Free Online Business Tools Every Business Should Have

At 5StarWebReviews, our goal is to help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys.

That’s why we offer the largest free tutorials collection on the internet. Along with our tutorials, we have decided to create free online business tools to help you grow your business.

Below are the list of free online business tools:

Google’s G Suite: Google is way more than a search engine. It’s one of the best tools for small business owners to use. With a Gmail address, your business can share documents, video chat, create spreadsheets and monitor your website’s analytics and more. If you’re not sure of what Google’s G Suite can do or how to work it, don’t fret. Google provides free online courses that show you the ins and outs of all their resources.

Evernote: Evernote is the holy grail of small business tools. Using just the free version of this application, your business can clip web pages, search for text inside images, share notes with colleagues and store up to 60 MB of new content a month. Evernote is the perfect tool for storing important documents and resources. Instead of keeping all your receipts and paperwork in a file folder, upload them to Evernote!

If your company decides to opt for the business profile, retailing at $14.99 per person per month, your company can sync all your notes and documents to your devices, forward emails into the system, scan and digitize business cards and password protect particular documents. Organization is huge when it comes to managing a successful small business—a huge reason why many startups vote Evernote as one of the best online business tools.

HelloSign: Legal documents. They’re one of the most difficult things to get right as a small business. That’s where HelloSign comes in. Using HelloSign, your small business can easily sign or request digitally signed documents from employees, customers or business partners. HelloSign takes the weight of legal documentation off your shoulders, a great free tool for small business owners.

Doodle: Doodle is one of the best free online business tools for those who work closely with their colleagues. If you need to schedule a meeting, an important luncheon or something of the like, Doodle makes it easy to pick the perfect time. All you have to do is just send out an email to the people in your workplace. In the email will be a link to Doodle. They’ll pick what days and times they’re available for whatever it is you’re trying to schedule. Then, boom! Doodle sends you back the best time to have your event. Pretty convenient, huh?

E.ggtimer: Greatness doesn’t have to be complicated. E.ggtimer proves that tenfold. Want to do a quick brainstorming session? Set aside a certain amount of time for a task? That’s easy with this website. Just specify how much time you want E.ggtimer to count and it will do it for you. it’s one of the most underrated and useful small business tools available online.

i-Autoresponder: One of the best free tools to help grow your small business is i-Autoresponder. It saves your company time on marketing tactics and analytics. The website works by helping your business build your brand, find your audience and engage your customers. Using i-Autoresponder sounds a lot easier than doing all of that work yourself.

Coffitivity: Do you find yourself getting distracted when doing paperwork? Filing your taxes? Give Coffitivity a try. This free online tool plays the sounds of a variety of different coffee shops through your speakers. It plays just enough sound to keep your mind from wandering to other things, but is also not distracting enough to keep you away from your work. It’s perfect for those used to working in a community environment.

Canva: If your small business has a blog or uses social media, it needs to use Canva. Canva is a great free tool for small business owners because it walks you through creating a variety of online infographics, headers and images that can be used to market your company. Make sure to also take advantage of their free photo and icon libraries!

Paletton: Need to find a color palette for your next business card, website or flyer? Try Paletton. This free online tool assists you in choosing complementary or adjacent colors that work well with one or two shades of your choice. Use Paletton when you’re trying to add color to your office or landing page!

Slack: Slack is hands down one of the best free tools for small business owners. It’s a website (and app) that lets you connect everyone in your workplace via an online chat room. Slack is particularly great for online-only businesses. It lets colleagues share documents, collaborate on projects and set reminders for meetings or deadlines.

Trello: If you think your business could be a fan of slack, make sure you also sign up for Trello. Trello is basically an online to-do list. It lets you track what you’re doing, what your workers are doing and when everything needs to be done. If your company has workers that do projects independently, Trello is the perfect way to organize what has been done and what still needs to be accomplished.

You can have a personal Trello board listing what you need to do for an upcoming event. At the same time, there can be a shared company Trello board that lists every time someone posts on social media, what they said and when they said it. Talk about organization and teamwork! There’s a reason why Trello is considered one of the best online business tools.

