Monday, December 17, 2018

The 45 Best Chrome Extensions for Business Owners

Are you one of the many small business owners who uses technology to get ahead for their business? Whether with new small business apps, accounting software, or innovative automation programs, entrepreneurs who stay on the cutting-edge of tech-based tools are making their lives easier and their businesses better.

So, where’s the next tool that’ll move the needle for your business? You might find it in your Chrome browser. These days there are more Chrome extensions available for business owners than ever.

Which ones should you install from the Chrome Web Store? Here’s the list of the 45 best Chrome extensions that every entrepreneur needs.

chrome extensions

The Best Chrome Extensions for the Busy Entrepreneur

For busy entrepreneurs, productivity is key. How can you get everything you need done during the day—but faster and more efficiently?

Try one—or all—of these 14 Chrome extensions.

1. Todoist

As one of the most-used Chrome extensions with more than 6 million users, Todoist is a popular to-do list task manager built for your Chrome browser.

Todoist lets you collaborate with your team, helps track your most important projects, or simply reminds you to call your Mom—anything that takes the stress out of managing your calendar. We especially love the fact that it integrates with all your devices, so on-the-go entrepreneurs can keep track of their daily tasks from anywhere.

2. TickTick

Another awesome task manager to add to the list of the best Chrome extensions is TickTick – Todo & Task List.

Use TickTick to fully organize your to-do list, focusing on the tasks you absolutely need to get done during the day. TickTick is totally customizable, so you can set up recurring tasks, task classification, task reordering, task collaboration, and more. One of the best features of TickTick is the ability to convert Gmails into tasks with one click.

3. Asana

One more task manager that can be forgotten on the list of the best Chrome extensions for productivity—Asana.

Asana is technically a small business app, but they have a stellar Chrome extension that makes using Asana and managing your task list that much easier. Use the Asana Chrome extension to quickly add tasks to your Asana projects, projects, and calendars from any webpage.

4. HoverReader

If you want to absorb all the information, news stories, or articles on the internet without the time sink of actually navigating through search results, then check out HoverReader.

HoverReader gives you an instant preview of websites without making you leave the page you’re on. Hover over any link you find through Google or on a website, and you’ll get all the content you need—with no ads or images.

HoverReader is one of the best no-fuss Chrome extensions, helping small business owners scan the internet quickly.

5. Black Menu

As a business owner, you might spend most your time online simply looking up customer locations, local businesses, directions, emails, and so on. Black Menu helps you search for that information all in one place. Black Menu is one of the many Chrome extensions helping business owners effectively navigate the web and get the information they need—without the fuss.

With Black Menu, you can tap into Google’s information services and you don’t have to leave the page you’re already on. Hover over the Black Menu Chrome extension, and get a drop-down list of whatever Google tool you use to find information—Google Search, Google+, Google Maps, Google Translate, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, and more.

6. Toggl Button

Toggl Button is the ultimate watchguard of workplace productivity.

This Chrome extension puts a timer into any web tool you use—Salesforce, Trello, Todoist, Asana, Google Drive, etc.—and tracks time on site and collects data on productivity. Check into your Toggl account to see where you’re wasting your time, and adjust accordingly.

7. Evernote Web Clipper

Evernote Web Clipper is a favorite among Chrome extension addicts, and it’s no surprise why—this is one of the best Chrome extensions for saving just about anything you come across on the internet.

Clip and save research articles, news stories, receipts, images, code snippets, and just about anything else you would stumble upon on the internet. When you need to revisit a piece of information you clicked, just go to your Evernote account and it’ll be there.

8. DocuSign

DocuSign eliminates the headache of signing and distributing PDFs. With DocuSign, there’s no need to print out documents, sign them by hand, scan and upload them, distribute to your customers or employees, and have the process start all over again.

As one of the best Chrome extensions for productivity, DocuSign takes the work out of signing important documents. Electronically sign documents and PDFs right from Gmail, Google Drive, or the Chrome browser.

9. CrankWheel

Do you ever wish that customers, partners, and employees could just see what you’re doing on your own computer screen? It would take the confusion out of verbally explaining products, reports, or just about anything else on your computer.

That dream is attainable with CrankWheel—an instant browser tab or screen-sharing Chrome extension. Unlike other screen sharing apps, CrankWheel doesn’t need to be downloaded for everyone to use it, and there’s no preparation required on either end. You can share your screen—both on desktop or mobile devices—within 10 seconds.

10. Drag

If you use Gmail, then use Drag to keep your Gmail inbox organized.

