If you have been lucky to be involved in a startup venture, you probably know you need to wear multiple hats to get things done. Unlike what you get in the corporate environment, you don’t have the luxury of time in a startup. You have to move fast and be agile if you want your startup to survive and grow. That’s why most successful startups use software to save time and get more things done. Every business uses software packages such as Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. But a startup needs more than that. It’s nice to be able to draw charts or collaborate with others over the Internet, but you are also going to need software to develop business and marketing plans and find answers to your technical questions. After all, you don’t want to waste the time you don’t have looking for answers in the wrong places.

The following software packages not only allow you to get more done in less time, they also let you save a lot of money in the process. Remember, running a startup is not easy but you can do more by using the technologies around to your advantage:

Business Plan Pro: the software that got me started with my own startup. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do, but going through sample plans offered with this software helped me develop my own business plans in a more effective fashion. And it saved me time too. If you are working on your start-up plan and need guidance, this is the best software to own.

Marketing Plan Pro: very similar to Business Plan Pro in design, but it addresses your marketing needs. If you are looking to manage your own marketing plans more effectively, this software is a good option to consider.

Quicken Legal Business Pro: truly a life-saver. When you are trying to start a business and form a company, you are going to have a lot of questions and challenges ahead of you. You can spend hours on Google to find credible information, or your can just use Legal Business Pro to save time. The documents included are truly life-savers.

Peach Tree Professional Accounting: the software that I use to manage my financial information. It’s always good to track how much is coming in and going out, and what you can do to grow your business. Peach Tree helps you automate your invoices, checks, and employee payroll

Adobe Captivate: a great way to save time training new employees. You can easily record screen-casts, videos, and so on. You can also develop interactive training sessions for your employees. Not cheap but saves you money in the long run.

There you have it. These packages are by no means all you need, but they do increase your productivity when it comes to running your startup. You may have to wear multiple hats but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use technology to your advantage.

Your take: what’s your favorite startup software?

Whether you are an online business owner or own an offline local business, you can use the power of the Internet to your advantage to drive leads to your business and increase your profits. You can have the best local, national, or international product in the world. But if people don’t know about what you are offering, they are not going to come to you for your business. Every business owner wants more Internet traffic, but not everyone goes about getting online traffic the right way. There are thousands of ways to get traffic for your business. You just have to decide which traffic source matters to you the most, and whether it’s worth your effort to pursue non-traditional traffic generation sources.

If you are a business owner and looking for more traffic for your business, here are 25 ways you can go about increasing the size of your audience:

1. SEO: search engine optimization is the cheapest way to get traffic. You got to have a search engine optimized website however (SEO resource).
2. Pay per click: getting traffic from Google Adwords or Yahoo! search marketing is one of the best (but expensive) way to get traffic (resource).
3. Twitter: is quickly becoming a great source of traffic for businesses.
4. Facebook: another great social network to get traffic to your website.
5. Social News Sites: sites such as Digg and Reddit can be effective traffic drivers as well (submission service).
6. Directories: should be a part of your SEO efforts (submission service).
7. Blogs: displaying your content on other blogs can help too (resource).
8. Facebook Ads: you can advertise on Facebook to get more traffic as well (Fads)
9. Article Marketing: pushing your products with articles can help too (EzineArticles).
10. LinkedIn: a great way to reach to your target audience and gain their business.
11. YouTube: doesn’t need any introduction. Great for going viral.
12. StumbleUpon: advertising on StumbleUpon or just getting your site voted by the community can drive big traffic to your site.
13. ClickRiver: advertising on Amazon can be another decent way of driving traffic (CR).
14. Giveaways: giving away things is one of the best ways to go viral online (just give away an iPhone 3G S or another hot gadget).
15. Free service: you can also put up your service up for grabs to go viral.
16. Information: giving away information for free can help as well (e.g. reports).
17. Newsletter: building a killer newsletter gives you access to targeted leads (Aweber).
18. Podcast: what a better way to get some following going with a killer podcast.
19. Video-cast: creating a video show on the web can help your business generate leads.
20. Blog: still one of the best ways to drive traffic to your business. Easily set up your site with Wordpress.
21. iPhone: building an iPhone application for your business helps too.
22. Offline Marketing: you can always give away business cards, brochures, pens, and … (offline marketing).
23. Blog Comments: commenting on other blogs can build your traffic gradually.
24. Forums: your signatures on niche forums can build your traffic gradually as well.
25. Affiliate Program: creating your own affiliate program is another cool way to build traffic (idev).

