7 Tools for Freelance Writers to Expand Their Online Business
Leverage technology to earn more money and fame as an online entrepreneur.
Leverage technology to earn more money and fame as an online entrepreneur.
Your career as a freelance writer doesn't stop at writing.
If you want to do something truly remarkable, you have to go the extra mile.
You have to grow your digital footprint, nurture your community, reinforce your personal branding efforts, and constantly keep upskilling yourself.
In essence, you’re not simply writing. You’re running an online writing business.
This post discusses seven tools that can help digital writers expand their online business. From cold pitching to building a content strategy, these tools can help you every step along the way.
Read on for some helpful technological hacks that will put you ahead of the competition and boost your online business.
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a powerful web scraping tool that can capture data from multiple websites at once without coding.
How can it expand your business?
As a freelancer, you can use this tool to collect 1000s of emails and social media links of the companies you want to work with.
Octoparse will create a downloadable excel sheet with all the data on automation. You can then use it to pitch your services to the companies and convert clients.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Download Octoparse and enter “email” in the search bar. You’ll see the option: “Emails Scraper with Social Media Profiles.” Click on it.
Step 2: Enter the URLs of the website you want to scrape emails and social links from. Put one URL in each line, and click “Save & Run”.
Step 3: You’ll see two options to run the scrape. Select “Run in the Cloud” for faster extraction.
Step 4: Within a few minutes, you’ll see all the data the tool could find from the websites. You can download it as an excel sheet and start approaching.
That’s how easy collecting emails via Octoparse is.
There are plenty of other ways you can use this tool to collect data from the web (or social sites like Twitter) without any manual effort.
Find more step-by-step tutorials here.
Cost
It has a free plan that lets you scrape 10,000 data rows per export with unlimited pages per run.
If you want to extract data in huge volumes, you can upgrade to their paid plan starting from $75/month billed annually with a 5-day money-back guarantee.
Check the whole pricing structure here.
2. Intellifluence
Intellifluence is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that helps you collaborate with amazing brands in your niche.
How can it expand your business?
You can use this platform to find brands actively looking for influencers to promote their products.
You can connect with them, share an honest opinion of their products with your audience, and receive free products or money in exchange.
It’s a cool way for creators to leverage their audience by creating a win-win-win situation:
- Your followers get to know about amazing products that can solve their problems.
- Brand makes money by selling products and helping the customers.
- You make money by introducing the brand to your followers.
The best part? You can join Intellifluence for free.
They also don’t take any cut from your price, which means, you get to keep 100% of your profits.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Click here to join as an influencer. Then create your profile and add all your interests and hobbies. This will help brands to easily find you.
Step 2: When brands send you offers, review their proposals and accept the pitches that suit you the best.
You can also browse the platform and apply for offers that are appealing to you. Once the brand accepts, you can start the work.
Step 3: After you deliver the promised work, you’ll receive the free product or cash based on how you collaborated with the brand.
Intellifluence is the best platform to use if you want to make money without charging your audience.
Cost
No cost. It’s free for you to join as an influencer. Enjoy!
3. Rize
Rize is an intelligent time tracker that helps you measure and optimize your time to reach your goals faster.
How can it expand your business?
As a freelancer, you don’t have any fixed schedule to follow. This makes it easy to lose track of your time and get little done even after a busy work day.
To improve your productivity and expand your business, you need a tool that can track your work and offer a detailed breakdown of where your time is going. Rize is fully automatic and runs in the background, so you don’t have to manually start and stop timers.
Rize helps you do just that.
It records your work day and gives you an in-depth report with metrics like:
- Which websites and apps were the biggest interrupters.
- How much time you spent on each website.
- What percentage of your time was spent focusing, meeting, and taking breaks.
and much more…
Here’s a detailed review of my Tuesday’s work day:
Getting this visual report at the end of every day helps you realize where you’re spending most of your time and where you need to optimize.
This allows you to focus more on what matters and grow your business.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Download Rize on your desktop and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up.
Step 2: Create your categories and tracking rules to customize how you want Rize to track your time.
Step 3: Start working and Rize will begin recording your work activities.
Rize is a boon for people who want to measure and improve their work habits to reach their goals faster.
Trust me, you’ll never again ask yourself where your time is going once you start using Rize.
Cost
It has a free plan that allows you to use the session timer and retain one day of data. But to unlock all its features, including daily review reports, upgrade to their paid plan starting from $9.99/month billed annually.
Click here and use my code: ANANGSHA to get 25% off for 3 months on your annual plan.
4. Lightkey
Lightkey is an AI-powered text prediction tool that helps you type 4x faster by removing the manual typing of every word.
How can it expand your business?
As a freelancer growing an online business, typing is a necessary aspect of your life. Whether writing articles, social media posts, emails, etc. you’re always typing something.
Improving your typing speed can be the quickest way to finish your work. That’s where Lightkey helps you.
The tool adapts to your writing style and suggests predictions based on your previously created content and, therefore more in line with your thoughts. As you continue using the tool, it’ll start predicting complete sentences for you, which is amazing.
What I love the most about this tool is, it suggests corrections to your typos and grammatical errors in real-time. This helps you type in the forward direction without losing your train of thought.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Download Lightkey for free here to speed up your typing. You can also use their Chrome extension to type faster on millions of web apps.