Drag is a chrome extension that keeps your Gmail organized into easy-to-use task lists—turning your inbox from a mess into a manageable workspace. Drag will help you organize your emails between stages, like Do, Doing, and Done, so you know what email chains you need to be paying attention to each day.

11. Hiver

Shared support or sales email accounts can be difficult for busy entrepreneurs to manage between having to signing into a different inbox to reply and coordinating with team members about who will respond.

Hiver allows you to manage shared accounts from your primary Gmail inbox, assign email queries to team members, and answer questions swiftly with templates, saving your team precious time.

12. Click&Clean

Search much? If you’re browsing the web a lot, having a cluttered cache and browsing history can slow you down. It can also affect your displayed search results, which isn’t great if you’re checking on any articles that may be ranking.

If you’re looking to clear your cookies and history in one click, then Click&Clean is a good extension for you to have. This tool clears your typed URLs, cache, cookies, and your download and browsing history.

13. Add to Trello

If you use Trello rather than Asana, then you can make use of this extension. Instead of having to log into Trello to create and arrange cards, you can do it all through Add to Trello.

When you visit a page that you want to save to a board, click the extension, add all your notes as usual, and select whether you want to card to go to the top or the bottom of your board.

14. Lastpass

If you have a lot of accounts, then you have a lot to secure, which means plenty of secure passwords to remember. The chances of you remembering all those is slim, so save time by saving them to Lastpass.

Lastpass saves all your passwords in one place, so that when you’re ready to login you have your credentials ready to go. Save time by avoiding those pesky password reset emails.

chrome extensions

The Best Chrome Extensions for the Distracted Entrepreneur

As a small business owner, you do your best to stay focused on what matters—running and building your business.

But with your inbox full of unread emails, your browser tabs full of need-to-read business articles, and your employees and clients messaging you, it’s hard to stay focused on what you need to get done.

Here are seven Chrome extensions you can use to minimize the many distractions on the internet.  

1. Pocket

Pocket is one of the best Chrome extensions for business owners who want to save important articles, websites, or videos for later.

Pocket makes it easy to put things aside when you’ve got work to do. Hit the Pocket Chrome extension, and the webpage will show up in your Pocket queue—ready for you after you’ve done your work.

2. Inbox When Ready 

If you, like many small business owners, can spend days on end filtering through unread emails, then Inbox When Ready is one of the best Chrome extensions for you.

Inbox When Ready lets you hide your Gmail inbox and protect your focus during the day. You can search your archive or compose messages without getting distracted by the constant influx of emails. When you’re ready to face your inbox, all you have to do is press “Show Inbox.”

3. AdBlock Pro

With 40 million users, AdBlock might be one of the most popular Chrome extensions out there.

Everyone can benefit from the ad-blocking power of this Chrome extension, including easily distractible entrepreneurs.

If you find yourself getting lost in the rabbit hole of the internet by clicking through endless ads, use AdBlock to stay on task and drown out the noise.

4. OneTab

Do you keep 23 tabs open at once, toggle between them, open a few more, close two or three, then look at the one you really wanted? Then you’re in the good company of the many internet users who are distracted by tab after tab.

If you cringe at the thought of simply closing all these tabs to avoid the distraction, then use OneTab. OneTab converts all your tabs into one, simple list—helping you reduce the clutter, avoid the time-hog of sorting through them all, and save up to 95% of your memory.

When you want to dive back into your tabbed pages, you can either restore them individually or all together.

5. Website Blocker

If you’re a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube addict, then Website Blocker is one of the best Chrome extensions for you.

Website Blocker is straightforward—it blocks the websites that distract you throughout the work day. This Chrome extension lets you choose the domains you want to block on your computer.

But don’t worry, you can indulge after work—just set Website Blocker to work only from 9 to 5.

6. LINER

If you, like many online readers, get distracted by lengthy, text-heavy pages online, you should use LINER to stay focused on what you need to know.

LINER helps you highlight sentences from anywhere on the web. It’ll save all your highlights made across mobile and desktop devices. Say you’re combing through a 250-page-long PDF but only page 196 to 197 have information that’s relevant to your business. Use LINER to highlight the good stuff, and leave everything else out. When you want to share the nuggets of important information to your customers or employees, LINER will only send that you highlighted.

7. Ghostery

If you want something more robust than AdBlock Pro, then Ghostery is the extension for you. Not only does it block ads, allowing you to focus on important content, but it also prevents tracking.

The added bonus of this is that it can also speed up how fast websites load.

The Best Chrome Extensions for Social Sharers

Savvy small business owners are always keeping up their presence on social media sites.

