Whether you are a solo-preneur, or a growing small-to-medium business, you may need support at one time or another and consider working with freelancers.
Hiring full-time staff can be costly, and you likely do not need support all the time. Freelancers can provide cost-effective expertise that can help you increase the performance and productivity of your business.
Hiring full-time staff can be costly, and you likely do not need support all the time. Freelancers can provide the cost expertise you need to increase performance and productivity in your business. Click To Tweet
But how do you manage costs, team productivity, security of sensitive information and workflow? Here are 8 great tools your business can use:
1. LastPass.com
Give your virtual team access to all necessary digital platforms without sharing passwords. We have worked with clients who lost access to intellectual property and digital platform to rogue freelancers. Protect yourself and your business whilst helping your team do their work. Plus, no lost passwords because Lastpass saves them all in a secure vault. Just remember that if you forget the password for accessing your Lastpass account, it will lock you out and the company cannot help because they do not store any passwords for security reason.
2. Clockify.com
Kill Word & Excel time-sheets and let your team track hours spent on each task by clocking in and out. At the end of the week or month you can review time spent on each task to understand what your most profitable activities are and where you need to cut out activities that are not profitable. Also, you get to see exactly how much you need to pay each team member – no quibbles. Best of all, it’s free.
3. BetterProposals.io
In turning prospects to clients, nothing is more frustrating than creating proposals, quotations and agreements over and over again. Prepare branded templates in advance and allow your team to simply edit and send proposals to clients whenever needed. Once sent, you can track the activities clients take on each proposal until signed. You also get to see what what your revenue pipeline looks like month by month by viewing how many proposal are created, accepted and rejected. The best thing is clients can sign the proposal digitally without the back-and-forth of heavy PDFs clogging your mailbox. Plus, you get to save on freelancer costs because the work from templates, and not from scratch.
4. Canva.com
Design is expensive. Save thousands and maintain brand integrity by creating your own branded templates so your team can edit and use accordingly. Canva has done-for-you graphics and document templates that give a great starting point to customise what you need to your preference. You can get away with simply working from the free version and upgrade to the paid version if you want to access more features and tools that make your team work faster.
5. Buffer.com
Need to post on social media regularly? Automate it and forget about it. Canva.com will save you time in design whilst Buffer.com will save you time in scheduling posts in advance. Pre-load images, videos, captions and hashtags in advance, and set the exact time you want your posts to appear on your preferred social media marketing channels. With the free version you are permitted only 3 channels and a maximum of 10 automated posts. The paid version gives you more automated posts and stronger analytics to your social media marketing strategy.
6. Planoly.com
Having a web and mobile app that enables you to manage posts and content visually before posting to Instagram and Pinterest is great for curating visual content that ideal for your target audience. You get to see what your pages look like before you post, prepare captions and hashtags, and either automate posting or post manually.
7. ClickUp.com
Manage people, projects, and everything in between. Features include communication and collaboration tools, task assignments, statuses, alerts and time tracking. You can assign comments and tasks to individuals or a team in your company. With status updates you are always abreast of what is happening with the a project. It is one tool that eliminates having multiple tools to increase your team’s productivity.
8. Google Drive
Working with freelancers can get tricky when it comes to file sharing and collaboration. Email boxes can block heavy documents, or finding documents in email trails can be frustrating. Your team can share documents securely and work on them simultaneously whilst track comments and changes in real time.
9. WhatsApp
Once upon a time, businesses could not fathom the concept of using WhatsApp as a business communication tool. That has since changed and companies all over the world are using WhatsApp to respond to clients speedily and efficiently. In emerging markets, WhatsApp is preferred over phone calls and emails. WhatsApp Business has automated response features that can be set up to send messages to specific people. You can use this feature for your internal team communications especially if you work across different countries.
Working with freelancers can be rewarding and increase your business performance with the right tools. Help your freelancers deliver the best results for you in a timely manner so you can focus on revenue generation for your… Click To Tweet