HootSuite: If your small business is planning on using social media to market, you need HootSuite. It’s difficult enough managing personal accounts, let alone business ones.HootSuitee is a great online tool for small businesses because allows them to monitor and post from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more—all on one website! You can schedule content, manage accounts and view post reach.

If your company is social media-centric, you need to be using HootSuite. Don’t worry if it sounds overwhelming, Hootsuite offers a free online certification program so that anybody can understand how to operate its various features.

Kickstarter: If you have a small business that is in the market of creating, consider using Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a free online tool that allows businesses and people to crowdfund different projects and ideas. If you have a big idea but can’t seem to get enough money to make it a reality, put it on Kickstarter. You’ll have to set up different incentives so people will want to back your project, but it’s worth it to see something you’ve dreamed about come to life.

Google URL Shortener – Best URL shortener for creating branded links

1stURL is a full-featured URL shortener service that can be used to not only turn long URLs into short ones, but also track the traffic coming from your links. Its dashboard shows trending links and general statistics, while an analytics page lets you dive into traffic by device, location, and referrers. You can also drill down into clicks by the time of day. Tags, which you can add to your shortened links, let you view your link website traffic in new and custom ways and are perfect for tracking and coordinating campaigns.

Google My Business

Over 100 Billion searches are performed on Google every month. So, if your business is not discoverable on Google, you are losing out on a huge business opportunity. Fortunately, Google makes it easy for small business to list their business on Google products such as Maps and on search engine.

Google My Business is a free tool that lets you list your local business easily. Its a great way to build your web presence and generate more leads.

 Goolge For Retail Businesses

We are sure you haven’t heard about Google Retail yet. This free tool offers solutions for merchants to list their inventory on Google and start shopping AD campaigns. You can create a Trusted Store and display customer rating or manage inventory across Google using Merchant Center. Google Trusted Stores have to pass a test for reliable shipping and customer service, and in so doing, they earn the right to display a Trusted Store badge.

Depending on the location of your business, Google also offers Android Pay and delivery service called Google Express.

Think With Google

Think With Google is a nice place where you can get industry insights, useful articles, research documents, case studies, various infographics and interviews of industry leaders. This site is updated constantly with loads of useful content that you can use to grow your business.

It also has collection of creative AD campaigns you can draw inspiration from.

Google Analytics

The ultimate goal of any business is to attract more eyeballs and generate more leads. In the case of companies that sell products or services online (like a cloud accounting software), their website is the only source from where the customer gets to know about the business.

Everyone is happy when leads flow consistently but we must find out the source of traffic, which pages they spending their time on, their location, etc. Google Analytics is a great free tool that tells us everything about our website visitors. You can spend some time learning how to use it and get some really useful insights.

If getting data from Google Analytics sounds little technical, you can take help of your developers or the web design company who manages your website.

Google Alerts

At ProfitBooks, we have to constantly keep ourselves updated with latest developments in the accounting and taxation industry. For this, we rely on Google Alerts. This very useful free service from Google sends you an email alert whenever there is any news about topic of your interest appears on internet.

With this, you can stay updated about your industry news and can even track your competitor! For example, you can sign up to get notified whenever someone mentions your company, products, executives, or your competition. Its super simple to use – you just need to add a topic or a search phrase and create an alert.

Google Trends

Every business needs to evolve with the changing times. You need to determine what kind of marketing language and descriptive terminology to use for your sales materials, website copy, and search engine optimization.

In addition to the Google Alerts, Google Trends can be a great tool for helping you monitor industry trends. It enables you to evaluate the popularity of certain terms, compare them against other keyword variations, analyze how their popularity varies over time and in different regions/languages, and shows related keywords, which can be helpful in getting new keyword suggestions.

Google Correlate

Google Correlate is a close cousin to Google Trends – it’s actually Google Trends in reverse (and just as powerful). With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a data series of activity (over time). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern.

In Google Correlate, you can find correlations across time AND space. If you trying to define your target personas for a new product or service, you can use each correlation to get deep insights about your audience.

