Usually two words “freelancer” and “time” go together. Freelancers can’t juggle multiple tasks simultaneously and that’s why we need to allocate time carefully. Time is an essential source of freelancer financial success.

There are lots of web apps that help track time and create reports. If you use one of the tools on a daily basis, you can turn your work into a structured schedule, get more spare time for fun, and improve your productivity. Here’s is an overview of 10 top free apps for time management for freelancers. Continue Reading

Every freelancer out there has a bag of tricks they wouldn’t want to do work without—whether it’s their computer, useful software, or their favorite radio station. Find out what sorts of things help FreelanceSwitch.com contributors during their workday.

Perhaps their advice will inspire you to try something new, or reaffirm that what you currently use is the best in the biz.

Hardware

My Apple Kit

I regularly use a MacBook Air, iMac, iPad, and iPhone for work. I love the style and function of OSX and iOS, and the quality of these tools is just amazing.

I can enjoy a huge screen at home for digging into some in-depth work, and take the super lightweight MacBook Air on the road. My iPhone never leaves my side, and I’m constantly amazed at how much work I can get done on such a tiny device. –David Appleyard

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Almost everyone uses social networks for personal or business purposes. Communication via social media is taken for granted. Even employers check freelancer’s reputation with the help of social means.

Today we’ll explore top apps for better social media management. However, we will go beyond solutions like Hootsuite as it is a well-known brand on the social media apps market. The tools in this roundup are easy, useful, and affordable for freelance social media experts and are rising stars you should get your hands on.

Bizo Switchboard

Bizo Switchboard

Bizo Switchboard is more than a just a free Twitter link shortener. It helps you get the most out of your tweets and promote your website, blog or your freelance services. As you publish a URL, Bizo Switchboard shortens it and makes a unique bar, which pops up to anyone who clicks on your link in the tweet.

The bar contains your Twitter account name, your message and “Follow” button. Switchboard bar can be customized to meet your website color scheme. Besides, Bizo Switchboard shows statistics such as link impressions and click through rates. Continue Reading

I work for a magazine publishing company with a very small staff. We use email marketing to let our advertisers know what is coming up in future issues, enticing them to advertise. There is no way our sales team can personally call and visit each and every one of their hundreds of clients, so email marketing is extremely important to us.

When I first started at this company, they tried to put me in charge of our Constant Contact account. I know it’s supposed to be easy, but it wasn’t. I was extremely overwhelmed by my choices (400 templates? Really?) and I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to use the program. I nearly had a mental breakdown.

Thankfully they reassigned that task to the art director, who, in her infinite wisdom of PhotoShop and InDesign, created the most beautiful template of our very own to use each month.

I’m not a stupid person. But Constant Contact got the best of me!

There had to be an easier way to send out mass emails from a third party account. I finally found MailerLite, and my email marketing stress melted away like a chocolate bar left out in the sun.

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One of the great advantages of freelancing is the ability to work from anywhere. On Web.AppStorm, Justin Stravarius looks at fifty web apps that can replace desktop applications you depend on. It’s worth a look.

Even without the help of the ground breaking features in HTML5, web apps have come of age. While not all web apps rival their desktop counterparts, some clearly do. One solid example being online To-do apps with invoicing and project management apps also competent enough for a neck to neck fight.

We’ve compiled a list of 50 worthy web app alternatives to standalone desktop apps. Let’s take a look!

Read “50 Great Web Alternatives to Desktop Software” on Web.AppStorm.

Web based applications are overflowing the internet these days, but to short down the humongous list of several thousands – I thought it would be best to showcase 10 of the Best Web Based applications a freelancer needs. These are all great apps, some might work for you, some might not. It all depends on who you ask; I have found these to be the best for what I need. I suggest you try these out before making up your mind on which ones are great and which ones are bad. It´s all in the “Eye of the Beholder” after all. Continue Reading

From file management to accounting, invoicing to time tracking, there’s a web app for pretty much everything in a freelancer’s life. Over on our sister blog Web.AppStorm you can find a huge roundup of half a hundred web apps freelancers will find useful!

Amidst all those decisions that have to be made, you also have to choose what tools you’re going to use to actually do your job. And the web is both a blessing and a curse in this regard. It’s a blessing in that it gives you a plethora of choices for the different categories of applications. But it can be a curse because there are so many good options to choose from.

What’s a poor, green-behind-the-ears freelancer to do? Well, you can start by letting us whittle down the list a little for you. Separate some of the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You’ll still have find which of the tools below best fit your needs and style, but this is the right place to start.

Continue Reading at Web.AppStorm

If you’re a Mac user you’ll also enjoy Mac.AppStorm’s much shorter list – 12 Essential Mac Apps for Freelancers. Yep it’s app overdose

Having the right billing and invoicing tools is crucial to a freelancer. Your options can be very different, depending on what type of computer you’re working on. For those freelancers working on Macs, there are several applications worth investigating. It’s just a matter of choosing which will fit best with your billing habits.

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The search engine ranking game is full of pirates and marauders; sort of like the high seas of the 18th century. In order to navigate through these treacherous waters (and protect the good name of links to and from your clients’ and your websites), it pays to understand your enemy.

This article provides a short overview of the downside of search engine optimization as well as offers tricks and tips of how to ensure that your websites legally reach the page rank they deserve so you can attract clients.

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As a freelancer I sometimes lay awake at night tossing and turning over thoughts about secondary revenue streams. That tells me two things:

1. In this current economy it’s always a good idea to be looking ahead for new revenue opportunities.
2. I must be pretty dull at parties.

Lately I’ve been putting together a new travel and information site called I Heart Japan. And while it has been coming together I’ve been looking at good ways to add advertising revenue streams to the site.

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Hot on the heels of my NomaDesk review, I had requests to review Dropbox as an alternate way to store and share files online. So come along as we delve the deep dark Dropbox, and I’ll promise to stop with the alliteration.

Much like NomaDesk, Dropbox is like a virtual hard drive that you can store and share files on. It’s a fairly straight forward way to sync your files with the added benefit of being able to access them with any computer with Internet access. Simply drop your files into one of DropBox’s folders and you’re done.

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I am a big fan of the digital nomad lifestyle. Being able to take your laptop and do your work from anywhere has a lot of appeal for me. But living the nomad life is rarely as simple as just picking up your notebook bag and heading out the door. There are a lot of factors to consider. My biggest fear is leaving important files behind sitting on my desktop while I’m a thousand miles away with a client deadline looming large.

For that reason I was excited when FreelanceSwitch gave me the assignment to review NomaDesk, a virtual workplace for digital nomads.

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