From Creative Boom, Katy Cowan offers her recommendations for tools to help freelancers run a lean business. For marketing needs, she recommends these tools, all of which I have used and recommend also:
Marketing
Who has time for marketing when freelancing? It’s certainly a challenge to find the time. But these clever marketing tools will help you put your business name out there, without taking up too much time or costing you a penny:
14. Mailchimp: Mailchimp helps you send better emails to clients and sell more stuff. That’s the promise anyway, and we certainly love it. Send amazing campaigns for free with up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.Completely free.
15. Buffer: Buffer lets you manage your social media marketing all under one roof. Ok, it can’t monitor conversation – but it can help you schedule posts for later, so you can get on with running your business. Completely free.
16. IFTTT: IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. It’s a superb automation tool that lets you create recipes that connect apps to one another, sparking some kind of action. It’s great for automating your social media, for example. Completely free.
17. Bitly: Bitly isn’t just a very helpful URL shortening service, it gives you complete ownership of all your links, allowing you to capture data and track the effectiveness of your tweets and updates. Completely free.
18. Feedly: Need access to all your favourite news, blogs and inspiration sites, all in one place? So you can share via your social channels and keep clients informed of industry updates? Feedly brings everything together for you. Just subscribe to what you love, create folders and bingo. There’s even an app. Completely free.
Read the full story at 20 free or affordable tools to help money-saving freelancers run a lean business | Creative Boom
See also ContactOut for a simple browser extension that helps you find email addresses and phone numbers of anyone on LinkedIn.
