Freelance Shack

The internet is full of tools that we can all use in our everyday life. The problem is finding all of them to use since there are thousands out there. We’ll I’ve made a short list of tools that you can use for your company or personal life as a freelancer.

Picnik

• Fix your photos in just one click
• Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
• Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
• Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
• Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
• Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
• Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers

Capture Me – This tool is a flexible screen capture and recording utility for Mac OS X which features a floating capture window, several saving options, and resize ability. We used it to take every screen shot that is on our blog. It is one of our favorite tools used here at Freelance Shack and we recommend this to anyone wanting to find a quick, reliable tool for screen capturing.

• Free (and open source)!
• Globally floating capture window.
• Record short MPEG-4 QuickTime movies.
• Fast screen captures (uses OpenGL).
• Ability to down scale captures (proportionally or not).
• Save as PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, or GIFF.
• Adjustable translucency of capture window.
• Several ways to adjust the size and position of the capture (move the window, arrow keys, scroll wheel).
• Nifty capture sound.

Find it here

Keyword Spy – This is a keyword tool that you can perform advanced keyword research and keyword tracking to study what your competitors have been advertising in Adwords & Other PPC campaigns to improve your own PPC campaign. It’s a great way to track how your competition is using certain keywords to their advantage and gives you a tool to begin to reach their level. Here is the result of a graphic designer keyword search:

Wordle – Wordle.net is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Here is one that we did for our blog. We picked our colors and fonts for this jpg…supercool tool.

Finding the Right Tools without surrendering the entire day towards google(ing) is hard…trust me – We Know! So what I’ve decided to do is use the research time to use these tools for projects I’m working on. For instance; if the project calls for using wordle.net which I just showed you, then I will spend a little extra time researching Wordle in order to fulling understand how the program works for next time. This is forcing me to learn it because I am able to apply the knowledge directly into the project, and now I can’t classify that time as wasted. The client is also getting the most out of my efforts because I chose to invest my time to learn the program.

The truth is that you’ll never know everything that’s on the web…even all the cool stuff you want to know about. Finding the right balance between what you’ll actually be using in your business vs. non-efficient time wasting tools, will help prioritize your days better. Remember – Time is money. But also know knowledge takes time to build and people pay you for your knowledge. Find a way to gain knowledge in an efficient way to gain the power of your business and add the value to the client.

So your part is next – What tools do we need to hear about and spend time learning? What tools do you use in your everyday life that help you achieve your objectives and make life easier. We look forward to hearing them!!

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Tags: capture me, picnik, time management, wordle, working efficiently