Step 2: You’re done! Start writing and follow the improvement of your typing speed and overall typing metrics in Lightkey’s Control Center.
Cost
The free plan helps you save 1000 keystrokes/month. If you want unlimited experience plus full access to advanced features, I highly recommend you purchase its lifetime subscription for $169.95. Check out the whole pricing structure here.
5. TextSniper
TextSniper is a simple, powerful, and easy-to-use app for Mac users to extract text from any digital document in seconds.
How can it expand your business?
You might have come across creative inspirations like infographics, videos, and interesting images that you want to collect data from and save in your notes.
But the challenge is that you can’t select text directly from these documents, and retyping is time-consuming.
That’s where TextSniper helps you.
It lets you copy non-selectable text from any source on your screen and saves it in your clipboard to be pasted anywhere. It’s as simple as taking a screenshot on your Mac.
Here are some amazing ways this tool helps you save time:
- Scans on-screen QR codes and barcodes without manually scanning them from your phone.
- Let’s you customize how you want the text to be copied and whether you want to retain the line breaks.
- Extracts heaps of text and append them to the clipboard which can be pasted together.
- Reads out your copied text using its text-to-speech feature.
- Supports over 8 languages, including English and Chinese.
- Stores all your data in your local device and doesn’t share it with anyone.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Select Capture Text from the menu bar.
Step 2: Select the text area. All the text within the rectangular selection will get copied to the clipboard.
Step 3: Press CMD+V to paste the text to your doc file, notes, emails, or any place you want.
If you’re a Mac user, this simple tool will make your life much easier. You could quickly select any text from your on-screen inspiration and save it for the later use.
Cost
TextSniper is available as a one-time purchase of $7.99 for one-Mac license on its website.
You can also purchase it from the Mac App Store for $11.99 by sharing the app’s access with up to six people.
6. Sunsama
Sunsama is a task management app that helps you effectively plan your day and boost your work productivity.
How can it expand your business?
As a solopreneur, you wear many hats and manage every aspect of your admin and marketing tasks on your own. This makes it easy for you to get consumed by work and frequently feel burned out.
That’s where Sunsama helps you.
It allows you to productively manage your workload and prioritize your day’s most important tasks that aligns with your weekly objectives.
Unlike other task planners, Sunsama has an extremely simple interface that’s designed to enhance your focus. It keeps your dashboard simple and doesn’t clutter it with complex features.
I’ve been using this tool for a while, and I love how much it’s improved my deep work capability. It lets you set time for each task and assess how long it actually takes to complete. This helps you track your progress and get better with each session.
Sunsama also lets you integrate and pull tasks from your calendars, emails, and to-do list apps in one place. It saves you the trouble of switching from one app to another and improves your focus.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Click here to start your 14-day free trial. Follow the on-screen instructions and integrate your other task management tools with Sunsama.
Step 2: Review your yesterday by filling in what tasks you completed and how much time they took. Then add your today’s tasks and allocate time to each of them.
Step 3: Timebox your tasks by dragging them on the calendar. Once you’re done, set your Shutdown time when Sunsama can prompt you to call it a day.
Step 4: Your planning is done! Take a moment to review it and add/remove any tasks you like. Then click “Get Started” to kickstart your work day.
If you’re struggling with efficiently managing your daily tasks, I highly recommend you to try Sunsama. It’s the real game changer.
Cost
Its pricing is straightforward. You can use the tool for 14 days for free to see if it improves your productivity. Once the trial ends, you can upgrade to the premium plan of $16/month billed annually. Check out their pricing here.
7. Article Forge
Article Forge is an AI writing tool that helps you create SEO-optimized content in just one click.
How can it expand your business?
SEO is the most crucial element of any online business. You have to keep creating great content to claim your position on Google’s first page.
But as a freelancer, generating regular content is hard. You need to do content research, competition research, keyword optimization, and much more.
That’s where Article Forge helps you.
It automates all your manual efforts that goes into creating SEO-optimized content. Its AI is extremely powerful and built closer to how Google’s AI operates, so your articles have a higher chance to rank on the first page.
Here’s how to use it
Step 1: Visit Article Forge and log into your dashboard.
Step 2: Enter your primary keyword and select the language. You can also select article length and allow the tool to add titles and section headers to your article.
Step 3: Click on ‘Generate’ and your article will be ready in a few minutes.
Writing long-form articles that will please both your readers and Google can’t get easier than this. If you’re a freelance writer, adding this tool to your arsenal will help you grow your business at a rapid pace.
Cost
It has a free 5-day trial where you can test drive the tool. If you love the article quality, you can upgrade to the premium plan starting from $13/month, billed annually. Check out their pricing here.
Final Words
Summarizing, here are the 7 tools that will help you expand your online business as a freelancer:
- Octoparse: Scrape emails and social profiles of potential clients on automation.
- Intellifluence: Leverage your audience to earn money/free products for sharing your honest product reviews.
- Rize: Track your time to optimize your work day.
- Lightkey: Predictive typing software to 4x your typing speed.
- TextSniper: Extracts text from images in seconds.
- Sunsama: Plan your work day effectively.
- Article Forge: Create human-friendly SEO articles with just a click.
I hope you found some fantastic tools to help you grow your online business. If you’ve used any of these tools before, let me know about your experience in the comments.
Author’s note: Some of the links mentioned in this article 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 life and journey as a content creator.