Staying active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat can be game-changer for your business, but it takes time to distribute your content and share on your various business profiles.

Here are five Chrome extensions that make sharing across the internet so much easier.

1. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular Chrome extensions available, and for good reason. Buffer makes sharing content remarkably easy.

Share content and publish your updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more from anywhere on the web. It just takes one click. It also tracks your results and analyzes everything you share.

2. RiteBoost

RiteBoost is another Chrome extension that takes the work out of sharing on social media.

Use RiteBoost to automatically add hashtags, emojis, gifs, images, or more to any piece of content you share on social media. The auto hashtag tool, for example, will automatically add trending hashtags (if they’re applicable to your content), boosting what you share.

3. Talk and Comment

Talk and Comment is one of the more interesting Chrome extensions as it lets you record and send voice notes on social media sites.

If you’re always in a dialogue with customers or followers on Twitter, Facebook, or WordPress, you might find that Talk and Comment will save you loads of time responding to your social media followers.

4. App for Instagram

Historically, one of the toughest parts of Instagram for business was that everything needed to be done on mobile. Not so anymore. The App for Instagram extension mimics Instagram on desktop.

When you click the extension icon, you can see Instagram displayed as if it were on mobile. You can scroll, view, save, and share from the extension on desktop.

5. List Building for Twitter

If you’re looking to build lists quickly, List Building for Twitter allows you to do just that from any dashboard view. For example, if you want to make a list of people who participated in a Twitter chat, or used a specific hashtag, then the extension will allow you to select all of them at once and add to a list.

chrome extensions

The Best Chrome Extensions for the Marketing Guru

Every business owner needs to put on the hat of a CMO from time to time. To make the intricacies of paid, content, or email marketing easier to master, check out these 12 Chrome extensions.

1. Grammarly

If you’re a business owner who’s posting on your company’s blog, managing the copy on your website, or pushing out emails to your customer list, you want to come across as a professional. Typos and grammar mistakes aren’t professional.

If you cringe at the thought of pushing out a piece of content with errors in it, try using Grammarly. Grammarly is a Chrome extension that checks your spelling and grammar as you type. Use this extension to make sure your content is easy to read, effective, and free of sloppy grammar mistakes.

2. Mixmax

Wondering which emails delight your customers and which emails go straight to their trash? Looking to increase your email open rate? Trying to find ways to reach out to your email lists faster?

Business owners can master the art of email marketing with the help of Mixmax. Mixmax helps you reach out more effectively to clients, customers, and prospects. Use it to track open rates, clicks, and downloads, personalize bulk emails, write emails faster, embed polls and surveys, schedule email campaigns, and so on.

Downloading Mixmax is a no-brainer for any entrepreneur looking for the best Gmail Chrome extensions available.

3. Yesware Email Tracking

Another must-have Chrome extension for email marketers is Yesware Email Tracking.

Yesware is another great way to track your open and click-through rates, process email marketing analytics, and set up easy-to-use templates for Gmail.

4. Hunter

As a marketer, public relations guru, or communications manager, reaching out to industry leaders, potential partners, or news reporters is a constant struggle. You dig through the internet to grab their email, pitch your store or business, and cross your fingers that your hook will catch.  

Hunter takes the pain out of the first step of marketing or public relations outreach by easily finding email addresses from anywhere on the web. With just one click on any website, Hunter spits out any email address that’s ever been associated with a website.

5. Woorank

Woorank helps you solve the complicated—yet ever-important—puzzle of SEO.

One of the best Chrome extension for web analysts out there, Woorank provides a deep SEO analysis of SEO factors on any website. Use the SEO tips from this Chrome extension to bring your homepage up to number one in Google’s search engine.

6. MozBar

MozBar falls at the top of the list of must-have SEO Chrome extensions.

Moz’s SEO Toolbar Chrome extension gives you the tools you need to master the art of SEO. MozBar lets you create custom searches, compare link metrics, highlight links and keywords, expose page elements, and access a whole bunch of other powerful SEO tools.

7. Page Analytics

Page Analytics takes the mystery out of how your website visitors interact with your landing pages.

Page Analytics is one of the best Chrome extensions for getting insight into your customer. See what they click on, what they don’t click, how often they bounce, and so on. Use the insights from Page Analytics to then optimize your website and give your users what they want on each page.

8. WhatFont

For the creative thinker and the brand strategist, WhatFont is a simple but powerful Chrome extension.

WhatFont lets you identify fonts used anywhere on the web. Say you stumble across a stellar font on a competitor’s website. Simply turn on WhatFont, hover over the text, and presto—you’ve got the font name, font size, line height, and color hex code instantly.

