Every freelance designer knows how hard it is sometimes to get everything done when you are a freelancer. You have to manage every single thing from emails to SEO all by yourself. You have to deal with clients, promote your own portfolio website, read the latest industry news as you have to keep up with the technologies and be aware of the latest events, you have to deal with many issues connected to running a business as finances, bills etc. All these things take time, attention and effort. So, how and when do you do actual designing and development? Here is a short list of useful tools and resources that will help you cut down the time and effort spent on things that have nothing to do with actual design and development.
Finances
Invoices Made Easy Very good and easy to use tool for sending invoices and accepting online payments.
Bill My Clients Lets you send invoices both via email and regular mail.
Less Accounting Created especially for freelancers this tool will help you easily manage your invoices and accounts.
Xero This online accounting system gives you an access to all your financial figures like invoices, bank transactions etc. anytime you need them.
PayPal The best and thus the most popular online payments service out there.
Managing your contacts
Being a freelancer you need to organize your customer base, these tools will help you do the task:
Big Contacts Lets you easily organize the information about your clients.
Zoho CRM Another good tool to manage your business activity.
These online communication tools will make it fast and comfortable to solve issues with your clients:
Skype Great choice for online communication, lets you make phone calls and have video chats.
Yugma Online video conferencing tool.
Promotion
I’m sure most of you use Twitter as one of the main promotion tools. If you do you’ll like these services and applications:
Tweet Later This great service lets you to set time when you want your tweet published.
RTweeter Another tool to schedule your tweets.
Tweetdeck is of great help when you have hundreds of followers. The tool lets you filter the users into groups, thus you won’t have to look through all the tweets to find what the user you are interested in is doing.
Well, this is for sure not the full list at all. What tools are you using to simplify and speed up your non designing activities?
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Thanks a lot for this these useful tool. I just love finding blogs like this
when I have the time.
Great tools , i really dont know about tweet later website , thanks for the info.