The modern world is changing so rapidly that a lot of people find it difficult to keep up. The events of recent months have shown that the future lies in the digitalization and freelancing. Only a small group of people managed to stay afloat during the worldwide lockdown, and freelancers are among them. These days CEOs worldwide positively estimate the prospects of the freelance market and found it is a great growth driver for many industries.
Freelancing gives you an opportunity to choose any lifestyle you want without adjusting your habits to the company policies: you don’t have to stick to dress code, get to make your own schedule, and travel as much as you want. So if you are thinking of making it online, check out the top 7 lifesaving programs every freelancer should get to grow their online business.
Get Mobile with Buildfire
If you would like to be a successful freelancer, the first thing you should do is to establish your online presence. And an app is a perfect and modern way to promote your brand and offer your unique service. This way you will tag your name on the map, and attract new clients. With Buildfire you will develop an incredible app in no time – no need to be a skilled programmer, the easy-to-use drag and drop interface will help you build your dream app effortlessly and quickly.
Create a Design with PhotoWorks
If you’ve decided to build your own website, try to imagine how it would look like and what images you intend to use. Instead of outsourcing the task and paying lots of money to strangers hoping they will understand your view and capture the essence of your business, you can prepare pictures for the web all by yourself. Check out PhotoWorks by AMS Software which is very intuitive and does not require any prior knowledge or skills in photo editing. It contains all the tools you may need to turn a simple image into a website banner or a perfect profile photo: enhance quality, change any background or make it transparent, add a text or watermark, and much more. Besides, if you want to pick up a new skill and dig into photo editing and post-processing, it will be a great helper for your business and will save you money on overpriced Photoshop subscription.
Organize Your Team with Trello
Now it is time for project management tools. Trello is a perfect way to organize your daily tasks and monitor the performance of your team. Starting a company on your own comes with many new responsibilities, paperwork, and unexpected pitfalls. Organizing this workflow might be difficult, so try to build a neat system in this program: the interface is self-explanatory, everything is drag and drop. You can assign a task to one of your teammates, leave some comments and questions about the progress and enjoy the clear and structured overview of the workflow.
Synchronize Your Files with Dropbox
Once the actual work has started, you get more and more invoices, files, pictures, tables, and so on, so where do you keep those? The answer is Dropbox – an good platform to share documents with your team. You can set limited access to some important data, back up some essential info, and set up automatic synchronization with all your files from your PC and mobile phone, this way you will get access to all your documents from any device.
Develop SMM Strategies with Tweriod
Looking to reach a new audience and land new clients? Surely, you can simply get a Twitter account and simply create posts once in a while, however, timing is important! If you don’t adjust to your followers’ schedule, your posts might never reach the potential clients. Tweriod will analyze your followers’ habits, likes, and demographics and provide the ultimate time of the day to post your campaigns to attract your target audience. In the form of a small and compact report, the program will let you know what time of the day on weekends and workdays your posts will be most exposed to your audience, so you can get more efficient.
Keep Track of Your Spending with Mint
Being a solo business owner is challenging – there are so many things you need to keep in mind. Mint is a great helper for your wallet, allowing you to keep an overview of your expenses and income in one package. You simply add all your bank accounts to the program and get a comprehensive summary of your cash flow, instead of checking each bank account separately. You can also create your budget right in the app to stick to your financial goals.
Stay Focused with Focusbooster
And last but not least – time management. Staying focused might be sometimes difficult for freelancers, especially, if they work from home surrounded by so many distracting factors. So, here is what this app does: you can set a timer for 30-40 minute work session after which you take a 5-minute break. This technique has been proven by many researchers, however, every person has their individual cycles, so find the perfect balance for yourself and stick to it. The result will surprise you – your productivity will grow and you will feel far less tired at the end of a day.
Making it as a freelancer involves a lot of self-discipline and motivation, so hopefully, these programs will help you find the right work-life balance and turn your business into a huge success.
