Grow Your Business Using Evernote

When you think of growing your business, what comes to mind? More professional marketing strategies?Higher quality sales pages?A waiting list of clients? While all of these are possibilities that may happen as you scale your business, they aren't solutions to a very real problem that many entrepreneurs don't see until it's too late.  What's the problem? They don't have one designated place to manage their business. Yes, they might have a waiting list, but it also takes ten minutes to find notes from each client session. In short, the absence of one single tool to manage their business is costing them precious time, energy, and money.  The solution? Every small business owner needs one business management hub. You can use one even if you're just starting out, and it doesn't have to be as complicated or expensive as you might think. In fact, Evernote, a free tool you might already have and use for storing ideas, could serve as your management tool and play a role in accelerating your business's growth.  

3 Areas You Can Effectively Manage with Evernote

1. Client Onboarding & Management

Depending on the type of work you do, you can use Evernote to manage both short-term and long-term clients. With this system, you can ensure that each client goes through the same onboarding process like clockwork, which helps you make sure that your client care is consistent and smooth. Everyone's process, or template, for onboarding a client may look different, but to give you an idea, mine typically includes a checklist for tasks like sending the contract, sending the invoice, and sending the welcome package. With just a couple of templates, you can track clients' progress, make notes for following up, and record reflections on where you think you could have improved. When you use Evernote to manage clients, you can facilitate a seamless onboarding system and keep track of your clients' growth.   

2. Blogging

While one of Evernote's strengths is serving as an information hub where you can collect resources to use in the future, it can also serve as a tool to manage the entire blogging process from the brainstorming process to the final product. To keep the information you'll need for blogging organized, you can create notebooks like:

• Case studies
• Popular searches
• Post Ideas
• Stories
• Research

Once you have your ideas in Evernote, you can take it a step further and use a blog post template to write the post itself. This is what my blog post template looks like. If you want to come back to edit the post later, set a reminder for yourself directly in Evernote, and when you’re done, you can share the Evernote link to the blog post with your assistant. Another great feature of using Evernote for the blog writing process is that you can provide your assistant with a link to an Evernote note with your blog uploading checklist. When you use Evernote to manage your blogging, you can plan your editorial calendar in advance knowing that your best ideas won't be forgotten while also creating a streamlined system for yourself and your team.   

3. Nurturing Relationships

While Evernote is great for storing information, it also helps you take action on that information, which comes in handy when building and nurturing relationships. The beauty in using it as a relationship management tool is that you can create individual notes that contain important information like the person's industry, interests and birthday, and set a reminder when you need to follow-up with them. Each time you have a conversation with this person, forward your e-mail into Evernote or save a screenshot of your conversation on social media directly into Evernote to ensure you don’t forget where you left off. If you see something positive about their business or know that they will be soon celebrating something, you can make a reminder directly in Evernote to congratulate them. When you choose to use Evernote as a hub for building and nurturing relationships, you will have a tool that consistently assists you in planting seeds for connections that may lead to media opportunities, partnerships, and long-lasting friendships.   

Back to You

Did you know that Evernote can help you manage just about any area of your business, like prioritizing your to-do list, so you know what you should be working on next and getting clear on the steps you take to accomplish repetitive processes, so that you don’t reinvent the wheel next time you engage in them? Check out my Evernote for Small Business Guide to learn how you can transform Evernote into your business management hub. 

In the comments, tell us: Are you using Evernote in your business?