Five Indispensable Tools for Freelancers

You learn a lot when you start out as a freelancer. About a week in, you realise that managing everything manually and balancing sixteen different spreadsheets isn’t an option. And if you’re operating on a narrow start-up budget, hiring professionals to handle everything might not be viable either.

Fortunately, there are a wealth of free and affordable tools out there for freelancers to take advantage of. These five have been indispensable to me during 603 Copywriting’s first quarter.

If you want to balance the books, keep on top of your social and email marketing, track statistics and add some visual flair to your posts and pages, these five tools will help.

1. Clearbooks
Recommended by Sarah Turner
Price: From £10.88 per month

If you’re like me, you’ll absolutely despise having to keep tabs on folders full of invoices, cashflow spreadsheets and all the other lists of numbers that come with running a business. So you’ll like Clearbooks.

It’s simple and intuitive bookkeeping software, which is especially useful if your brain space is far more concerned with words and phrases than figures and numbers, and it’ll help you handle everything from quoting potential clients to invoicing them.

It also gives you a rough running total of how much you’re likely to owe in tax, which is particularly helpful if you’re worried about the tax man kicking your doors down at 5am.

Killer feature: Generate and email invoices with a couple of clicks – you don’t even need to open Outlook.

2. TweetDeck
Price: Free

Social media can be a hell of a time sink. And despite a few improvements, Twitter’s website is still as useful as the proverbial confectionery-based drinking vessel. So if you’re using Twitter to keep up with your contacts, spread the word about your services, or look for potential client, you need a decent third-party platform.

Despite a strong showing from Hootsuite, you can’t go wrong with TweetDeck.

Features like multiple account support and list filtering will help you keep your business and personal personas separate, but it’s the in-built search functions that make TweetDeck truly indispensable.

Killer feature: Keep tabs on people talking about your business, or looking for people in your niche, by setting up search columns.

3. Cyfe
Recommended by Neil Simpson
Price: Limited free version, premium from $14 per month

What metrics are you tracking? Google Analytics? Your AdWords spend? Search engine rankings? Social followers? Email list growth?

You’re looking at loads of different websites, just trying to work out what’s performing well and what isn’t. Well, don’t bother. Just sign up with Cyfe and set up a dashboard. The free version limits you to tracking a single SEO search phrase, and only gives you 30 days of historical data, but there’s something to be said for seeing all of your most important marketing data on one page.

Killer feature: Want all the impotent rage that comes with working for an SEO company? Fire up the rankings tracker and watch the inexplicable fluctuations in your rankings.

4. MailChimp
Price: Limited free version, premium from $10 per month

Nobody’s been wowed by a plain text email you’ve mail merged and sent through Outlook. And Outlook won’t give you opening or clickthrough rates. MailChimp will.

If you’re running an email marketing campaign or a regular newsletter (like mine, that you can sign up for here), chances are that you’re familiar with MailChimp. But if you’re not, MC is a good place to start, thanks to the system’s in-built list-building, design and tracking features.

Oh – and if you’re considering an email campaign, you might want to ask for an email copywriting quote…

Killer feature: Sorry, designers. But MailChimp’s design functions are a good stand-in for a professionally designed campaign. At least in the short term.

5. Canva
Recommended by Neil Simpson
Price: Limited free version, premium assets from £1.00

Speaking of stealing the food from designer’s mouths, Canva is sure to have the graphic designers in my audience rolling their eyes. Sorry guys.

But Canva’s far simpler than Photoshop, or Illustrator, or scanning in your felt tip scrawlings. And it’s cheaper too. There’s a wealth of free assets (backgrounds, images and layouts) for you to make use of, along with a couple of paid-for pictures that will help your imagery stand out from the crowd.

Just don’t use a rubbish font, unless you want your website developer to send you snotty messages on Skype for the next week. They take font choice very seriously.

Killer feature: Can’t remember how big a Twitter header is? Or a LinkedIn avatar? Canva has the specifications for all of the leading social sites programmed in. And it has Instagram images into the bargain.

 

So, over to you. Have you used any of these tools? Which do you recommend, and which could you happily live without? If you’ve seen a tool that freelancers need to use, let us know the killer features in the comments section below.