Ways to succeed in freelancing:

Freelancers often have to work under tight deadlines, can receive thousands of emails which can be remain unread, have to fulfill high expectations of clients and you want to stay on top of your freelance business, but there is not enough time to do all this. Unfortunately you cannot add more hours to the day or make of duplicate of yourself who can fulfill your demands. But still you can automate everything to make it even better. By using automation tools to your freelance business means three things for you:

You can save time:

Usually freelancers tend to spend a lot of time on tiresome manual processes like writing proposals drafting emails, filling timesheets, invoicing and all sort of business related activities. These activities consume lot of time. By using Automation tools you can allow yourselves to reorganize these processes. According to a survey about 75% of people prefer to use marketing automation tools to save their time. Moreover, using automation tools can increase your productivity by 5%.

You make more money:

By freeing up time you spent on repetitive and manual tasks, you can spend your time on profitable work. Automation tools also make marketing and outreach more efficient. About 80% of businesses using automation tools have seen increase in their leads and 68% of top performing small businesses are using these tools.

You reduce errors and mistakes:

By doing manual tasks absorbs energy and time, this can result in costly mistakes that can lead your business to unnecessary risks. By using automation tools you can reduce these errors and mistakes. This means that better quality, higher productivity and happier clients.

There are many tools being used by freelancers to make their work automated, but in this course we will talk about few specific tools like Google Calendar, Google Calendar, and IFTTT. IFTTT stands for “If This Then That” and is completely free and works with all sorts of different programs. IFTTT can work with Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Google Drive etc.

By using this tool you can:

Save your mail attachments to Drive: Sometimes Emails are clunky and difficult to find in your inbox. To get rid of them one by one or downloading them into a certain folder takes up more time than we realize, through this tool you can save automatically your email to google drive. This will save you both time and space.

Track your hours with Google Calendar:

Freelancers often have to track their work hours, this might seem like a small and easily done task, but automating can make it even better. With this tool you can set up a location for your office and your phone will start tracking work hours whenever you enter. You will never have to remember to write down the time you start working ever again.

Sync your clouds:

If you are using multiple cloud storage services, or are using one for backup or are just in the middle of switching. Synchronizing your files between Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon Cloud can be a pain. But through this tool you can easily synchronize your files.

Have your phone muted during meetings:

Have you ever been in an important meeting and forgot to mute your phone? That’s a little thing you can do manually, but again, why not let IFTTT do it for you? For this you just need Google Calendar. You can also add movie night to your calendar in order to ensure that nobody disturbs you.

Connecting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram:

If you have multiple social media channels, then you know the feeling of having to post the same photo to multiple ones. Through IFTTT you can keep you Facebook and Twitter profile pictures sync, can tweet your Instagram photos and lot of other stuff.

Linking WordPress to all of that:

A lot of freelancers have blogs and cross-posting can take so much precious time. Through IFTTT you can automatically tweet out your newest WordPress post or can share it on Facebook.

In short there are so many features of this tool and possibilities are countless. You can visit IFTTT website and use their discovery tool. It is easy to use and you can see how many people are using it.