)

So, there you have the plans I’ve been using — and my hat tip goes to both of the masters for giving me a starting point to create these one-page marketing plan templates.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. What do you think of these one-page marketing plans? What do you use as a marketing plan, and why? In what ways would you change or improve the templates I’ve offered? Come on, share your ideas.

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet. Internet marketers use email marketing campaigns to promote their own and/or affiliated products to prospects.

Internet marketers build up mailing lists through various methods, including ‘borrowing’ mailing lists – either the spam-free opt-in lists or the spam-invested non-opt-in ones – from email marketing companies.

I have been told many times that the power of email marketing is in the size of the mailing lists. The more mailing lists members, generally means the more sales the Internet marketers make. 

Is this true?

 
Those that have been actually using email marketing responsibly (like I have been) have grown to understand that the size of the list has nothing to do with results. In fact, having a big list just to have a big list can hurt you more than help you because of the number of bounces, etc. Having a smaller, but high quality list can be cheaper to manage and can give you better results. By sending targeted messages and not “spraying and praying,” marketers do see repeat sales, because they are using email marketing to retain customers – not acquire them. It’s about knowing your audience – not volume. 

Responsible marketers are using advanced tools to segment their audience so that, ideally, the reader is only getting information relevant to their interests.

But then, with the larger number of email spams out there and the more wise and tech-savvy email users today, email marketing is heading into extinction. Or is it?

Email marketing campaign vs. email spams
People love to email spam for one obvious reason – hopefully, their spam emails are getting the attention of the email recipients, and get them converted into ‘buying’ what the spammers offer – most of the cases, ‘products’ that main purposes are for identity theft and digital robbery.
With the countless email spams out there, the legitimate and real emails from Internet marketers are often accidentally regarded as spams.

This in itself loses thousands, if not millions of dollars of the Internet marketers’ money.

Email marketing campaign vs. tech-savvy email users
Tech-savvy email users regard email marketing campaign as a mixed-blessing – in one hand, the products Internet marketers offer can be very useful for them, while in other hand, they simply just want to get the free offers that often offered by Internet marketers to build up the mailing lists.

Free offers?

Yes – it is common that Internet marketers offer something free to get prospects to sign up to claim the freebies. Free offers come in the form of free services, free products, or free reports.

What tech-savvy users do is this: they set up a free email account from Yahoo!, Gmail or others for the purpose of getting the free offers. This means, they won’t read any incoming emails from the Internet marketers, which also means zero conversion – very smart, eh? :)

Despite all that – is email marketing dead?
In my opinion, not quite.

Like I mentioned above, there are prospects who opt-in to receive offers through their email accounts.

The prospects can be product and/or service users, or Internet marketers themselves that hope to make money online through affiliation. They want to receive offer, thus increasing conversion.
One problem, though – opt-in email lists are hard to built, simply due to the nature of the lists – members are voluntarily choose to include themselves into the list.

One of the solution to overcome the problem is through partnering with an email marketing company that offer you opt-in mailing lists.

The problem with renting an email marketing list is that you’ll never know where your email blast will end up eventually. Some do register just for the sake of the ability to send their emails to the list – they register with free email address created especially for this purpose – so yes, they won’t read yours, in this case.

Remember, the keyword here is ‘opt-in’ – there are literally thousands email marketing companies that spam their mailing lists. You should stay away from them, as using their service will damage your products or services reputation.

EMail marketing works for me. For one thing the response rate is much better. If you get a 4% response rate in print it is considered a success. I notice between 25 and 30% open rate with html eMail.

As long as Internet marketers can offer quality products and/or services, the email marketing is pretty much far from being extinct.