Stay tuned for the 2nd part of this series for more specific ways to drive traffic to your business.

So you take the risk and start your own business. You want to control everything and put your business in the best situation possible to succeed. But you can’t do it all. You can try, but it’s not possible. There is just too much work to do to get a business of the ground, which means you are going to have to delegate non-core activities, and divide and conquer the rest with your partners.

So what should you outsource? Anything that is not mission-critical and of high importance to your business. In other words, you don’t want to outsource your core activities – what you do best. But you can always outsource parts of your promotional activities (SEO, SMO), and your programming. The same thing can be said about IT, legal, and other business activities that may not be core to your business. Thankfully, there are many places that let you outsource your tasks and get your work done faster.

Here are a few ways to outsource your business activities:

Coding and Development

• Rent a Coder: RAC is a great place to find coders, writers, and everything in between. Anything that you want to do is covered here. There are hundreds of categories to choose from, and these guys take care of you. You won’t be robbed on this site.
• oDesk: oDesk is another one of those top outsourcing sites that is designed to gain you access to the global markets. They too provide you with tools to manage your projects more effectively.
• Guru.com: Guru.com is a great site to reach out to start-ups and smaller companies and get more sophisticated projects done. I have seen highly complicated projects posted there (e.g. Web 2.0 start-ups).
• LivePerson: LivePerson a great place to outsource programming. If you are looking for coders, this is a decent place to look.

Freelancers for Misc Activities

• Elance: Elance is not only a great place to find work but also those who provide services.
• Virtual Employee: Virtual Employee helps you find virtual assistants and all kinds of help.
• Freelancer China: looking for Chinese employees? Freelancer China is the way to go.
• TheFreeLanceNation: TheFreeLanceNation is another place to look for programmers and elancers.
• HireMyMom: HMM is a great place to find professional moms.
• iFreeLance: if you are out of luck so far, you cna give iFreeLance another try.

Continue reading Online Business 101: Outsourcing Is Key

Whether you own a business or just have a blog that you are treating as a hubby, you are going to have to drive traffic to your  business if you want to survive. You can always try paying for traffic and get lots of traffic with pay per click marketing, but that is going to depend on your budget. It’s so easy to spend a fortune and blow through your budget without making real profits. Pay per marketing is effective but you have to be very good at it, and even then you’ll have to combine multiple tactics (SEO, offline, …) to manage your cost per acqusition and increase your margins.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to a website is by using social networking and bookmarking sites to get the word around it. Think about it. If your site is submitted and dugg on Digg.com, you are going to get a whole lot of free traffic that you wouldn’t get otherwise. And if you have real good content or services that you can offer to your visitors, there is no reason your site won’t get some love from Digg or other social networking community members. Let’s not forget the SEO ramifications of submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites either. Not only you get back-links that could help you climb the search engine rankings, you may even get ranked for highly competitive keywords through your pages on social bookmarking sites.

Taking advantage of social bookmarking sites is a no brainer, but there are hundreds of them around and submitting each page to these sites can be a hassle. Most of these sites require you to create an account and verify them before you can use their service. You’ll also have to manage your passwords, secret questions, and so on. It’s just too much hassle for a business owner to go through. And you can use your time on other more important chores. Thanks to social bookmarking automation services such as Social Maximizer, you won’t have to do it all by yourself.

Social Maximizer is a cool social media automation service that lets you submit your pages to hundreds of social bookmarking services without having to lift a finger. You will have to set a title and description for each entry, but you won’t have to create accounts and submit stories by hand. What I love about Social Maximizer is the fact that unlike other social bookmarking automation services, you get to choose what goes live. That way you can not only avoid spamming these networks but also get more value out of your each entry.

Services such as Social Maximizer are life savers for your business. They let you concentrate on more core business activities and still drive you lots of free traffic to bring down your costs per customer. Best of all, they don’t spam these social bookmarking sites, which means you won’t get banned. Best of all, they don’t cost much (18 cents per submission in Social Maximizer’s case). If you own an online business and are looking for more traffic, Social Maximizer is a no brainer.