The more fascinating part of Google Correlate is the Search by Drawing function. Draw a fun graph and Correlate will give you search keywords that best match your graph creation.

Google Forms

You might be frequently using Google Docs, Sheets and Slides but very few people use this wonderful free tool – Google Forms. Its simple yet powerful way to collect data using online forms. There are so many use cases – Maintaing sales leads, taking short surveys, conducting interview tests, etc. At Profitbooks, we use it to collect feedback from the customers.

Google Blogger

This Blogging service from Google is popular among individuals but very few businesses are using it to it’s full potential. Start using Google Blogger for business and write about product updates or latest company news. Best part is, Google will give you some SEO love and your content will get indexed more quickly on Google search.

Keyword Planner

If you are planning to start advertising on Google, Keyword Planner will give you an estimate of search traffic and budget. Its a great tool to find out which keywords people are searching for more often. You can slice and dice the data based on geography, gender, interest, browser, mobile device and much more.

Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is another useful product that give you valuable information about Site Traffic, Site Health, Optimisation suggestions and various other resources.

You can submit your webpages as well as your sitemap to Google’s index.

Google Feedburner

With Google Feedburner, you can allowing your visitors to subscribe to your website content, particularly your blog, using RSS feeds. After subscribing, visitors can receive regular updates via their web browsers, RSS readers, or email. This can prove very helpful to the growth and reach of your business blog.

Google Scholar

Fed up of routine articles on a specific topic – like business growth? Get more meaningful information using Google Scholar. It is an online, freely accessible search engine that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. It searches a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Hangouts For Business

Google Hangout started as a simple communication platform for individuals but with its powerful video conferencing feature, more and more businesses started using it. You can have a conference call with your overseas customers, present a webinar to your users, host a QnA session online, interview candidates and even hold group meetings.

Google Calendar For Business

Google calendar is not just about keeping track of your meetings. It has many hidden functions that can improve your productivity. At ProfitBooks, we have to conduct product demos almost every day. With Google Calendar, we can setup appointment slots so that our customers can schedule the demo easily.

Apart from this, you can create different calendars for different purpose (specific to a team, etc),  schedule meetings with groups using “Find a Time” or “Suggested Times”, add a Google Hangout to your event, browse interesting calendars, sync it with your CRM and do much more.

Google Keep

There is numerous tools to manage notes like Evernote and OneNote. However, Google Keep is light weight and super easy tool that comes handy while managing daily chores.

Best part of Google Keep is its native integration with other Google services. It has a spectacular system for setting reminders that ties directly into other Google services.

For example, you can create a note in Keep and then tell the app to remind you about it at a specific date and time or even when you are at a certain location (say, at a client’s office or the grocery store). When the appropriate time or place arrives, you’ll get a notification on phone as well as in your Inbox.

Google Drawings

We all know about Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides but very few people know about its “neglected” siblings. Google Drawings is the freshest among all Google Drive tools. It is not a full-blown image editor like MS Paint but the graphic editor is more powerful for one simple fact – it is a real-time collaborative application. At its most basic, it is an online whiteboard.

Lay out diagrams, create flow charts, and then easily add them to other documents or embed them on a website with Google Drawings.

Here are a few specific things you can do:

• Edit drawings online in real time with anyone you choose, and invite others to view your edits in real time.
• Chat with others who are editing your drawing, from within the drawings editor.
• Publish drawings online to the world as images, or download them in standard formats.
• Insert text, shapes, arrows, scribbles, and images from your hard drive or from the Web to enhance a diagram or painting.
• Insert drawings into other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides using the web clipboard, then tweak them inline.
• Design an Infographic.
• Screen design with Wireframes.

Google Groups

Google Groups is one of Google’s oldest services but still unknown to most people. It is a collaborative space for online discussions around any topic. Each group has its own email address, and members can share information using this single email address instead of emailing each member separately. Discussions are threaded and you can join a conversation on Google Groups or via email if you are part of a group’s mailing list.

