In this multi-part series, I’m covering various applications that I’ve personally used and can recommend to anyone starting a web-based business. (Click here for Part 1.)

I’m going to dive right in and list more applications I use on a daily basis. I’m on a Mac, so Windows users please bear this in mind. I’ve tried to find some equivalents out there for you.

For Getting Things Done: Quicksilver, TextExpander, Evernote, Things

Quicksilver is one of those applications that I cannot imagine living without. If you’re on a Mac, it is an incredible tool to zip around your Mac and get things done faster than using the Finder and Spotlight. (Dash appears to be a decent PC equivalent.)

I’m not a power Quicksilver user, but it’s always at the ready to launch programs and find information super fast.

TextExpander is a Mac program that lets you create unique abbreviations or shortcuts that automatically type out longer words and phrases. These are quite helpful, for filling out addresses on forms and even routine stuff like salutations in emails. For instead, I can type breg and hit the space bar and voila, it turns into:

Best regards,

Brandon

I constantly discover new uses for TextExpander, such as saving tedious code snippets. This cuts down on formatting blog articles and other documents. FastFox is another software that works on both Macs and PCs. Both are around $20-25 for a single license.

Evernote is an amazing program that I’m still getting used to. Available for both Windows and Mac (both a free version or premium one for $45 per year), Evernote gives you a web-based site as well as a downloadable desktop version. Using either the web or desktop version (they work together to keep your stuff), you can “grab” and store just about any information you can think of. It’s useful for copying and saving informative web content and images, for example. But probably the best gee-whiz factor is the ability to upload photos to Evernote. That by itself is ho-hum, except when you sync the photos with the Evernote website, any content (text) within your images is now searchable. So let’s say you’re at Best Buy comparing different products, and you secretly snap a couple photos of the price tag and other info. Later, you can pull up Evernote to remember what you were looking at Ditto for that parking space number at the airport that you’d otherwise forget. Evernote also supports the use of tags to categorize information.

Things is a fairly simple “getting things done” software that I like. It’s in beta right now and is free, while the final version will cost $49 when released in January 2009 (or pay $39 now if you sign up for their newsletter before the official product launch).

I like Things mostly because they have a good iPhone app that lets me quickly jot down things I need to tackle, grocery shopping lists or whatever. I could use Evernote for this, but have found it’s buggy when I’m out of good cell range (due to the syncing issues). Things stands alone, meaning it is (for now) just a desktop program.

For Phone Calls: Skype and Kall8.com

Skype is crucial for me, particularly to save money on mobile calls. As a small business owner, I decided not to use my home phone for business, nor my cell phone per se. I initially set up a very inexpensive 800 number using Kall8.com. This is a great service, and for about $8 a month (and a cheap per-minute rate) people can contact me there. I set the Kall8 number to go straight into their web-based voicemail, and anytime someone calls I get an email. I could set it to automatically re-route to any other phone, but I’ve found the voicemail option works well and keeps the charges to a bare minimum.

Skype has proven more beneficial on a daily basis. I bought an inexpensive Logitech USB headset/microphone (around $30) and use it to make calls. I paid for a yearly Skype Out plan, for $29.50. This gives me free web calling in the U.S. and Canada. Since my work is U.S. based (I should reach out to my Canadian neighbors!), this is an unbeatable deal. I also just sprang for my own local Skype number, which comes with its own voicemail. I’m finding that since I use Skype so frequently, it will be nice to give people a number to reach me there. It also has options to re-route calls to my cell phone or wherever. And the cost was also low, $12 for three months (I used a Skype credit I had; otherwise, the longer you commit, the cheaper it is.)

I also use Skype for text chats, along with Apple’s iChat.

For E-Mail Campaign Management

I use Aweber to allow email signups through the site, and to send a series of autoresponders and email blasts to subscribers. My research with a lot of the top web gurus out there (like my friends at Internet Business Mastery) convinced me that this was a great, affordable solution (less than $200 invested so far). I’ll write more about email usage in upcoming articles.

For Project Management: Google Apps and Wrike

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about my appreciation for Google Apps. Google Calendar, Google Mail Google Docs are a powerful combination for keeping track of tasks to do, as well as all kinds of information related to the business.

When I’m consulting with clients, often it helps to set up a dedicated project management area. This allows a more robust system to assign tasks and deadlines, as well as store and share files in a central place. For years, I used Basecamp. I remain a fan of that product. However, I’ve been using another solution called Wrike, mainly due to a lower price point ($3.99 per month for Wrike’s most basic plan, vs. $24 per month for Basecamp’s.) So far, it’s met my needs—although with at least one client, we’ve reverted to using mainly Google Docs and email to share information!

For File Storage/Backups: Dropbox

I signed up for a year of online-based storage using Dropbox, which works with both PCs and Macs. The price: Free for 2GB of storage, or $99 a year for 50GB. The cool thing about Dropbox is that it keeps different versions of your files. So if you mess up and delete a file on your local machine, you can login and view or restore a previous version. Dropbox also makes it easy to share large files with others, either publicly or privately. I’ve used YouSendIt for big files also, along with Drop.io, two other worthwhile and affordable services.

