Moms Online Business Coach

An essential skill for anyone with working from home with any online business is how to manage their time effectively.  After all, there is actual business tasks and customer service, planning and strategics, building content, social networking, blogging, e-marketing, building website traffic, search engine optimization and tweaking.  The question is, as one person, how to do you get it all done?

One of the biggest advantages of using the internet heavily for business is the number of multi-tasking “tools” that are available to people.   Everyone has their preferences and their own tools that work best for their niche. But since I was asked the question, I’ll give you the list of my internet tools that I personally use.

First, my foundation, my Internet Browser.

I started using FireFox about 6 months ago and I never looked back.  I do also use FLOCK on occasion if I am doing heavy social networking, but I really love all the functions I have built inside FireFox to get the most of my work time.

Tools

Once I installed the FireFox browser that took a non-techie like me about 4 minutes I was then excited to see their extensive list of “add-ons“.

Here is the list of the add-ons I personally use:

• Alexa Sparky
• BetterGmail
• Clipmarks
• FireFTP
• LaterLoop
• Rankchecker
• ScreenGrab
• SearchStatus
• SEO for FireFox
• Shareaholic
• Socialmedia for Firefox
• Squidoo
• Stumbleupon
• TwitterFox

Above is a picture of what my browser actually looks like on the top.

What do they all DO?

Alexa Sparky

Gives you simple Alexa Data in your Toolbar
BetterGmail

The best Gmail grease monkey scripts in one plug in
Clipmarks

Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.
FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
LaterLoop

LaterLoop actually is the one of a couple add-on that I use that is not listed on FireFox. I just found it about a week ago and am excited about learning how to use this tool. The biggest plus to me is marking something for the ability to read it later or read it offline. I’m still playing with it, but it came highly recommended.

Rankchecker by SEO Book

Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? The Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search- enter your URL and your Keyword and it will give you quick results of where you are in the page ranks. No more sifting through 10 pages of search results searching for your website!
ScreenGrab

Screengrab saves entire webpages as images…
SearchStatus

Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
SEO for FireFox
Shareaholic

Do you spend a whole lot of time looking at things on the Web, and end up finding piles of things that you want to share with other folks? Tired of copying and pasting endless URLs? Shareaholic allows you to share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages quickly via a wide array of web 2.0 social websites without cluttering up your browser! Shareaholic currently supports: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter, ycombinator, bzzster, etc. * Shareaholic was the Grand Prize winner of Extend Firefox 2, a Mozilla sponsored contest for the best Firefox addons
Socialmedia for Firefox
Squidoo

Official Squidoo extension update for Firefox 3.0
Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
TwitterFox

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ statuses of Twitter. You can set the refresh timing and a small box will pop up on your bottom toolbar when tweets are refreshed. This also gives you three tab settings for all your tweets, those that are directed to you, and one for direct messages.

One more add-on that can be useful is the Internet Explorer tab with the IE add-on. Especially if you want to do quick checks on how formatting looks in different browsers.