A Google Group can be a forum, a Q&A website, a customer support center, a knowledge base, a shared platform for all of Google’s tools, and much more. Any small and big organization can use Google Groups to facilitate communication. You can even embed a group on your website to build up user engagement with your site visitors.

Google Resizer

As more and more devices are coming up with different screen sizes, crafting an user experience for a website or app that’s intuitive and powerful is a tricky proposition. To help Web designers achieve a balance, Google has introduced a useful utility called Resizer.

With this tool designers can test Material Design across platforms, and see where the breakpoints are. Rather than hope for the best when designing a Webpage, Resizer shows you — in real time — if the site is recursive for mobile.

It was designed for Google’s material design but it works fine with any URL. Its a great way to test how your website is visible on different devices.

Google PageSpeed

Google give a lot of importance to how quickly your webpage loads as this directly affects the visitor experience. To help developers to optimize the webpage, Google introduced couple of handy tools under the name PageSpeed.

With this tool, you can find out the possible issues that might be slowing down your website. Google also suggests ways to fix the errors. Faster loading pages get better ranking on Google search engine.

 URL Shortener (goo.gl)

Sometimes sharing a long URL on social networks like Twitter can be painful. This is where Google’s URL Shortener comes handy.  You can feed any long URL to it and this tool generates a short link that can be shared anywhere.

Not only this, you can get detailed analytics on number of clicks, referrers, browsers, country and much more.

Google Classroom

Designed for teachers and students, Google Classroom helps easily connect the class, track their progress and achieve more together.

Teachers can create classes, distribute assignments, send feedback, and see everything in one place. Google Classroom ties Google’s many products together to help educational institutions go to a paperless system.

5StarWebReviews

Average monthly US traffic (Alexa): 6.48 million

US ranking (Alexa): 957

Business reviews for: any business

5StarWebReviews is an online small business service directory, search engine and review site that provides small businesses with the information to network.

5StarWebReviews: a directory with solid traffic volume and review capabilities

The site helps small businesses connect and grow through their community where users can buy from, partner with and connect to companies.

Developer Tools

Google offers hundereds of tools for developers to help them with creating better web application, mobile apps, build apps on top of Google products such as Maps and lots more.

Most of these Google products are unknown to a normal internet user. Check out these developer tools site more for information.

Google Digital Garage

Digital Garage is a fantastic resource from Google where you get free tutorials on everything from your website to online marketing and beyond. Choose the topics you want to learn, or complete the whole online course for a certification from Google.

Topics range from building online presence, improve search engine rankings, using social media, selling online and lot more.

We are sure, you didn’t know about this hidden gem from Google.

Google is awesome and it offers many useful of tools to grow your business. No matter if you are a developer or a business owners, there is something for you.

• Free Business Name Generator – Easily get business name ideas.
• WordPress Theme Detector – See which theme a specific WordPress site is using.
• Website Contact Forms – WPForms Lite makes it easy to create contact forms in WordPress.
• Easy Website Analytics – See how people find and use your website with MonsterInsights Lite.
• All in One SEO Toolkit – Optimize your website for SEO and increase search rankings.
• Viral Giveaways & Contests – Grow your website traffic with our viral giveaways plugin, RafflePress.
• Coming Soon Pages – Use SeedProd to create beautiful coming soon and maintenance mode pages for your website.
• Instagram Photo Feed – Create custom Instagram photo feed and display it in WordPress.
• Custom Facebook Feed – Add your Facebook page and group content on your WordPress site.
• Custom Twitter Feed – Embed your Twitter feeds on your site.
• Custom YouTube Feed – Easily display your YouTube videos and playlists in WordPress.
• Call Now Button – Add a call now button on your site.
• Insert Headers and Footers – Easily embed scripts on your site without writing code.
• Social Proof Widget – Add real-time user activity notifications on your site with TrustPulse.
• Website Push Notifications – Communicate with visitors after they’ve left your website with PushEngage notifications.

Final Thoughts

As we create more free business tools, we will add them on this page.

Do you know any free app online business tool that we missed out? Please share in comments below.