The Single E-Commercer
5 low cost tools to turn lone freelancers into successful powerhouses.
If you’re a busy 1 person production crew who is looking for quick tips to help with your business, this short article is for you.
Let’s dive in.
Speechelo
You’re making a video for a new product or service you’re trying to sell.
You know your market, you know your product. You’ve written the perfect script and it’s ready to be turned into a sound-bite or a sales pitch, aimed directly at the audience you’ve meticulously researched and funneled.
But there’s some concerns holding you back.
You hate the sound of your own voice.
You don’t have high priced recording equipment at your kitchen table.
The kids aren’t likely to quiet down while you try and record your crisp audio. You understand they don’t get it, but that doesn’t help much.
Less likely but also possible; you have 5 dogs and a pet goat. These are also known as sound factories.
Speechelo — (see free demo) is your solution for these audio hang-ups. This AI text to speech software goes far beyond your standard AI speech tool.
How?
By taking into account punctuation and matching the expressions with almost pitch perfect tonal accuracy. Even the demo video is narrated by the AI.
Seriously, the demo audio will amaze you.
What your project needs are are essentially irrelevant in Speechelo. Just write what you need recorded and the software will do the work based on your voice and language preferences.
They make it easy with drop-down menus and audio samples so finding the right fit is almost effortless.
With dozens of male and female voice overs in over 20 languages, making your own clean and expressive audio for your product or service has never sounded so exciting!
AWeber
AWeber is an email marketing tool that helped pave the path in the email marketing world. It’s one of the first email campaign creation and monetization tools with tens of millions of users worldwide.
Used by sites such as Shopify, Paypal, and Etsy; it incorporates years of accumulated data and industry knowledge to help you create high converting email marketing campaigns and professional looking reply emails at a competitive price.
Need an email for a digital product advert? They have templates for that.
Need something geared towards selling your latest work of art or home craft? They have templates for that too.
Need to build automatic reply customer service emails in multiple formats? They have templates and support tools for that too.
As a freelancer or small business, AWeber has what you need to deliver the best looking and highest converting emails, thanks to their staying on the cutting edge of design and functionality in the email marketing niche.
SQRIBBLE
Don’t need an audio component for your product or service? How about a user manual, report document, or an e-book?
SQRIBBLE — (see free demo page) will help you shave weeks, and potentially 1000s of dollars on creating an e-book product. Instead of having to hire someone, or go through the painful drawn out design process yourself, use a template designed just for you!
With over 50 templates, 300+ layouts and over a dozen pre-made niche specific designs, you’re bound to find something to suit you at a fraction of the time and financial investment you’d otherwise have to make doing it from scratch, or paying a third party.
Need to make an instruction manual? They have niche specific e-book templates for that.
How about a recipe book? A template will help you cook up something you’ll love the look of!
Need a novel formatted? Easy. Just fill in your content and choose your formatting.
If you’re a writer like me but don’t have experience with e-books or niche based formatting, consider checking out the landing page link to see if this tool is right for you.
RescueTime
This one made me feel horrible about myself, but proved invaluable in helping better manage my most important resource - time.
RescueTime is a web client based time management tool that tracks your computer usage on a day-to-day basis once you’ve installed the client.
If you ever felt like you wasted time browsing youtube or memes that you should have been spending building your business, this app will give you the rude kick in the backside you need to guilt trip you into staying on track.
Every week you get an email breakdown of how much time you spent on your computer, doing whatever it is you did that week.
What does it tell you?
If you tell people you spent X hours on your business this week, RescueTime will either confirm that for you, or call you a rotten liar right there in your inbox with a breakdown of how many hours you actually spent watching cat videos.
Trust me. The shame is real.
The free version will likely be enough to get you by. (Yes that means I lose commission, but honestly the free version will be enough to get most people ashamed of themselves — which is payment enough for me since I’d feel less alone.)
The paid version offers more features, including advanced and more detailed time breakdown reports complete with data points and weekly summaries. Worth it if you want to go deeper into how you use your time. For me however, the basic version is enough.
Any cloud backup software
This last software tip is more of a general safety rule everyone with an online business should follow.
BACK-UP YOUR DATA! With multiple free tools out there you already likely use or at least know about, ie: Dopbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc, I don’t see a need to give you an alternative. These work just fine for the majority of applications.
Just make sure you use these tools regularly, especially if you’re a traveler.
I’ve been down this dark road… I lost several hours of writing material on several occasions because of this simple yet common oversight of not backing up my data to a web based storage drive.
A device is portable, but it is also a vulnerable single point of failure. Don’t leave your work to chance. Back it up.
If you found this article helpful as a freelancer or new e-commerce business owner, be sure to clap, share, and check out some of the above mentioned tools!
Good luck out there.
