Tools that I use to supercharge my freelance work

By Raddy in Business / Marketing · 9th June 2021

In this short article, I will talk about the tools I use to supercharge my Freelance business. If you don’t know who I am, my name is Raddy I am a Freelance Web Developer and Content Creator. You can read more about me here, or check out some of my videos.

Let’s start with one of my favourites and arguably one of the important ones. Grammarly.

Grammarly

Most of you have probably already heard of this tool. Grammarly simply helps me write better. I always wanted to write blog posts, but never hard to courage as my writing skills were fairly poor (at least that’s how I felt).

I use Grammarly for pretty much everything that involves writing. From blog posts, YouTube video scripts, emails and so on… It challenges my writing skills and helps me become a better communicator (I think).

I am currently on the Free version, but I will upgrade at some point.

Google Keep

Google Keep is a simple notes tool. It’s minimalistic and that’s why I love it. You can go in and just start making notes without any complications. The only negative side in terms of usability is that once your list grows it’s very hard to stay organised and find things. I do use the labels, but that doesn’t help much.

The off-putting thing about Google Keep is privacy. It’s a Google product, so I can only assume that there is no privacy. I am not saying that the data is public, but not encrypted in any way.

Notion

As of recently, I started using Notion to organise my notes and plan. It’s a little bit more complicated than Google Keep, but it’s a lot more powerful and it helps me stay organised. I kept everything fairly simple for now and the most important part of it is probably the YouTube part where I have my kanban setup.

The word “Kanban” makes me feel unwell. It’s a very organisational thing to do and I am not a big fan 😂. The only useful thing is that I can keep my notes a little bit more organised, that’s all. I am sure that it’s a very effective method of working in a team. Anyway, Notion is a great tool. Check it out

Update: I am moving back to Asana. The notion UI is far too slow and I prefer the Interface of Asana.

Buffer

Buffer is a great tool for scheduling social media posts. It does have some bugs and the UI can be a little bit annoying, but other than it’s a great tool. I personally use it to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts. With the Free version, you can load around 10 posts on each Social Network and have them scheduled to be posted on a specific day and time. There is not much to say about this tool, other than if there are better-paid tools out there I will be willing to upgrade.

Invoices & Book Keeping

My invoice and bookkeeping process is terrible. I currently do all of my invoicing in Adobe Illustrator and my bookkeeping in a OneDrive Excel file which I update every year.

Using Adobe Illustrator to create and send invoices was a terrible idea, but at least my invoices look nice. I haven’t yet found a good affordable tool for that just yet. If you have one in mind, please let me know in the comments below.

Regarding the Bookkeeping, it’s not so bad. I have a nice template that does most of the work. It’s a little bit old school, but it does the job. I will be happy to upgrade.

Zoho

Let me start by saying that Zoho is awesome! I use Zoho for my business email and I defiantly need to explore some of their other business tools. With Zoho was that I was able to host one business email for free which is perfect. I wasn’t expecting the email service to be anything special, but I actually ended up loving it. Their apps are great – except for the regular updates that you have to do on Windows. Everything is super smooth and I’ve never had a problem with their systems. I prefer it over Office 365 and Google Workspace.

If I ever need to create more business accounts, I would stay with them as their pricing is fairly competitive which I like.

TimeCamp

As a full-time Freelancer most of the time I work at an hourly rate. To keep up with the numbers I recently moved to TimeCamp. Previously I was using Clockify, but it started to get a little bit annoying. I think it was to do with the user interface and how they always tried to upsell their product. Anyway, I am now using TimeCamp and it’s not too bad. It does the job for now, but will probably have to come back and update this article after I use it for a little longer.

I would still recommend it as it seems great so far. I am currently on the Free version, but I probably wouldn’t mind upgrading soon. Clockify is a no go for me anymore.

DropBox

We’ve all heard of Dropbox. It’s a great tool for sharing files with clients and friends. The user interface of their website is one of my favourites and their apps are pretty good. OneDrive is probably the second-best, but if I had to upgrade I would go for Dropbox simply because of the user experience and I like the company as well. I am currently somehow using the free version, but I could defiantly do with upgrading soon.

AWS

As of recently, I started using AWS and so far I’ve been very impressed. I haven’t had any issues since I started using it and the price of a LightSail server is pretty good. I used to use all sorts of shared garbage web servers which actually cost more than AWS. The only negative thing about AWS is that it’s not as easy to set up. It requires a few commands, but it’s not that bad. I actually wrote a full article on that – check it out here.

Actually, this website is currently hosted on AWS Lightsail. The cost so far is around $4.2/mo and the specs are Memory: 512 MB, Processing: 1vCPU, Storage: 20GB SSD and 1TB Transfer. Not too bad!

As this website grows I might need to upgrade to the next tier, but that should be a fairly easy process and the cost would start from $5. It might be even worth upgrading now to get better performance.

Random, but I tried running this website on a Raspberry Pi once. It actually worked 😁

Hostinger

Hostinger is a fairly affordable hosting platform that is easy to use. I have been trying it myself and I have a few clients and friends on there too. It makes sense to go with them, especially if you are starting out and you are building a new WordPress site. I haven’t had any problems so far which is great.

And these are some of the most important tools that I use to run my business. If I’ve missed something I will probably come back and update the article at some point. I hope that you find this article informative and if you have any cool tools that you want to share please comment below.

Thank you for reading this article. Raddy

More Resources:

• Step-by-Step Guide to Migrate Your WordPress Site to AWS Lightsail
• How to find clients as a Freelance Web Developer
• AWS LightSail Fix WordPress File permissions
• Best Alternatives To Heroku For hosting a NodeJS app for FREE
• Professional Business Card Design For Creatives (AI)

Author

Hi! I’m Raddy. I am a web developer, often making YouTube Videos, Blog Posts and side projects. Enquiries: [email protected]

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