These handy tools will make marketing your business easier

As a small-business owner, you should avail yourself of technology developments that make your life easier—as long as you’re ­prepared to invest a little time in learning how they work. Here are seven online tools we think are especially useful for retailers:

1. Nimble (nimble.com)
Nimble aligns all your social networking accounts in an easy-to-use interface, so you can see all the activity going on at one place.
 
2. Asana (asana.com)
Asana allows you to create and assign tasks to your marketing team members and get automatic updates on their progress.
 
3. Google Calendar (google.com/calendar)
Using this indispensable tool, you can share deadlines and tasks with your team, plus add comments to each task and delegate who is responsible for completion.
 
4. Google AdWords (adwords.google.com)
This simple tool reveals the popularity of your keywords by showing the number of searches per month and the competition that each faces. This is the one tool you should definitely be using.
 
5. Alexa (alexa.com)
Alexa, an Amazon.com company, sheds light on your site’s performance compared with its competitors. It also provides important data such as site traffic and the demographics of frequent visitors.
 
6. Odesk (odesk.com)
Odesk can save you time and money by letting you outsource graphic designing, blogging, video production, and other jobs to freelancers online.
 
7. Elance (elance.com)
Like Odesk, Elance has a systematic recruitment process and a time tracking system so you pay only for the amount of work done.