Whether you’re starting your first freelance venture or transitioning to the freelance lifestyle after years in the workforce, you’ll find that this work style requires its own special tools and platform. After all, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in freelancing – every writer, developer, designer, and marketer needs different things based on their personal strengths and the needs of their clients.
Design Freelance Tools
There are different use cases for each tool depending on whether you’re working with 2D or 3D designs. There are also a lot of other tools you can learn about online, as well as a lot of online courses and tutorials to help you better understand how they work.
Adobe Cloud
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are two of the most widely used design tools for freelancers and designers. These softwares help freelancers and designers with graphic design, video editing, web development, photographing editing, and so much more.The one downside to Adobe is that it is on the pricier side, so let’s move on to some free and more cost-effective freelance tools to use.
Canva
Designing is only one of many skills you need to succeed as a freelancer, but Canva makes it easy to create high-quality graphics quickly and easily. It’s free, easy to use, and lets you save your designs so you can access them later. The ability to reuse images across different documents also gives Canva a leg up on other design tools. You can purchase a paid account to access some of their premium features, but the free tool still gives you a lot to play around with.
Free Image Sites
Designing an image (or taking one) for a website or business can be incredibly time-consuming and costly if you have to hire a graphic designer. Instead, why not get free images from a number of sites online? While there’s no shortage of free stock photos available online, some of our favorites include Picjumbo, Pexels and Unsplash. Find candidate lifestyle shots or more stylized graphics — whatever you may need for your deliverables!
Project Management Freelance Tools
Project management tools can help you with everything from organizing your to-do list to making sure everyone’s on the same page. Managing multiple clients and projects becomes a bit more manageable with these project management tools that are affordable, efficient and easy to use. From real-time messaging capabilities to tracking tasks and budgets, these solutions make running a freelance business much easier.
Asana
A free, project-management platform that works seamlessly with a variety of other productivity tools. It’s my go-to tool when collaborating with designers, developers and writers on projects. Whether you’re organizing content promotion, planning your next conference or keeping tabs on all your social media profiles, Asana can handle it.
Monday.com
Part project management, part social network and all task-management software — this software helps clients and freelancers coordinate and communicate. It’s also useful for managing multiple projects at once. Create product roadmaps, set up campaign dashboards, and keep all co-collaborators on track with customizable schedules.
Scheduling Freelance Tools
If you’re a freelancer, schedule management is key. Whether it’s your writing, design or social media skills that you offer your clients, being able to do so in an organized manner will save you time and energy.
Calendly
Online scheduling software is a godsend for freelancers. Instead of juggling dozens of calendars and wasting hours emailing back and forth with clients to make appointments, online schedulers let you coordinate everyone’s availability in one place. One of our favorites is Calendly, which has integrated directly with Google Calendar so that you can easily share your available time slots with clients on Gmail.
AI Writing Generators
From a simple spell check to writing tools that can write entire articles, artificial intelligence has come a long way. Even the most experienced freelancers need a writing boost every now and then — even if it’s just to banish that pesky writer’s block. Because of this, more and more freelancers are turning to AI to give them the helping hand they need.
Grammarly
Grammarly catches spelling and grammar mistakes, including punctuation and contextual errors. You can use it as a plugin on Firefox or Google Chrome, or download it onto your computer. This means you can catch mistakes in real time, cutting back on both your editing process and helps avoids having any errors in your content once you go live.
Anyword
When it comes to AI copy generating tools, Anyword’s AI Copywriting Platform reigns supreme. With Anyword’s AI tool, freelancers can create entire blog posts in just a few clicks. Plus, if you wanted to generate social copy to go along with that blog post, the platform holds that power as well. In short, Anyword is a freelancer’s one-stop-shop for all of your copy needs. Create blogs, ads, landing pages, emails and more!
And the benefits don’t just stop there. The copywriting platform also provides unique “Predictive Performance Scores” for select copy variations that indicate the performance and conversion potential of that piece of text. What does this mean for you? You can get a strong idea of how your copy will perform — before you even have to press publish. Kiss the guesswork behind copywriting goodbye with the help of Anyword’s versatile tools. Test the waters with a free, 7-day trial.
