Top 6 Business Tools : A Treat For Entrepreneurs

Holiday season is fast approaching. And with that, we’re here to give you an early treat to help you grow and empower your business or your freelancing career.
Whether you need help in boosting your marketing efforts or need assistance in sorting your paperwork, you’ll surely find something you need from this list. These selections of tools are absolutely free. So, feel free to give them a try and be rewarded with a smoother and easier work flow.

Dropbox

Having the power to automatically update and sync your files to all your devices, this app is definitely worth downloading. Plus, this is beneficial for entrepreneurs and freelancers on the go. If you need more space, you can always upgrade to a premium version for minimal fee.

Prezi

When trying to capture the attention of clients and investors, it is a must to create an engaging presentation. With Prezi, you are able to create a number of visually-compelling presentations and allow users to share it via Prezi site or your own page, as you wish. Plus, you can simultaneously work with other team members to create this presentation with the use of Prezi Meeting.

MailChimp

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of keeping your clients updated on the newest offering and latest batch of products that your company offers. If you’re ready to send in your email newsletters, MailChimp may be your best bet. Through this app, you’ll be able to manage as much as 2,000 subscribers and allows you to send as many as 12,000 emails per month.

TweetAlarm

Monitoring your Twitter account for mention of important keywords could be time consuming. Through TweetAlarm, this process could be a lot easier. You’ll be receiving an email notification every time a Tweet regarding any of the subjects and keywords that you have flagged appears. Plus, one of its more advanced features is giving its users the ability to ignore tweets from a specific user.

JotForm

Taking down orders from a bunch of customers could be quite difficult. Now, you can do away from all this trouble and receive your client’s orders in an easier manner. JotForm is an easy-to-use form builder which allows you to customize your own forms. And once you’re done, you can have it integrated into your site. Plus, order forms shall be sent directly to your email.

Gimp

If you want to cut down on your spending and do away with the bills of Photoshop, Gimp could be your best alternative. Unfortunately, this may not be as slick or as polished as your Adobe competitor. For a free app, this could be a pretty good choice. Plus, they have a community of dedicated users that could help you out if in case you need answers.

Most of these apps have been around for quite some time now. If you haven’t been able to try them out, now is the right time to take advantage of these tools. With an endless list of tasks, you’ll surely need all the help that you can get.

Making Your Resume Stand Out In Crowd of Freelancers

 

One of the most daunting things about freelance writing is getting yourself noticed. It is a highly competitive field. Sometimes it seems like all the good jobs are taken and only the scams and cheapskate jobs are left. When a dream opportunity comes along, all of the bids start piling up and it’s tough to get noticed in the crowd of competition. The best shot you have going in is your resume, so it had better be good! If you are looking for jobs on freelancing sites it will be in your best interest to take another look at your CV and determine if it can’t be even better.

Don’t Be Predictable

There are so many generic resume templates out there that people are careful about differentiating themselves from everyone else. This is not a very wise approach, as your resume will look just like everyone else’s and you will be forgettable. Avoid using the usual “Hard working”, “Self-starter”, or “Perfectionist” cliché words. If you can engage the reader, you might have just gotten your foot in the door.

 

Customize for Each Job

If you’re applying for a technical writing job, you will want to put a lot of emphasis in your resume on all the experience you have with technical writing. Then let’s say you apply for a comedy writing piece, you probably will want to emphasize on your comedic writing experience, rather than the technical writing. Cookie cutter resumes that appear to be broad, aimed at multiple jobs, won’t get looked at. If the reader knows that you have put in the extra effort to acquire the job, they will be more likely to hire you.

 

Don’t Be Sloppy

Someone once asked me why nobody would hire him even though he thought he had a lot of skills. He sent me his resume and had written “costumer service” in several places. It wouldn’t have been bad if he worked in a wardrobe for movies, but alas, he was referring to customers, not costumes. If you’re a writer, imagine how bad it would look to service buyers to see a resume riddled with spelling errors. People want perfect spelling and grammar and aren’t about to hire those who can’t spell in their own resumes.

