BEFORE

With a full-time job, three pets, a husband, and community involvement, it can be hard to find time to consistently pour into an indie business. Staying productive, inspired, and effective requires a well orchestrated schizophrenia of productivity that consolidates where you invest your energy. Between social networking and the online marketplace it is easy to become overwhelmed and distracted. Where should you spend your web time? And how do you spend it well?

Here are some tools and tips that I have discovered over the past three years that have helped me to use the most of my time online:

Hootsuite: The commotion around Twitter may have died down a touch over the past year – but the site remains an invaluable place to make connections, find new audiences, and learn about things in the online community. The site Hootsuite allows you to make the most of tweeting by combining your feed, direct messages, and more onto one screen. At a glance you can see  what’s trending, who is mentioning you or your product,while stalking your favorite feeds. My favorite Hootsuite tool for those time when I’m overloaded: The tweet scheduler. You can formulate exactly what tweets go out when – meaning that all your Twitter activity can pre-scheduled and then out of mind!

AFTER

Link your Facebook to Twitter:  Another great way to increase your internet exposure without spending more time in front of the computer is to link your Twitter directly to your Facebook Fan Page. By doing this you can post on FB and that blurb will automatically appear on your Twitter feed too! A word to the wise: Make sure to also have unique posts on your Twitter as you don’t want to exhaust your audience by being too repetitive on both outlets. Also remember that if you FB post is too long it will be cut off via Twitter. Need help with the connection? Read this simple tutorial on how to link the two sites.

Centralize: Do you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, WordPress, Etsy, BuyOlympia and a general website? Are you torn as to where to direct your audience? Is your biz card suffocating with web addresses? Maybe it’s time to consolidate! When you’re a one person show (designer/creative/spokesperson/producer/accountant/networker….etc) you don’t have time to update five different webpages every time you run a promotion or change your branding. Choose your favorite digital medium and stick to it – linking all your online presence to one central source. I recently scrapped my isolated Pierogi Picnic website in favor of a blog. It’s more interactive, user friendly, and charismatic since it shows the many dimensions of my company and me.

Those are three quick ways you can simply and centralize your online energies. Do you have a tool that helps you make the most of your web time? Please share it in the comments below!