VA Tool Box
There are many, many free tools and resources available on the internet that will aid your virtual assistance practice by increasing productivity and efficiency. Please bookmark this page and return to it often as we will update frequently as we discover and test new tools. If you have a great tool or system that you recommend, please send it to us for inclusion on this page. It would be greatly appreciated.
Client Management Systems
ClientSpot This is the system that we use and I love it! This is not actually free, but they do offer a free 30 day trial so you can test run it. It is very affordable and very powerful. Tust me, your clients and team members will very much appreciate this system.
Conference Calls
Free Conference Calling Free on-demand conference call service is available to use anytime. Yes, every conference call is actually free and accessible from any type of phone, from anywhere – repeatedly. There are no fees or gimmicks whatsoever.
Totally Free Conference Calls Unlimited conferenceing and free replay line.
Documents, Templates, Forms, Ebooks & Presentations
Doc Stoc Docstoc is a community for people to find and share professional documents. Find free legal documents and free business documents. Upload your own documents and get embed code for your website.
Jing Use Jing to add visuals to your online conversations by capturing anything you see on your computer screen and share it instantly as an image or a short movie.
ScreenToaster This online screen recorder captures screencasts instantly. Capture video of onscreen action and share them instantly. No download. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux.
SlideShare Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations and Word documents on SlideShare. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.
WordPress Templates To install the free theme download the files and then extract them to your desktop. Then upload to your wp-content/themes folder via FTP. Select the theme in your wordpress admin panel.
File Transfers
Send This File Have videos, jpegs, pdfs MP3s and other large files that are too large to send through email? This is a quick and easy solution.
Image Sharing and Storage
Flickr Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world
Photobucket Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo sharing and video sharing. Upload your photos, host your videos, and share them with friends and family. You can also resize your images here.
Image Manipulation
RoundPic An online rounded making tool for making anti-aliased rounded corners for avatars and images in web 2.0 style
Misc. Utilities
FormatIt Email formatting utility. No downloads required. This is a great tool for formatting emails for 1shoppingcart.
Hide Email Addresses This is a great utility to hide email addresses if you don’t currently have a contact form. This page will generate a HTML encoded mailto link that is reasonably ‘spambot’ proof. Spambots crawl over websites looking for email addresses, when they find one they add it to their database for junk email.
Zamzar Online file conversion, covering a wide range of different image, document, music, video and compression formats. Free for files up to 100MB.
Social Media
FastPitchNetworking This is a network that I personally highly recommend for professionals. You can sign up for free but I do recommend that you opt for the annual membership. I use the free press release and event section more than anything else. These press releases get a LOT of views. Business professionals can market their business, press, blogs, events and social networks.
Ning Ning lets you create and join new social networks. If you are not familiar with Ning please visit our Virtual Assistance Industry Community. It is free to join and we welcome your participation.
Squidoo Squidoo makes it easy for you to find useful overview pages called lenses that are created by real people. It is a fun and very simple way for you to publish your own content for free. Share what you care about. Get found. Get followed. Get influential.
SquidUtils Blog ping for Squidoo lenses. This Ping Tool will notify a number of blog search services that your lens has been updated, and is specially optimized for Squidoo. It is not certain whether or not this has any benefit or not for existing lenses, but it is probably good for getting new lenses indexed quickly by search engines
Your User Name Do you have your user name registered with every social media site that you should? Use this utility check the availability across the leading social networks, micro blogs and web 2.0 apps from one simple location.
Video
Animoto Free (or you can upgrade to the paid service) web application that produces short videos from your uploaded photos and music.
