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For Small Business Owners

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About this lesson

You could run your business using only Evernote even without upgrading to paid levels.

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Topic

Evernote for Small Business Owners.

When to use

You could run your business using only Evernote even without upgrading to paid levels.

Instructions

1.Whip Through Your Tasks

When it comes to managing tasks, it’s essential to have a single place to add, store, search, and get notified about items that are due. Evernote meets every one of those requirements:

Add: You can install Evernote on your computer and on practically any other mobile device, which makes it super easy to add tasks on the go.

You don’t even have to have Internet for that. Your notes are synchronized across your different devices the moment you are reconnected to the Internet.

Search: Creating a separate notebook (called Task List, Action List, or whatever you’d like) for your tasks is a super easy way to quickly find your tasks.

Adding tags—ideally a combination of them—will make finding whatever you’re looking for even easier.

Here’s how your tagging system could look:

●Use “task” tag for all to-do items

●Use “task” and “follow-up” tags for when you need to remember to check in with someone

●Use “task” and “waiting” tags for projects that involve collaboration

●Use “task” and “project-name” tags for action items related to specific projects

●Use “task” and “client-name” for items that require you doing something for your client

Run general searches to get an idea of what’s in your pipeline. Do more specific searches to figure out whom you need to follow up with or what’s outstanding for a specific client or project.

Use a reminder feature where you can set a reminder and have the system notify you when an item is due.

2. Nurture Relationships

Relationships are the lifeblood of every business. Nurturing your network is easy with Evernote. All you need to do is enter details about them and set up reminders to follow up and check in with them.

I recommend creating a separate stack called Contacts or People. Depending on the nature of your business, you’d put in that stack notebooks like:

●Prospects

●Clients

●Partners

●Industry Leaders

●Competitors

●Referrers

Here’s a simple template for the kind of info you can track:

Name

Website

E-mail address

Mailing Address

Social Media profiles

In the notes for specific people, you might:

●Save web clips with interesting details you found about those people online

●Add highlights from your last conversation

●Schedule a reminder for when next to follow up

●Forward your email exchange (see lesson about forwarding emails into Evernote)

This can become your own sales pipeline.

3. Manage Clients

The way you manage your clients and client work depends on the type of work you do for your clients and how you work with them.

It will save you massive amounts of time down the line if you create templates for every type of collaboration. This way, every time you get a new client you simply copy your template, add the client info, and start going through the steps.

Templates for short-term commitments can look like this:

Business: [website]

E-mail: [e-mail address]

Industry: [name of the industry]

Service bought:

Possible upgrade? Yes/No

My notes:

Templates for long-term projects can look like this:

Business: [website]

E-mail: [e-mail address]

Industry: [name of the industry]

Service bought:

Client’s goals:

Timeline:

Milestones:

Contract returned: Yes/No

Payment made: Yes/No

Welcome packet sent: Yes/No

Initial consultation scheduled: Yes/No

To track the progress of your long-term clients, you might want to expand your template to include additional information.

For example, after each session, you can enter a short update in the client’s Evernote note listing:

Client’s wins since we last spoke:

Client’s struggles since we last spoke:

Today we discussed:

My observations:

Homework for next time:

Next time to discuss:

Having information about your clients, especially long-term ones, in the same place, easily accessible and retrievable, will make managing them a breeze.

4. Make Projects Happen

The most important tools you need to manage projects are a timeline, an information hub, and a central place for communications.

Timeline: To keep track of due dates and create a calendar for your project, integrate Evernote with your Google calendar using Zappier, which will create a calendar item out of any note that has a scheduled reminder.

Information hub: We’ve already established how you can turn Evernote into the most amazing information hub. Just make sure you create a new Project Name stack (or notebook for smaller projects) and continue uniformly tagging notes.

Besides web clips and PDFs you can also add into your project notes Google Drive and Dropbox documents, which is really convenient because all links in Evernote are live, so you won’t have to download the same files over and over again!

Communication hub: Evernote is also great for collaboration. You can share individual notes or whole notebooks with one or several people. Since the information lives on Evernote, you don’t need to worry about synchronization—once one of the collaborators makes a change, that note is automatically updated across all collaborators’ accounts.

As you can see, Evernote is one mighty tool. If you put it to use, you don’t need much else to run your business.

00:04 You could run your entire business using Evernote, and
00:07 you don't even need to upgrade to paid levels.
00:11 So in this lesson, we're going to take a look at a few business activities
00:15 that you can manage using Evernote.
00:18 Let's start with managing tasks.
00:21 When it comes to managing tasks, it's essential to have a single place to add,
00:26 store, search, and get notified about items that are due.
00:31 And Evernote meets every single one of those requirements.
00:35 You already know how easy it is to add information into Evernote.
00:39 And if you make sure that you either put those fasciculated
00:44 items into a single notebook or uniformly tag them,
00:49 you will be able to easily find what you're looking for.
00:54 Also, don't forget to use the Reminders feature to make sure that
00:58 every note reminds you of something that is due.
01:02 In a similar way you will use Evernote to manage your email.
01:06 So whenever you receive an email that you don't have time to answer or
01:11 you don't want to answer, you can send it into Evernote as a task so
01:16 that you don't have to make a mental note that you have to come back to that email.
01:22 And you can simply go on with the rest of your day until the time comes for
01:28 you to sit down and deal with that email.
01:32 This way you will be rest assured that there is nothing in your inbox that
01:36 requires your attention, and you didn't forget about that email completely because
01:41 sometimes it does happen.
01:44 You can also use Evernote to nurture relationships.
01:47 So for that, create a note or even entire notebook for
01:52 a specific person and start capturing information.
01:56 To make things easier for yourself,
01:58 you can use a template that lists different prompts so
02:04 that you capture all information about that person.
02:10 And as the time goes,
02:12 you can add more information about what that person likes, maybe there.
02:17 Birthday, maybe, highlights from your last conversation.
02:21 You can even set a reminder for
02:23 yourself not to forget to follow up with them or congratulate them with something.
02:29 So, Evernote can really help you to
02:31 nurture relationships with people in that way.
02:35 You can also use Evernote to manage clients.
02:39 Naturally, the way you manage your clients and
02:42 client work depends on the type of work you do.
02:46 But once you are clear on that step-by-step that happens every time,
02:51 you can create a template for every collaboration.
02:54 And whenever you get a new client, you'll simply copy that template,
03:00 add the client info, and start going through the steps.
03:05 Last but not least, Evernote is fantastic tool to manage projects and
03:10 that is because it can easily become your information and communication apps.
03:16 So again, adding information into Evernote is super easy.
03:20 You don't even need to be online to add notes or work on something.
03:27 And then, features like being able to share notes or entire notebooks and
03:33 have work chats with people will help you to keep in touch with everybody who you're
03:41 collaborating with on this project, and make sure that you make progress.
03:46 As you can see, Evernote is absolutely amazing as a business management tool,
03:51 and if you put it to use, you don't need much more to run your business.