Introduction
We are living in a world where there is a new and stronger Covid 19 variant each season. Working remotely is the new normal. Organizations are seeking ways to eliminate the spread of the virus. It is against this background that the global freelance market is flourishing. In 2020, more than 59 million freelancers pumped over 1 trillion U.S. dollars into the U.S. economy as provided by Statista. They further predict that there would be 83 million freelancers by 2026 in the U.S. This trend is expected all around the world. Freelancers are jack of all trades. Freelancing is a business, and think of freelancers as independent contractors. They perform a non-committed job for different organizations as opposed to being an employee at a single organization. As such, there are brilliant online tools to help them get a slice of the pie. Here are five great tools that every freelancer must own or use. Keep listening.
- Asana – ( www.asana.com )
If you are a freelancer, and you take your work seriously, then you need a project management tool. It is your sole responsibility to be well organized. What is Asana, and what does it do? You may wonder. Asana is a well-known project management solution every freelancer must use to organize their work. It gives you the latitude of collaborating with your clients, sharing and commenting on the files, tracking tasks, people and projects, and assigning tasks to colleagues.
The amazing thing about Asana is that you can seek your client’s opinion on the project that you are working on, by simply sharing that project with her. It works best for teams. You can also schedule tasks, subscribe to notifications when the status of a task changes, and when the other members have completed items. It’s ideal for small projects and strategic initiatives as well. The Asana platform shows the person who is responsible for each part of the project. This tool is easy-to-use, provides a simple, sorted list view, which makes it easy to check tasks off the list. Its excellent free version is very useful. That’s why Asana is the freelancers’ favourite. If you seek to upgrade, you may select the premium plan or the business plan. Visit www.asana.com if you want to use this tool, and you wish productivity to shoot through the roof.
- Preciseby – ( www.preciseby.com ) 30 Day Free Trial
In the accounting realm, Preciseby is a truly powerful invoicing annual subscription tool that covers the needs of every freelancer, sole proprietor, and small to medium-size businesses. Its 30 day free trial gives enough time to learn and test the platform in real life situations. Preciseby is big on simplicity, so it is easy to navigate and use. This new player in this market helps you create invoices and estimates, but unlike its peers it does this in the simplest of ways. This definitely eliminates those annoying overdue payments, complex accounting software and the old school paper invoices. This invoicing solution offers a simple yet excellent way of adding customers, adding products, adding vendors and their tax and discounts. That helps you easily track down your customers or vendors, contact details or income contributions to your business. What’s beautiful about Preciseby is you can easily update expenses and follow up on income as customers make payments.
One of the outstanding things about this accounting tool is that you can get a full outline of your business’s financial position. That means, you will have greater control of your accounts. After all, you probably already know that time is money for both clients and freelancers. For convenient invoicing we found Preciseby to be the most price friendly and value packed option. Their annual plans include the basic plan ($115), the standard plan ($279), and the premium plan ($469).
- Grammarly – ( www.grammarly.com )
Grammarly is a game changer for all your content writing. This writing tool eliminates all your worries, so that you can focus on what matters the most. Whether you are a freelance content writer, student, extraordinary teacher, or outstanding designer, Grammarly can help you resolve grammatical errors, sentence structure, conciseness, punctuation, correct tone, wording, and plagiarism checking. Your articles, emails, and social media posts will definitely be well polished.
The power of Grammarly’s free version helps you in checking for plagiarism, spelling, grammar mistakes and punctuation. No wonder, Grammarly has a massive 10 million global user base. Other great features and advantages of Grammarly are that incredible real-time analysis of content, outstanding customer support, and it is available in all the formats. You may access this writing in any place whenever your creative urge kicks in. The fact that you can view meanings and synonyms for words just by clicking on the word makes this AI powered writing tool a must have for every freelancer. As you will see from www.grammarly.com, besides the free plan, you can choose from the Premium plan or the Business plan.
- WordPress – ( www.wordpress.com )
One of the leading and widely used content management systems is WordPress. It’s an online open-source software that you may use for free to create exceptional blogs and freelance portfolio websites. It exists either as a Hosted WordPress version or Self-hosted WordPress version. The platform has about 27 million users who have installed websites. If you are an aspiring freelancer, a talented photographer, or a jack of all trades, you can use WordPress to wield your web presence. This CRM tool helps you to remain visible across multiple platforms. WordPress has hundreds of plugins, themes, widgets that help when you get creative. You can submit your articles and photos through WordPress.
The main attractive features of WordPress are that it’s simple, supports different languages, and Search Engine Optimized. It’s quite easy to publish using the publishing tools, and it has a built-in comments section. This tool has a simple interface that accomodates users who are not particularly tech-savvy. Other God-sent features include email management, social media management and integration, visitors tracking, website management among others. WordPress is free, but you will need a hosting account. When you visit www.wordpress.com, you will notice that WordPress’ pricing plans start with a free plan. After that follows the personal plan, premium plan, and lastly, the business plan.
- SmarterQueue – ( www.smarterqueue.com )
Every freelancer that is an influencer on social media must be using SmarterQueue. But, what’s SmarterQueue? You may wonder. It’s a leading social media management and scheduling tool if you are an influencer, a blogger, content creator, entrepreneur, or shrewd marketer. Technology and your capabilities, meet at this crossroads. SmarterQueue automatically posts on various social platforms for you so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. How? You might ask. This tool selects posts from a rotating content library even though you did not schedule content for that particular day. In doing so, it manages monitoring, content posting, customer engagement, and scheduling. SmarterQueue’s fascinating features includes bulk upload/import, content curation, tagging, a social media inbox, visual planner, bookmarking, comparison, drag-and-drop interface, and advanced analytics. It also includes the content recycling feature, which enables you to share and repost evergreen, and suitable content from old posts. Their paid plans include the solo or custom plan, then the business plan and lastly, the agency plan. Visit www.smarterqueue.com for more information.
Conclusion.
Almost all the fields and industries are opening up to freelance jobs. Analysts expect the global gig economy to go through the ceiling. For a great deal of people, freelancing is quickly becoming the sole source of income around the world. As such, the number of freelance platforms is mushrooming to serve different, and unique purposes. Statistics show that the most sought-after freelance jobs are Instagram marketing, brand strategy, and development of artificial intelligence skills. In this article, we unpacked the 5 most important tools that we believe every freelancer who dreams of becoming a millionaire, should own or use.