If you look at the current career landscape, solopreneurs are a growing and powerful force. Who is a solopreneur? Any entrepreneur who runs a business alone is a solopreneur. Anybody from a bottle washer to a chief cook who owns and runs a business solely is a solopreneur. Hence, the person is solely responsible for both success and failure. Which means if being a solopreneur has its benefits, it has its disadvantages as well.
As a solopreneur, you will have to be on your toes always. Completing multiple tasks altogether needs a lot of time management, which can sometimes become a great challenge. The biggest drawback of being a solopreneur is being trapped in “Isolation”. Therefore, you will have to motivate yourself to stay active and productive consistently. Here are some of the tools, a solopreneur must have to stay focused and motivated.
#1 Harvest
If you are looking for something that helps you track online timing, Harvest is the best tool you should invest in. Although spreadsheets are a great assist in tracking the time you dedicated to your client projects, they have their limitations. A spreadsheet can only give you an overview of the hours you spent on client projects. It cannot analyse the data separately for main and side projects, all customers projects and other petty activities on your daily to-do list.
This is where Harvest can come to your rescue. Harvest is capable enough to track all of your client projects and other time-consuming activities simultaneously. Even if your projects are subdivided into multiple tasks and include separate rates, Harvest can easily track all the activities. This will help you understand how much time each task requires to complete and the time considered for the investment return.
If you like your tasks to be automated, you can also set up “automated reminders” with Harvest. This feature can be smartly used for sending reminders like due invoices and payments with the client. Some of the most helpful apps integrated with Harvest are; Trello, Basecamp, Salesforce, PayPal and Zendesk.
#2 Shake
Shake is the web and mobile app that is best suited for legal transactions and agreements legally bound. With Shake, you can also resolve all your legal queries in few seconds. Shake allows the user to create easy contracts for leases, jobs, sales and none disclosure agreements with its free templates.
For those who are not familiar with legal terms, this app also simplifies the legal jargons and contracts. Team Shake also provides a free version of the app, which is highly recommendable for beginners.
#3 Boomerang
Email communications are highly important regarding business development. However, sending the right email at the right time is even more important. Solopreneurs who work with their clients in multiple time zones need to adjust their email communications as per the customer’s timings. Boomerang is a great tool to automate your emails, as well as your email campaigns. You can schedule emails, send follow up emails, track responses and set reminders for no-reply messages.
If you want to send an outreach email to any influencer, you might see that often your mail will get buried in their long email list. Hence, you should make sure you are sending follow-up emails to reach better results. Team Boomerang has introduced a new feature known as “Respondable”, which uses the AI to help the user create compelling, actionable and engaging emails. Remember, the way you draft your email, it predicts the quality and quantity of responses, and show ways to improve your tone.
#4 Socialert
With the rise of social networking, social media platforms have become the most important part of business development. From generating leads to brand recognition and brand awareness, social media gives unlimited benefits to your business.
Socialert is a smart tool that allows the user to track keywords and hashtags, and handle competitors on Twitter. With Socialert, you can check which kind of content is going viral at what time. You can also keep a tab on the content posted by your competitor and check which group of who is engaging with their content.
Remember, people who are contacting your competitors are your potential customers. Socialert helps you gather information about the hashtag campaigns and keywords your competitors are using to interact with the potential customer base. On the other hand, this tool will also show you relevant tweet shares and the profile of audiences sharing your content.
#5 Rapportive
The first thing we all do while working on leads and rapport building process is finding social contacts of the prospect. Rapportive is a kind of Gmail extension that shows you LinkedIn profiles for your prospects and clients in your Gmail. Whenever a prospect sends you an email, the Rapportive tool will automatically generate its social contact for you.
This Gmail extension extracts the correspondent’s location, company and job details, interests and mutual networks and drops it in your inbox. You can also add your social profiles so that anybody who wants to look for your contact details can find you without any hassle.
#6 Grammarly
Content marketing has many benefits including brand awareness, SEO, better conversions, direct traffic and so on. Entrepreneurs can easily delegate their content marketing tasks to their subordinates. However, a solopreneur will have to handle the content marketing, on its own. Which means you need to write your own sales copy, website pages and emails.
Grammarly is a useful grammar checking tool for writing a grammatically correct copy. It checks the content with more than 150 grammar rules and makes sure you get the best content to post online. It also offers a free version, which includes contextual spelling, punctuation and grammar checker.
A solopreneur is not same as an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur hires employees over time to help in business-building, but a solopreneur carries all the business growing responsibilities on its own. Being a solopreneur has both high risks and high rewards. In such a situation, tools mentioned above can prove quite helpful in sustainable task management.
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