There are plenty of tools that we use for managing our business on the web, but theres heres the 5 most fundamental ones that we use everyday.

1. Get a home

You're going to have a constantly increasing base of information and tools and resources that you use and access regularly, so you need a home, 1 place that you can quickly link to everything, make notes, have little windows into your business. Theres several options out there now, but the most simple and coolest which we use everyday is netvibes. Goto netvibes, sign-up and start organising your business. Whatever applications and resources you've got for managing your business on the web, netvibes is your tool to bring it all together.

2. Know whats happening with your sales pipeline

The first and most important thing you need to grow your business is sales opportunities, you need to gravitate around them until they're flowing in and you have a good amount of new leads, opportunities and closed deals. If you manage leads and opportunities in a spreadsheet, your head, or think that CRM is something for big companies then todays the day to change all that. Pop over to pipelinedeals a tool we use nearly everyday to keep track of new leads, opportunities and closed deals. Its an absolute must have whether you're a one person consulting business or a growing medium team. I've seen businesses with 50 people manage there sales pipleine worse than you can now do it in just a few minutes.

3. Manage Projects, get them complete on time

Once you've got deals closed, you want to switch to delivery mode ASAP. If you're a services business then its not as simple as shipping a product and collecting the cash, you've got your process to follow, things to do and a timeline to meet. Load your process into basecamp (which stages you go through), and get your customers into it with you so you can work together to get the project completed.

4. Bill 'em

So you're closing deals, completing projects, now its time to Bill'em!! Make it easy on yourself to email bills to customers and let them login and access them themself. Theres a few web based billing applications but we currently use billing orchard.

5. Web Marketing Analysis

Whatever size your business is, you can be getting more leads and sales from the web. Sure we're a web company so can be expected to be getting the most out of the web, and do, we now get around half our new qualified leads from the web, but this is just an indication of what can be done by any business. With your web its important to know where your audience is coming from, particulrly what web sites (referrers). Theres a lot of information in behind your website, so having a good simple web analysis package is important. We use the hosted, and free google analytcis.