109 freelancing resources

Freelance Switch has written up an amazing list of resources for freelance professionals. It’s mostly geared toward people who work online, doing things like designing web pages. But as a freelance journalist and radio producer, there are a lot of tools on the list that I can use as well.

The list began as 101 freelancing resources, but the authors have added a few based on feedback from readers.

They’ve separated the list into software and websites to help you:

• Keep track of time spent on various projects
• Create and manage invoices
• Organize and manage projects
• Find templates, stock photos, and other files to add to your website
• Legal resources
• Find freelance jobs
• Design websites
• Advertise
• Send and receive faxes from your computer
• And business tools for communication, sending and receiving payment, finding an accountant etc

I’d only add a few items that I’ve found useful since I began freelancing in August:

• K7.net provides you with a free voicemail/fax line. This isn’t a fully functional phone number. But it’s great if you need to receive incoming faxes and don’t have a dedicated fax line. K7 automatically converts any fax sent to your phone number into a TIF file and emails it to you. Mostly I get junk mail offers for cheap health insurance or real estate in Florida. But it’s good to have a fax line.
• I use faxZERO to send faxes. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s free to send up to 2 faxes (3 pages or less per day). You upload a DOC or PDF file, and it’s sent as a fax. Your free fax will include a cover page with an advertisement for faxZERO on it, so I would only use this if you’re sending messages to someone you’re not trying to impress. You also have the option of paying $1.99 to send up to 15 pages with no cover advertisement. The main thing I like about faxZERO is that you don’t need to register with the site or pay a monthly fee. In the rare instances when I can’t just email a document scanned into a PDF, this is what I use.
• Microsoft Accounting 2007 Express is a great little program for creating professional looking invoices. It does a lot more than that in terms of bookkeeping, but since I use a custom spreadsheet for tracking most of my business income and expenses, I just use Accounting Express for creating invoices. Oh yeah, and it’s a free download.