9. MakeGIF Video Capture

Looking to spice up your blog posts? Using fun, relatable, and light-hearted gifs is an easy way to do so.

MakeGIF Video Capture makes creating awesome gifs a breeze. You can capture frames from any HTML5 video and convert them into GIF animation. Drop those gifs into your next blog post, and watch your page views, social sharing, and comments spike.  

10. Buzzsumo

The Buzzsumo extension for Chrome allows you to check engagement metrics for any page you happen to be on.

The extension allows you to see engagement on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit, in addition to any other shares and backlinks it may have. you can also view who the sharers are in addition to information about the author.

11. Nofollow

If you’re at all into SEO, then you are probably aware of the difference between do and no-follow links. Do-follow links are endorsements in Google’s eyes, whereas no-follow links are mainly neutral for SEO.

So, if you’re an SEO, it’s important to see which links are do versus no-follow. The Nofollow extension outlines no-follow links in red, making your life a lot easier.

12. Checkbot

Here’s another one for all those SEO’s out there. As an SEO, you know that there is a lot to check, and Checkbot helps you do it faster.

This extension can crawl hundreds of pages and check for load times, broken links, errors, re-directs, and more. Keep in mind that they have an unpaid and paid version that differ in their capabilities.

The Best Chrome Extensions for the E-commerce Entrepreneur

Do you sell your products online or through an online marketplace—like Amazon, Jet, or eBay?

Then make your e-commerce experience easier to manage with these three Chrome extensions.

1. Keepa

Do you sell your products on Amazon?

Then Keepa is a must-have Chrome extension for your browser. Keepa helps you stay up-to-date on any price drops across all Amazon sites. Keepa takes the work out of monitoring your competition on Amazon manually. It’ll simply alert you whenever a price drops on an Amazon page, so you can keep up with your competition.

2. Honey

Honey is one of the best Chrome extensions for retailers, distributors, or your average consumer. This extension automatically searches and applies coupons and discount codes to your online order during checkout.

3. Pinterest Save Button

Just about all small businesses—especially those in online retail and e-commerce—should be using Pinterest for business to get their products and brand out there.

Using the Pinterest Save Button is an easy way to make pinning for your business a reflex. With just one click, you can save images, ideas, and products from anywhere on the web to your Pinterest page—for all your followers to see.

chrome extensions

The Best Chrome Extensions for the 24/7 Entrepreneur

No matter how hard you try prioritize work-life balance, you might be plugged into your business all the time.

If you’re that kind of small business owner, try one of these four Chrome extensions when you’re working out of the office or into the middle of the night.

1. Remote Desktop

While Google Drive enables connectivity to all your documents, there are times when you need to access files that are actually located on your computer.

Chrome allows this with Remote Desktop. When you’re out of the office and desperately need a file or document to keep working, use Remote Desktop to connect to your computer through your web browser—from any location.

2. Gmail Offline

If you’re traveling for business, you just can’t rely on having strong Wi-Fi at all times.

Gmail Offline takes some of the worry out of working remote by letting you access your Gmail account without network connectivity. That’s right—read, respond to, search, and archive emails even when your Wi-Fi goes totally blank.

3. Care Your Eyes

Can’t get any sleep when you finally close down your laptop and turn off the lights? Maybe that’s because you’re staring at a computer screen into the wee hours of the night, responding to emails or running reports.

Care your Eyes makes working late on your laptop a little easier on the eyes. When nighttime comes around, Care your Eyes will kick into night mode to protect your eyes from the intensity of the white, glowing computer screen.

4. Figure It Out

Working remotely? We’re talking really remotely—like in a whole different time zone? Then make the work of staying connected with your employees, clients, and family back home a whole lot easier with Figure it Out.

Figure it Out is one of the best Chrome extensions for small business owners on-the-go. It displays the time zone you’re currently in and the one your employee’s are in back home, taking the confusion out of scheduling meetings, beating jetlag, or connecting with your family while away.

What Are the Best Chrome Extensions for Business Owners? The List Goes On and On

After reviewing 45 of the best Chrome extensions, we haven’t even scratched the surface of all the time-saving Chrome extensions available for small business owners.

There are many, many Chrome extensions that can help you stay focused, increase productivity, market better, and simply create a better business. As many are on the market today, there are many more in the works, and we update accordingly. Keep checking this list for the best Chrome extensions currently available!

The post The 45 Best Chrome Extensions for Business Owners appeared first on Fundera Ledger.



from Fundera Ledger https://www.fundera.com/blog/chrome-extensions/

No comments:

Post a Comment