18 Essential Tools I Use in My Virtual Office

Have you ever wondered what it takes to run a virtual office?  Well here it is.  I listed the top 18 tools I use on a daily basis to manage my team of virtual workers that are spread out throughout the US, Mexico, Romania, and Canada!

Skype – Use daily to connect with team members, clients, and friends.  Skype groups are great for coaching clients.  Like Facebook groups but without the distractions.  We have special Skype groups for each project.  So for example if I have a project about a new website, I can easily put the people I need on the project on a special skype group, name the group accordingly, discuss the project and then move on.  When there are updates we post them to the correct groups and the conversations all stay organized!

 

Basecamp – Use daily to manage project.  Love the email feature.  It is important to make sure that all logins, passwords, emails, communications, and documents are all on one central place so you can easily find things months or even years later!  Just recently I have had clients contact me for logins from projects over a year old and since we used the Writeboards feature we were able to track them down easily!

SnagIt – Use daily to grab screenshots as I am working.  I love Snagit and is the one tool I could not work without!  I am trying to figure out how to auto save all of my images to Evernote but for now I can at least manually export the ones I want to share to Evernote.

 

WhatsApp – Since I have an international team, my team members and I use WhatsApp to text internationally without the fees.  It is great for also having instant group communications with family.

 

Infusionsoft – Use daily to setup campaigns, email sequences, nurture sequences.  Can’t wait to become an ICC (Infusionsoft Certified Consultant) in a few weeks!

 

CustomerHub – Use with Infusionsoft to manage my membership sites.

 

GoToWebinar – Use daily to meet with staff, clients, and also to record webinars that I can convert to videos for info products.

 

LiveScribe Pen – Use at all the conferences and live events to take notes and also on client calls. I like to take client call notes with a pen and paper and this way I can easily send the notes to my staff.

 

IPhone Camera – When I forget or can’t find my LiveScribe pen, I simply take pictures of my notes or drawings and email them to my staff.  Makes life easy.

 

IPhone Audio Notes – When out and about and I have an idea, I use the audio notes feature to record short messages that I then send to my staff via WhatsApp or email.  It is so much easier than trying to type out a message!

 

SignEasy App – Use this to sign documents with my Iphone.  So much easier than printing, signing, scanning, emailing!

 

Google Calendar – I am an avid scheduler.  I firmly believe that if it is not scheduled, it is not going to get done.  I may have a to do list a mile long, but every single to do gets appointed to a time slot on Google Calendar so that it is scheduled to be done.  Sometimes things happen… clients call… or prospective clients call… and things have to be moved but even this is easy.  I usually drag things I did not have time to do to Saturday as a placeholder and then when I have extra time throughout the week I slide them back in to an open slot and work on them.  Using Google calendar also allows my assistant to schedule my phone meetings for me without having to check to see if I am available.

 

Google Drive – I used to use Dropbox all the time but all of my staff’s folders got filled up so we switched to Google Drive.  I actually like Google Drive better now as it makes it easy to search for documents.

 

Hootsuite – I use this on my phone to send out updates while on the go.  I need a fourth monitor so I can have it open all day at home while working!

 

Ifttt.com – Now that it is all set up, I don’t have to use it, but it does run in the background making sure all of my “recipes” are working.

 

OptimizePress – I don’t personally use this but my staff uses it a lot to create landing pages quickly.

 

WordPress – Of course!  We build all our sites on WordPress and so this is running in the background all of the time.

 

Virtual Office – I use Regus as my virtual office and they are great!  It is easy to get office hours if I need a place to work and they also have board meetings for rent as well if I need to conduct group coaching to up to 12 people.

What about you? What tools do you use in your virtual office?

 

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