It is estimated that around 57 million American workers make their living through the growing gig economy. This means that a huge percentage of the workforce is made up of freelancers, and those freelancers can use all of the tools they can get to maintain successful self-owned businesses.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool that allows you to create posts that get published when you want them to. It is an extremely simple tool to use, but it can help you to maintain a strong social media presence across a variety of platforms.
Hootsuite
If you want the granddaddy of all social media management tools, then you want Hootsuite. The features on Hootsuite are robust and allow you to schedule a variety of different social media posts for a variety of platforms. One of the great things about Hootsuite is that you can use it for project-specific social media posting as well as general purpose posts.
Anytime Mailbox
Anytime Mailbox is a digital mailbox service that can save a freelancer a lot of time and aggravation. Freelancing in most fields is done online and offline, but it can be a pain to have to deal with the volume of mail you sometimes get. With a digital mailbox service, your daily mail is sent to you in the form of digital files in your email and you can quickly decide which mail to shred, archive, or forward to you. It eliminates dealing with junk mail and speeds up your day.
Mint
Mint is a financial app that allows you to consolidate all of your expense and income information and then helps you to create a budget you can manage. If nothing else, Mint makes managing your finances significantly easier by making sure every dollar you make and every bill you have to pay are monitored on the same app.
Quickbooks
Quickbooks can be an excellent bookkeeping tool that allows you to maintain your business finances all year long and then put together reports for tax purposes. You can track all of your business expenses (including mileage), pay various vendors, and manage your income from one central point.
FreeAgent
The gig economy is growing so much that there are freelancer tools being developed specifically for people who work for themselves. FreeAgent is a bookkeeping app that has all of the invoicing and expense tracking features a freelancer needs to use on a daily basis.
Asana
As a freelancer, you will be collaborating with a lot of people and working with a list of clients all year long. Asana is a collaboration app that allows you to set up and run virtual meetings, store contact information, and share documents with meeting attendees.
Tickspot.com
A freelancer must be organized if they are going to be successful, and Tickspot.com is a site that helps freelancers to track their project hours and make sure they are not going over their allotted hours on a specific project. Any freelancer who wants to save time while making sure they are dedicating the proper resources to their projects needs this sort of tool to help track billable hours and monitor the use of project resources.
Bidsketch
A big part of a freelancer’s world is creating and submitting proposals to prospective clients. Bidsketch allows you to create professional looking proposals and then track their progress. You can also have access to a variety of proposal templates that can help increase your chances of getting more work.
Yesware
Yesware is a simple productivity tool that helps you to send out email proposals and then track when those proposals were opened by the recipients. The benefit to a tool like this is that you are notified the moment your email is opened and that allows you to schedule a tactical phone call to discuss your proposal as soon as it is read.
GetaFreelancer.com
It is great to have proposal monitoring and generating software, but those tools don’t do you a lot of good if you do not have places to send proposals. GetaFreelancer.com is a website that has helped connect freelancers with job owners for a very long time.
ScriptLance.com
Professionals who freelance in computer coding or blog writing can use this site to bid on a variety of projects. While this site is mostly about coding and script writing, its blog content marketplace has grown over the years.
If your life is dedicated to being a freelancer, then you will need to have the right tools to keep the income rolling in. A successful freelancer is constantly looking for tools to improve the way they look for work, the way they bid for work, and the way they get the job done for the client.