Online Tools for Small Business Owners

Who needs office machines and employees? You can run your small business using only online resources. It’s amazing what is available online for solo business people today. Here are some online apps that I found interesting:

Avast.com is virus protection software. Avast! has a free home version, a desktop version, a small business version, and a professional version. They also have a Mac version. They claim 80 million users and they have been voted a “Best Bet” by PCMagazine.

Carbonite is an automatic online backup service which monitors your entire hard drive or selected folders;they say their service is “secure and encrypted.” You can also access files remotely from any computer. At $54.95 a year it’s a good deal.

Efax.com is an online fax service that lets you send and receives faxes through email. EFax Plus, the lower priced version, has these features:

• $14.13 a month if you sign up for an annual membership, or $16.95 a month.
• A $10 setup fee, then
• You can send 30 free pages a month, then 10 cents a page, and
• 300 free faxes received a month then 15 cents a page.

GoDaddy also has a fax-by-email service you can buy for about the same price. I use it and it works very well. You may be able to bring your existing fax number to this service; it’s worth checking into if you want to get rid of your fax machine.

If you want your messages answered professionally but you don’t want to pay an assistant, try Gotvmail For $9.95 a month you can have one number answered (an 800 number or local number) and 100 monthly minutes. Set up your answering so you can have several extensions – your “sales department” and your “customer service” department can each have their own extension.

Unless you sign up for annual service, these are all monthly, so you can cancel them at any time. See what I mean? Maybe you should fire your assistant and throw out all those office machines.

Image source: sxc.hu