Jan 28 10 Essential Small Business SAAS Products

Software as a service (SAAS) is an exciting growth industry and if you are running a business, chances are you have subscribed to a version of it in the past or will very soon.

Here at Marin Web Design, we are big on SAAS products. In fact we are monthly subscribers to over a dozen different types of SAAS.

Because software as a service, when produced correctly, can make your business considerably more efficient. We suggest you take a look at these ten solutions that we just can’t live without.

Disclaimer: We are not affiliates nor being paid a commission on recommending any of the following software solutions. We are long time users and loyal followers and genuinely wish to share our findings with you for the betterment of your business.

The following list may skew in the direction of a web master tools list, but I assure you anyone that can type on a keyboard can use these services. They truly offer intuitive design and a robust feature set with massive amounts of logic. They just make life better and upon trying any one of them I’m sure you’ll agree.

1. Esurance.com Insurance will never be the same…You can sign up, get a quote and print an insurance card without ever talking to a person. Now that’s cool! Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever talking to anyone at esurance to date.

2. Wufoo.com Simple and easy to use web forms. Create forms for lead capturing, surveys or polls, event RSVP’s, donations and contact forms.

3. Freshbooks.com The most simple yet powerful way to invoice and collect money from clients. If you are running a business and are spending more than 1 hour a week on billing, stop reading this blog right now and go sign up for an account. Besides one other benefit is it creates a P and L (profit and loss statement)!

4. SEOMoz.com This one is definitely for Internet marketers but I bet if you sign up for a free account you’ll be fascinated as an entrepreneur at the tools Rand Fishkin and his team have developed. You may know of one version of competitors your business has but a whole other flavor of competitor is the one that beats you in search engine rankings for keywords relevant to your business. The SEOmoz pro tools allow you to find out who those competitors are and create an SEO strategy to dominate the SERPs. Don’t rely on some SEO company to grow your business, learn and empower yourself to take charge of your Internet marketing. I’m sure glad I did!

5. Basecamphq.com The amazing crew at 37signals created the ultimate project collaboration software online. Multiple members can interact on a secure platform that allows you to calendar and schedule meetings, upload files, create to-do lists and engage in group thinking using their writeboards. Definitely a staple SAAS tool for us. Highly recommend.

6. Yext.com Ever wonder why certain small businesses show up in the google places local results while yours is nowhere to be seen? Citations have been a long guarded SEO secret to good local search rankings and overall traffic to your small business website via referral sources. The smart team over at Yext.com decided to create a simple SAAS offering that allows you to make sure your business name, address and phone number are consistent across 30 major citation directory sites such as Yelp, Yahoo and Superpages among others. The fee is, in my opinion high at $495, but that’s not stopping us from leveraging it as an efficiency tool for our clients. In all honesty I have to say every single small business in the U.S. should sign up for Yext, it would make the Internet much more fun if these large directories were actually relevant and updated by the business owners themselves. Big praise to these very sharp folks. To your success Yext!

7. Google Analytics See where your website visitors are coming from, which keywords they searched to find you, how long they spent on your site and a whole host of other metrics and behavioral data on your website’s visitors.

8. Olark.com Simple live chat widget for any website. Provide support to your website visitors in real time and convert at a higher rate by engaging your audience.

9. 99Designs.com Crowd source graphic design that is so powerful and effective your head may spin.

10. Unbounce.com Quickly develop and deploy powerful sales pages on the Internet in seconds or minutes not hours and days. This software rocks! You have to go to their site to really get it if you’re new to sales landing pages or conversion optimization and multi-variate testing.

My goal here is to share with you ten of the best tools we use to run our business. I hope you discover which ones help you make your business better. Do you know of a sweet app that we’ve missed and others should know about? Let the discussion begin.

- The Marin Web Design Team

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