 

The Use of Keywords

Many employers use tracking systems that pick out keywords from peoples’ resumes. If the recruiter states that the incumbent must be university educated, have strong mathematical skills and have experience with a certain program, you should list those exact things in your CV.

 

Be Specific of Achievements

If you were a part of a team of people who formulated a cure for a certain disease, you would want to put your name on it. The same goes for the smaller scale achievements throughout your life. If you worked on certain projects, elaborate on them. Don’t skate over them with “Led a project to minimize workplace interruption” or vague descriptions. List what your role was, what the project was about and the outcome.

Your resume is your key to getting noticed. It might help if you get other people to read yours and give input on what you should include or what to remove. You may even want to approach someone who works in the HR field for some input and tips if possible. Once you perfect your resume, it could only be a matter of time before that big beautiful dream job comes your way.

Top Freelancing Sites

I am now going to tell how do I earn those paychecks every week. Here are the few links to the websites where you try your luck.

Elance – Find job. Deliver great work. Get paid for results.


This is one of the largest freelancing site in the internet, Many rich clients post projects here. There are more than 1,00,000 providers or freelancers in elance and more than 25K jobs are posted each month. This is one of the best freelancing site and there are both free and paid subscriptions available. For newbies you can try with the free account. 


To Join Elance you can click to this link : www.elance.com

Guru – Find Freelance Jobs at the World's Largest Online Marketplace.

Guru is another biggest freelancing site, with more than 1,10,000+ freelancers. It has an escrow integration which is is a plus point for both freelancers and employers. This site also has both free and premium membership based on categories of work which you’re willing to do. This is also one of the place you must try.

To Join Guru you can click to this link : www.guru.com

oDesk - Changing How the World Works.

oDesk is one of the best freelancing site I have ever used. It has both hourly and fixed paid jobs. They assure guaranteed payment to freelancers and guaranteed work to employers. The recommend newbies to join here.

To Join oDesk you can click to this link : www.odesk.com

Freelancer - Outsourcing for small business.

The name tells you all. This site is very popular for fixed projects, and the site claims to have most number of freelancers across the globe. They have recently introduced hourly jobs also.

This site has free membership and gold membership which costs around $25 a month. I suggest you to start with a free one first then paid membership.

To join Freelancer you can click to this link : www.freelancer.com

There are few other freelancing sites also. I will tell more about them in my next post. Till then keep checking the site. If you have any questions regarding these sites, please feel free to leave a comment. 

How to Make Sure You Get Paid for Your Freelance Jobs: 4 Important Tips

Internet is the most common place for scams, people here will use for their personal profits. This can be the most popular reason why people wont choose the path of working online as freelancer. But you can avoid this, if you take precautions and necessary steps. Everyone of us can be a victim of the online job scam but you act right and take proper decisions you can save your time and energy on those scams.

These are some common scams that you should be aware of :


= You will need to pay for membership or software before you can start working. 

Never do such stupid thing. It is an employers responsibility to provide with all the necessary things. You should not pay even a single rupee for this.


= Please start working now, we can discuss the payment later.
Never agree for work without talking about the payment terms. Make the payment terms very clear. Never let a cheater take advantage of this.

= Rush Job, Limited Positions.
This may be a scam. Lot of freelancers fall into this. The job which is rush to take contractors and dont talk much about the job but offers you high payments clearly shows false hopes.

= No Information about the company. Unknown
If ever you get an email about a company you never heard of, And even you can't search the company in the internet, then it is clearly a scam. Never click links on that email because it can be a web to trap you. They will steal your personal data and information.

Remember that you are a talented person. There will be lot of companies which will hire you and willing to pay you for your work. So never fall for the hypes of getting rich instantly.


I never experienced such scams and I also don't wont you all to fall in scams. When you are searching for jobs remember these points. If some of you have ever experienced scams and paid money to someone for getting job, then please share your views here. Please post comments on this.