4 Tools that Helped Make My Writing Business More Successful
How you can use technology to set yourself apart from competitors and take your writing business to the next level.
How you can use technology to set yourself apart from competitors and take your writing business to the next level.
If you have a knack for writing, there’s never a better time to start than now.
The creator economy is catching up speed and we’re in for a huge revolution that’s taking place around the world.
Writers aren’t going to be broke anymore and can run a full-time self-employed business doing what they love.
But passion and skill aren’t the only drivers to the business. You have to take care of a lot of non-writing-related stuff that can take up a huge chunk of your time and make the self-employed life a lot less fun.
To make sure this doesn’t happen, I’m sharing four amazing tools that can take away all the boring stuff from your business and let you do what you anyway love to do.
1. Octoparse
Whether you want to research for an article, potential clients, or just to see what’s trending in your niche, you need to put in a lot of time to go through various websites and collect sufficient data.
You can’t escape this data collection phase because it serves as the foundation of your work, but manual efforts take a crazy amount of time. That’s where I’d like to introduce you to a very powerful data scraping tool: Octoparse.
Here’s what it does
It’s a cloud-based web scraping tool to help you collect relevant information from multiple websites. It scrapes the unstructured data and structures it for you in a more digestible form, like plain text or Excel sheets.
It gives you a lot of flexibility in choosing what data you want to collect from websites and lets you run multiple extractions simultaneously. You can also schedule it or run it in real-time, whichever suits you best.
Getting a bit technical? No problem. Let’s see it in action to get more clarity.
Let’s say you’re writing an article related to startups, but are struggling to find catchy headings. So instead of doing manual research on what titles top articles use, you can use Octoparse to extract that data for you.
Step 1: Download Octoparse and select “Advanced Mode” to create the task. Then enter the URL inside it.
Step 2: Select the data elements you want to extract and a list of options will come up. You can choose any as per your objective. In this example, I’m selecting the heading and subheading. Then click on “Extract data.”
Step 3: Check the workflow Octoparse created for you which will run in order to extract all data, and click on “Run.”
Step 4: You’ll be presented with three options. You can either run it on your device, on the cloud (premium feature), or schedule it.
Step 5: All the results will come up in the form of an excel sheet which you can easily export and use for data analysis.
If you had to manually read so many titles, you’d have to scroll for hours, but now, you can see a list of titles and sub-titles with just a few clicks. It’s crazy how much time and effort this tool saves by extracting data on your behalf, with just a one-time setup.
Cost
The free plan lets you get 10,000 records per export with unlimited pages per crawl, which is enough for you at the start. If you wish to extract data intensively, then you can purchase the premium version which starts at $75/month billed annually with 5 days money-back guarantee. Check the whole pricing structure here.
2. Founders’ Book
Running a business is chaotic, especially when you’re doing it for the first time and don’t know what’s coming.
In today’s rapidly changing world, the old methods for setting up a business are soon becoming redundant. There’s a high chance you might miss the newly evolving tools and resources which could have solved your biggest business issues. That’s the problem Founders’ Book solves for you.
Here’s what it does
It is the world’s biggest library of the best tools and resources which every founder needs to take their business off the ground to a level where they’re ready to scale up.
Ever had an incredible idea of creating your own app or SaaS product, but left it behind because you didn’t know to code, and hiring a tech team was a financial nightmare?
What if I say you don’t need any of that to build these products?
Yes, it’s possible with no-code tools.
They give you complete freedom and the ability to build complex products that can be monetized to run your business even if you don’t know how to code and have a very limited budget.
Isn’t that cool?
There are various such tools out there that don’t require you to be a Know-It-All to run a business anymore.
That’s the vision of Founders’ Book. They want you to bring your ideas to life even when you have a tight budget and you don’t know the dynamics of running a business. They have a very dedicated team to compile the best tools and techniques and teach you how to utilize them in the most efficient way so you can build your businesses by using technology, and not hiring any developers.
