During coffee with a friend and fellow business owner today, I realized there are 5 must-haves for business owners to increase market reach and efficiency:

1. Your Own Domain Name

Every time you send an email, you're advertising for yourself (if your email is personalized such as you@yourbusiness.com) or you're advertising for someone else (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.).

Make sure to advertise for yourself by getting an email address such as: you@yourbusiness.com.

You can buy domain names through Google or GoDaddy.com.

Questions about setting up a domain name? We recommend Ivan Expert Consulting.

2. Google Apps

Google Apps is the greatest tool for small business owners. With your account, you will get email (through Gmail), calendar (through Google calendar), and documents and spreadsheets, too. Plus, you get to use your personalized email, such as you@yourbusiness.com.

Need help setting up your account? We recommend Ivan Expert Consulting.

3. Firefox

Firefox is a fabulous browser especially because it has so many free add-ons that enhance your web browsing experience.

4. Email Signature Add-Ons for FireFox

Do you want to include your photo, colorful text, or different fonts in your Gmail email signature? Well now you can using one of these add-ons (Black Canvas or WiseStamp) for Firefox.

5. PhoneTag.com

The best time saver for a business owner is to have your voicemail transcribed and emailed or texted to you.

PhoneTag.com is a great software program that does this with a fairly high accuracy rate. It's much more fun to read voicemail than to listen to it!

MORE ABOUT SARAH LEAH

Sarah Leah is the founder of Secretary in Israel, which she has been running since January 2008. Prior to starting Secretary in Israel, Sarah Leah worked in marketing and had also founded a nonprofit. Sarah Leah currently resides in Jerusalem.

Cleaning out an inbox may seem like a simple task, but for many business owners it is a real challenge. An organized virtual assistant can help a busy business owner re-evaluate and get clear about what email messages s/he wants to be receiving daily, while cleaning out those time and brain-drains that so often frustrate them.

My client (and this a true story!) had over 4,000 emails in her inbox, including 800 unread messages and 140 folders. As you can imagine, she was totally overwhelmed! With a busy work and family life, her email inbox had become a monster that was a huge drain on valuable time and energy that she understandably wanted to be spending doing something else.

Like many well-connected, high-profile business owners, my client was receiving tons of social media requests, newsletters, networking event invitations, and more every day. Her goal was to just get the few emails from current or potential clients that were ultimately going to move her business forward. That is where I came in.

My first step was to take a look at her inbox and create a (very) long list of the emails she was receiving on a regular basis that were either not personal or business related. The action steps we took were:

1. I unsubscribed my client from many of the e-newsletters she was receiving, as she didn’t read them and they just clogged up her inbox. These included e-newsletters from online clothing stores, old clients, business “gurus” whose advice she no longer sought, etc.

2. We set up a # of folders (only 10, instead of 140 like she used to have). For emails she didn’t want to clog up her inbox, we had them filtered to one of these folders.This way whenever my client designated the time she could open her Newsletters folder to read what she wanted when she wanted.

3. Next came the whittling down of the 140 already created folders - this included delegating each of them to a new, more general folder location. The process was a back-and-forth one between myself and my client as I applied a new, more general label to each old label and then deleted the old labels.

As for the inbox, our goal was to create a one-page inbox that served as a “to do” list of emails that required immediate attention or action. Once my client completes the task, she then archives or labels the email.

That's it! My client's inbox is now much more organized and streamlined, which makes it much easier for her to work.

MORE ABOUT SALEET

Saleet is an established writer and editor, having spend several years writing both feature articles and e-newsletters. She is fluent in Microsoft Office, AWeber.com, ConstantContact.com, and 1shoppingcart.com. Saleet is also highly experienced in website and social media management. She graduated from UCLA with a BA in Literature.