For Photo Editing: Picnik

Anyone who has a blog or other content-sharing site knows what a pain it can be to resize and fix images. I have stopped using any desktop-based photo editing programs in favor of web-based Picknik (free or $24.95 per year for a premium version). It doesn’t get much easier (or fun) to edit photos, especially compared to the learning curve of a Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements). Picnik also lets you email your photos, create Flickr slideshows and more.

That’s all for now. If you have other applications you recommend for web entrepreneurs, please share them in the comments!

Photo credit: Ralphbijker

In this multi-part series, I’m going to cover various applications that I’ve personally used and can recommend to anyone starting a web-based business.

For those of you just reading for this site for the first time, take note that Web Business Freedom has been online since early September 2008. So it’s a mere babe in the woods compared to many sites. And right now, the site is primarily a blog used to share information as I establish an online presence and credibility (both for you, kind reader, as well as the soul-less bots from Google and other machines that creep and crawl through the site regularly, finding nothing of substance in a rambling sentence like this).

The point is, I’m not using any software for e-commerce or other really advanced activities (yet). Nevertheless, I’m using some smart stuff behind the scenes. Here is the first round of my must-have apps:

WordPress

I’m already written extensively about how to set up a website using WordPress. WordPress is the bedrock software for this site and hundreds of thousands of other web startups. It is open source goodness at its best, and it only going to get better with their next big release (coming soon!).

Read the previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) to decide which version of WordPress is right for you, WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

Google Apps

Cost: $50 per user account per year

Most people obviously know Google as the Big Kahuna of search, as well as a bunch of other amazing free software. But did you know you can get your own customized company email address, calendar and more from Google?

With Google Apps, you will gain enterprise-level functionality for your domain right off the bat, for free (ad-supported) or for the extremely affordable price of $50 per user account per year. See the comparison between the free and paid Google Apps versions.

At first glance, this might look like a trivial suite of services. But consider the combined power of the applications Google offers. It’s a tremendous value for startups, not to mention that all the information is readily available wherever you can get on the Internet.

The setup is a fairly simple process. After registering the Web Business Freedom URL (see previous article on registering a domain name, I headed over to Google Apps and signed up for the Premium Edition. It includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for my Gmail account, 25 GB of email storage, a variety of integration APIs (which I haven’t used), and telephone support for critical issues (also haven’t used this, as the service has worked as advertised).

If you have a domain already, you’re a step ahead; if not, Google can help register one for you, although I can’t vouch for how this works.

Once the plumbing is in place, you get your own company start page on Google, where you (or others using your domain) can preview your calendar and emails. You can also customize the page with news, weather and other widgets. Personally, I don’t use this start page, opting to go straight into my Web Business Freedom Gmail account.

Your own branded Gmail alone is well worth the price of admission to Google Apps. It’s just like the incredible personal Gmail account you might already have, but with your email address at your domain name instead of @gmail.com. It comes with the plenty of storage, the ability to search all your emails instantaneously, and built-in instant messaging with your contacts.

Gmail also integrates with Google Calendar, which you can use to set up both personal and business calendars that you selectively share with co-workers, friends, vendors and others. Again, this is a “company” version of your calendar when you use Google Apps. I also consider Google Calendar an essential application to keep track of all your commitments and get things done. I even set up a separate “calendar” to log calls to make (with notes added for completed calls). That way, both appointments and calls are both accessible with Google Calendar.

Finally, you get Google Docs and Spreadsheets. You can use Docs and Spreadsheets much like an online version of Microsoft Office. Create or import documents, edit them in your browser and share with others to collaborate in real time.

Google Docs is a real boon to keeping lots of information online and being able to share and edit files with others. Along with mindmaps I use in Mindmeister, I spend a great deal of time keeping track of the business in Google Docs.

FreshBooks

Cost: $14 per month (that’s for the plan I’m using, aka “Shuttle Bus”)

Every real business has to keep tabs on where the money’s coming from, and where it’s going. At this early point in my new business life, I just wasn’t ready to commit the time to install and learn QuickBooks, which is certainly a great product for small businesses and widely used by CPAs, including mine. However, it’s pricey and frankly a little complicated in my opinion. (And the same issues apply to their web-based version, which I’ve heard is not as good as the desktop version.)

So instead of QuickBooks, I went with a more user-friendly solution, the web-based software FreshBooks. It allows me to quickly set up clients and jobs, enter time and bill clients by email. There are also more advanced options to take payments online.

I’ve found the site to be pretty easy to use (especially compared to my experience with Quickbooks in the past), with just a few quirky things. I especially like how easy it is to send professional looking invoices by email.

The main dilemma at this point is exporting the right information out of FreshBooks for my accountant (who will of course import it into QuickBooks!). There are ways to do it, but not quite as intuitive as I’d hoped they would be. Still, all in all, it’s a simple, easy and cost-effective solution.

Outright

Cost: Currently free (the site is in Beta), though they “do plan to charge for certain features in the future.”

I was also lucky to have found another solution for logging expenses, just prior to signing up for Freshbooks, called Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap). Not only is it free (for now), the even better news is that it integrates directly with Freshbooks. With Outright, you simply enter any expenses you incur and assign them to the appropriate IRS tax category. Outright does a great job of calculating your estimated quarterly tax payments. And since it now connects to Freshbooks, the calculation includes income along with the expenses.

That’s it for this first round of vital apps I use. Stay tuned for more in part two.

If you’d like to suggest any essential applications for web-based companies, feel free to leave a comment below.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flattop341