Episode #4 – Technology Tools To Increase Your Productivity

Business Marketing News Update

In this episode David strays off of marketing and ventures into some time management issues as he talks about three online programs that he uses personally to increase productivity. (And, because they’re just fun too) Each of them has a free version and none of them requires any credit card info to get set up.

Referenced Links:

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Evernote *** You really need to give this one a try.

Podcast Transcript:

Hello, I’m really glad your here on the Business Marketing News Update Podcast, in today’s episode we’re going to stray a little from the marketing side of things and talk about some tools you can use that are probably a little more suited to the time management niche rather than business marketing, but these tools are so useful I really felt the need to share them with you.

So, this episode is all about how to increase productivity using technology. We’ll be talking about three different tools that will help you save all your important information and documents, as well as automatically sync them to all of your devices, from your home computer, work computer, smart phone or tablet you’ll have access to all the important documents you want.

The first one I’d like to tell you about is Dropbox, without exaggeration, I use this program every day. It works just like the “my documents” folder that sits on your computer right now.

You can create a document of any kind, word documents, excel spreadsheets, video’s, music files it doesn’t matter you can store it on dropbox. And what makes it even better, you can share these folders with friends, family, business clients or anyone else who has an email address that you want to share a folder with.

Once you share a folder with someone, anything you or they store in that folder will be available on your computer and theirs. It really makes sharing large files that can’t be emailed easily a breeze.

As I said I use this everyday and I use it for business and home. My wife and I have a shared folder with all of our favorite recipes and I also have shared folders with clients so we can easily share documents, whether it’s a video we’ve created for them, or a simple article we need their approval for, Dropbox works great for everything to do with the marketing campaigns we are handling for them. Our clients like it too, because of how easy it is to use and the simple fact that it’s a one step action to share all of this information.

And, it get’s even better still. You can get an account with two gigabytes of storage free of charge.

They’ll give you extra free space when you recommend dropbox to someone else online too. Now, I won’t be getting any credit for you signing up for a free account with them, I’d need to send you an invite through email so dropbox knows where the referral came from.

But, if you’re really feeling generous and want me to get the extra storage space… and I’d certainly be happy to have it. Shoot me an email and I’ll send you an invite.

The next cloud based program I want to tell you about is Google drive. If you’re using Google docs you may have heard of this one already. Google recently converted all of my Google docs over into Google drive. Anyway, you get most all the same uses with Google Drive that you get with dropbox, other than Google Drive gives you 5 gigabytes of space to start with.

One big difference is with Google drive you also get access to all of the Google docs tools, so you can create documents, spreadsheets and all the other documents google gives you access to and store it right in the same spot.

There is an app for your smart phone too, so all your documents are available on your mobile devices as well.

You can also download Google Drive to your computers desktop, so it works just like your my documents folder on your PC too. Of course all of the applications I’m talking about today work on either PC or MAC.

The last piece of software we’ll talk about today is a little bit different and has some really incredible features.

The program name is Evernote and if you haven’t heard of it you really should check it out. We’ll have links to all of these programs on the business marketing news update dot com website under episode number 4 “technology tools to increase your productivity”.

Evernote allows you to create documents and store them in different categories which they call notebooks and you can also tag all of your documents. As you might have guessed, allowing you to tag your notebooks gives you the ability to search for any item within Evernote with great precision and that is a major difference from either Google Drive or Dropbox.

Evernote also allows you to copy entire webpages right from your browser which makes it incredibly handy when you want to save something. You have a choice too, you can save just a link to the webpage or you can save the entire webpage just as it looks online and when you save it in Evernote, all the links on that webpage remain live.

Now with this feature you can save any webpage that has really good content that you would like to be able to refer back too. And, since it’s in Evernote you can tag it and it’s searchable. Pretty cool, eh?

Evernote also let’s you create a document and share it online with it’s own URL, so now you can easily share a document and send the URL to anyone you want to have access to it.

You can create a shared notebook which is really handy if you are creating a document and need to have others involved in the editing process, everyone can get to the document make changes all without ever having to email back and forth, you can check the document at any time to make changes without having to re-email it and try and keep track of which document is now the most current. Evernote effortlessly handles it all for you.

Take a look at these programs, as I said the links to them all are on the website at business marketing news update dot com under episode 4 “technology tools to increase your productivity”.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the business marketing news update podcast and I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave us a comment in the space available at the bottom of the page, unless you’re listening to us in itunes, in which case you’ll need to click over to the website to leave a comment.

Also feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments section as well.

As always, I wish you all the abundance and happiness that’s available to us all.