In the online business world, there are many ways to get things done and be successful. I have been on both sides of the spectrum where I don’t want to pay or don’t want to learn about a specific tool that may help me be more productive in my business venture. I have also been on the other side where I have paid for exactly what I needed after doing the research and finding the exact right tool that can free me up to let my online business flourish. What I have learned is finding the right tools to help you perform tasks in your business to be more productive, less busy, and have more free time to be creative is what will keep you from getting burned out and ultimately see the most successful growth.
Tools in My Garden
So I was doing some springtime gardening the other day – I can’t believe those words are even being typed from my desk – and I decided to convert our flowerbed (that had been sitting empty for over a year) into something that would actually be a bit more appealing. Note: the flowerbed is in my backyard so we really don’t have a lot of people that are viewing it on a day to day basis. It is really only in a position that we would be viewing. Thus the reason why it had been sitting vacant for over a year since we had moved in to the home.
The other reason it had been sitting empty without any planned growth (other than weeds and seasonal grass) was I didn’t have any tools to plant with. I was sort of forced into the decision to clean out the flower bed and plant something in there when my wife put together a potluck where many of our friends would be visiting and seeing our empty space of dirt.
As is the case when you don’t really want to do something, but know you need to, I put off taking care of the planting until the day before the event. I didn’t think it was a big deal, I mean it can’t really be that hard to plant some little pre-grown flowers that they sell at Home Depot.
So I went out to buy some little flowers and a few cactus like plants that might last a little longer if I slack on watering. But what I didn’t buy was a little shovel or anything to stir up the dirt with. If any of you live in the Southern California area, you will note that if you have an area of dirt that is not manicured or taken care of, it becomes extremely solid and difficult to dig in. Besides the scare of earthquakes, the hard dirt is the reason that we don’t have any basements in Cali.
So without the digging tools, I simply used some gloves and my hands to create little holes to put the flowers. Lucky for me I could manage this just enough for the flowers I bought since they were so small that they only needed a few inches of a hole to get properly seeded.
Fast forward a few weeks. My sister-in-law saw my flower bed, bare as can be with only a few small flowers in it, and decided to give me something a bit nicer to grow. She gave me some tomatoes and sweet corn which I am actually really excited to try to grow and taste. However, the size of the plants were big enough that I knew I couldn’t just use my hands for this process. It was time to head to the store to get some tools.
I came back with a small shovel and a rake like tool that stirs up the earth. And wouldn’t you know it, planting these larger corn and tomato plants was extremely easy. In about 20 minutes, I had planted what would have taken me about 2 hours to complete by hand. Not saying that they have thriving and producing vegetables yet, but at least my small “garden” looks decently complete.
Correlation to the Online Business Development World
This gardening without tools and with tools process reminded me about how important some basic tools can change things even in the online world. If you think about the blogging world, having a basic tool like a content management system makes the process of blogging very easy and painless. If you compare what someone would do to create a blog without a wordpress as compared to when they actually switched to implement things to a wordpress, they would surely be overjoyed with the new amount of time they would be saving.
In the SEO world, I know when many people first start out they are trying to do all of the their SEO strategies by hand. They try to do all the link building by hand. They try to keep up with their keyword research all by hand.
Just like buying a simple set of garden tools, it often makes all the sense in the world to leverage the advantages that the right tools can bring. Often they can help your online business grow and save you time in the process. The right tools can free you up to do more great things and spend more of your time being creative, rather than being forced to spend all your time doing business building tasks.
Our Business Development List
You can see a list of some of our favorite online business building tools. If you have others that you like to use and want to share, please leave a comment below.
