Don’t buy software, you can get it for free
Cutting your computing budget
I want to help you save Cash and I am never going to ask you for a dime in return.
Every year I save hundreds of pounds by not spending any money on software. This whole exercise began when I was looking at Sage Software as I needed one system to manage the key functions in my business. I am lucky enough to be running most of my key business activities using software that cost me nothing. So here is a skill they won’t teach you at business school. I know for a fact that most folk that work in small businesses dont know or practice the steps I share with you here.
I just follow these three steps to get the free tools.
* Search for ten minutes max per day for each type of free tool.
* Go get yourself a free copy of Evernote (it’s free, just serach Google).
* Ten minutes at the end of each day trying out what you find.
I would do this exercise for about one month to get a list together and implement all of the software you nedd. To get what I am talking about here try these tools now, I use then all the time and they work well.
Just to be clear what I have done below is listed the software you will have to pay for on the right hand side of the page (these are names you will have definitely heard of, the point here is to make your understanding of what each tool does) and on the left I have listed the free software.
Here we go:
Just type the name of the free product to the search engines
One system to manage customers and accounting
salesorder.com pricing: free Sage Software – really expensive and only does Accounting
Creating and writing Documents
Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100
Or
OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)
Sharing ideas online
Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200
Making videos
Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300
Teleseminars
DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month
My thanks to the Sage Software incident for the inspiration!motivation to blog this and help you out.
I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…