It can save at least 200 hours of your time on the lookout for the right advice and resources which can 20x your speed of business growth. Check this page to see everything they offer.
Cost
It comes with a one-time purchase of $97, with a 7-day money-back guarantee. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t give it a try when there’s so much to gain and nothing to lose.
3. The Future Party
As I mentioned earlier, the creator economy is undergoing a huge boom and there’s a lot coming up in the world every day. As a part of this economy, you need to stay up-to-date with all the upcoming changes to catch the amazing opportunities much before your competition.
That’s where I’d recommend The Future Party.
Here’s what it does
It’s a free daily newsletter that curates stories spanning pop culture, entrepreneurship, entertainment, and tech, and breaks down what it all means for the future. I love it so much, I’ve written about it in a previous article as well.
Every morning at 7 am PST, you’ll find them in your inbox where they break down the trends of today with their possible influence on the future to aid you with strategizing your business.
They span across the world and cover all the top creators, entrepreneurs, creative professionals in entertainment, music, art, fashion, technology, and business. So, no matter what niche you are in, or what your business is about, you can always be sure they’ll cover the big news and curate the best opportunities for you.
They also organize exclusive fun events to inspire and support the creator culture. If you wish to attend these events, join their community by clicking here, It’s free, and it’s sure a lot of fun!
Cost
The Future Party is 100% free of cost, yay! Just go here and subscribe to their newsletter, and a daily dose of valuable information will land in your inbox before you even start your day.
4. Chiggopay
Managing finances is probably the most unsexy part of running a business. It takes up hours fixing the taxes, invoicing, and a ton of paperwork which takes away the focus and time you should’ve given to the work that matters the most. So, to make your paperwork less intimidating and more fun here’s the tool I use: Chiggopay.
Here’s what it does
It’s an all-in-one business management suite to help you do all management-related activities of your business in a very fast and organized way without any to and fro to other platforms.
It makes it really fast to create professional-looking proposals and invoices which you can directly send to your clients. It also keeps track of billing, taxes, and finances for you, giving a beautiful visual representation of how your business is performing and what areas to improve upon.
A really interesting aspect is that users can create a mini-website for their service-based business on Chiggopay for free.
What I love the most about this tool is that you can manage all your clients from within its dashboard. It lets you host invoices, documents, book appointments, real-time chatting, and all the project-related communications in one place, which makes it highly efficient to keep track of the project and give your clients the best collaborating experience.
It’s crazy to see how much this tool can do on your behalf and how much time it saves that normally goes into confusion and hopping around platforms to get even a simple work done.
You can check out all the features this tool offers by visiting this page.
Cost
The free plan lets you create up to 50 invoices per month with limited proposals and templates. This is good to get familiar with the tool and see if it’s valuable for you.
Then you can use the basic plan, which starts with as low as $15/month billed monthly. This gives you a lot more flexibility over the tool. You can check out the whole pricing structure here.
Final Words
It’s easy to get intimidated with the self-employed life, given that there’s so much you need to take care of. But with the world taking a positive shift towards it, more and more tools are coming to the market to make your life extremely easy and get most of your time-taking work done by technology.
The four tools I mentioned in the article can do all the heavy lifting for you, saving you a ton of time and a bit of hair-pulling frustration:
- Octoparse: It’s a cloud-based web scraping tool to help you collect relevant information from multiple websites.
- Founders’ Book: The world’s biggest collection of tools and resources to help you set up and grow your business.
- The Future Party: Know about the changing trends of business, entertainment, and culture every morning straight from your inbox.
- Chiggopay: The all-in-one suite that helps you create beautiful invoices and proposals for clients, and accept payments in the blink of an eye.
I hope this article has helped you get more confidence in building your writing business. Get started today and you’ll reap the amazing benefits of all this hard work paying off tomorrow.
Author’s note: Some of the links mentioned here are sponsored. But I love these tools so much, I would never have shared them with you if I didn’t think they can add amazing value to your journey as an entrepreneur or a new business owner.