Whether you are a freelance copywriter, a freelance web designer or a freelance musician, a lot of your business practises are going to be the same, and there are some tools that can really help make things easier, leaving you free to do the work that really inspires you. Read on for the best tools for freelancers.
Invoicing
Everyone needs to get paid, and if you’re not used to sending invoices, it can feel a little tricky, or awkward. Using Freshbooks is a great way to easily create professional-looking invoices in minutes with just a few clicks – although when it comes to your clients paying you on time, there isn’t an app for that yet! Having a professional-looking invoice template should however increase the likelihood of them making prompt payments.
Newsletters
There are several different tools that allow you to send email newsletters, and one of the most popular is Mailchimp. You don’t need any experience in coding to be able to build responsive, and eye-catching email newsletters, and you can segregate your audience by various factors which allow for really intuitive, personalised emails. You can use the analytics to ensure that you are always hitting the mark when it comes to marketing mailshots too.
Social media management
Social media is priceless when it comes to getting your product or service in front of an audience, however, it can take a lot of time to ensure you’re posting regularly and consistently. Using something like Hootsuite can make all the difference here, as you can queue up posts to go out on any of your social media platforms without posting live. Set aside a few hours a week to queue up an entire week’s worth of content, set up your schedule and allow it to post without you having to lift another finger. You can even manage different social accounts from one screen.
Design
If you’re not a professional designer, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to creating simple graphics for your social media accounts or newsletters and it’s not cost-effective to hire someone each time. Canva is a really easy to use online site that has hundreds of different templates, each pre-formatted whether you want to upload them onto social media or get them printed as hard-copy leaflets, for example. It’s a simple case of drag and drop, using the free images, fonts and colour pallets. Even if you don’t have a creative bone in your body, you can’t go wrong with Canva.
There are always new tools, apps and services coming out that aim to make your life easier and help you run your business more effectively. It’s important to think about what tasks you don’t enjoy, or that take too much of your valuable time to complete, and see whether there is a solution to this. These are some of the most popular tried-and-tested tools for freelancers to allow you to focus on what you’re good at, without having to compromise on your business growth.
