Productivity Zone

We thought we'd make up for it with our top ten apps; a "best of" compilation from a year's worth of hands-on experiences with the apps and services. These are the tools we use every day and depend on to keep our sanity and keep our businesses running.

Kimba digs into ways to be more effective with Instagram. Tips on captions, tags, searching - everything you could ask for.

We'll pick on Google Analytics for a moment. Their reports provide tons of data, but it's not in the most attractive or easy to understand layout. Whatagraph turns that data into something your clients can understand. Take bounce rate, for example. I'm always asked to explain what this metric means. Whatagraph gives you a definition and a typical range of values so your clients can better understand what they're looking at.

The top players in the cloud storage arena are Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box. We're doing a comparison of features and prices so you can make an educated choice which one is the right fit for your business.

It's no surprise that if you don't ask for your money, you're not going to get paid. That's why this week we're showing you some of the best invoicing tools we've used. Some are free, some aren't, but you know that saying: you have to spend money to make money.

Not happy with conference calls? Tired of all the disembodied voices and no visual cues to see if Bob is attempting to be witty again or is just confused? Sounds like it's time to consider video meetings.

Kimba and Glen take a look at the current video conference offerings and try out a couple ones that are new to the market. No webinar apps, this is for interactive meetings.

PDFs. Everybody reads them, some apps give you a "Save as..." way to make a simple one. There's a huge amount of flexibility in the Portable Document Format (PDF) that lets you create forms and other interactive documents. The question remains though: what tool can I use to make or edit a PDF? Give a listen to learn about Adobe Acrobat DC and Smile's PDFPen.

Virtual Assistants, or VAs, have been a growing part of the "gig economy" for several years. While the folks on eLance and Fiverr generally occupy the artistic or creative roles, VAs usually perform office-related tasks. Need someone to book your travel reservations, process forms and paperwork that you might think of as routine, make calls or do research for you? Consider a virtual assistant and free up your time for your core business work.

Writing the next great American novel? Maybe it's an academic or technical paper or even a screenplay. whatever it is you're creating, save your sanity by using the right tools for the job. Scrivener lets you organize your thoughts, create a corkboard to pin your notes to, update your outline with drag and drop.

Fast, Reliable, Cheap: pick any two. That's the adage for lots of things, and website hosting is no exception. Today's podcast looks at the pitfalls people make when choosing business website hosting. We'll point out how to avoid those problems and give you alternatives that are affordable (because cheap isn't an option if you want fast and reliable - and you do).