Finding the best free online copywriting tools can create major benefits for your workflow and proficiency.
These tools can help streamline many day-to-day copywriting needs such as composition, graphic design, SEO, project management, or even something as simple as cloud storage on a platform such as Google Drive. If you’re a freelancer, online tools can also help with the business management side of your copywriting career—such as budgeting tools and free templates for client contracts and creative briefs.
But are you getting the most out of your free online copywriting tools?
Chances are these tools are helping you—but not always to the fully optimized level they should be. The trick is to make your tools run together as efficiently as possible.
You can achieve a more effective flow between your tools through centralization, integration, and automation.
More on each of these below.
Let’s look at how those concepts come together so that you can get the most out of your online copywriting tools.
Evaluating Inefficiencies with Free Online Copywriting Tools
There are a few key elements to consider when trying to pinpoint how your copywriting tools could better serve you. Here are a few areas to consider.
How much time do you spend switching between apps?
Even if you’re somehow able to stay on top of twenty different apps with twenty different log-ins and passwords and systems to check and manage, it still wastes time when having to switch between these programs—each with its own interface and menus, its own spaces you must navigate to find the right information, and its own insights into different aspects of your work. When these are disjointed and you’re constantly manually managing each, you’re wasting your time. Not only that, but you aren’t getting a cohesive view of your workflows and business operations as a copywriter.
Are Your Apps Telling You the Right Story?
Many apps will give you analytical insights into certain elements of your copywriting. But even without explicit analytics tools, many apps will help you see patterns and use those patterns to be more effective. For instance, a grammar and composition app may help you identify and adjust habits that lead to unclear writing. Linking these tools together can help you get a fuller picture of insights about the totality of each project, from the time to sign with a client to the time it’s finished with a paycheck in your hands.
Could your apps be doing more for you?
Are you using the full functionality of your apps? And are these functions interconnected and set up in a way that best helps you be productive and successful? Connecting apps allows them to communicate with each other, exchange data across platforms, and create new levels of functionality across all your tools.
Centralization
Viewing data fed to you from different apps at different times can create a disjointed and time-consuming approach to project management and your copywriting career. You may end up missing key insights that can only be seen through a broader lens.
Centralizing your tools and data can give you a sense of all the tasks and workflows that go into completing projects and managing your business. By having a side-by-side comparison of different data sets and how they interact within your task flow and schedule, you can derive deeper, more intrinsic insights.
Centralization in action:
Take, for instance, Notion—software that allows you to connect and sync data from other digital tools like Google Drive, Jira, GitHub, Slack, and Asana in a single, centralized online hub. Notion provides a live, connected data stream to let you track updates and information from your external copywriting tools. By centralizing these workflows using a tool like Notion, you can easily prioritize pressing tasks and adjust your approach to what’s most efficient for you.
Integration
How your copywriting tools interface with one another can have a major impact on how effectively they work for you. Integrating apps can unlock new levels of functionality and help you get the most out of your entire copywriting toolbox.
Think about it this way: Integration is a way to both streamline and optimize your free online copywriting tools. Through integration, applications can share and synchronize that data across platforms. This saves you the effort of having to enter the same data into different apps, preventing redundancy and ensuring your information is always up-to-date and accurate.
App integration has become a common feature for many online tools, and many apps offer built-in options for compatibility with others. Even if they don’t, many can be integrated using third-party interface tools.
Integration in action:
As they say, time is money. That’s why tracking productivity across your work schedule and having accountability for how profitably you’re spending your time can be critical. Consider these two seemingly disparate tools.
Your Google Calendar lets you maintain a detailed schedule and never lose track of the next work meeting or deadline—or the time you’ve carved out for recreational activities with friends and family, for that matter.
Toggl Track is a time-tracking app that lets you “bill accurately, measure profitability, manage workloads — and spend less time on it all,” according to their website. The app focuses on making you more productive and profitable by offering tools for time tracking, billing and invoicing, project budgeting, reporting, and payroll.
Now consider that these two apps can be integrated, allowing Toggl Track to sync with your Google Calendar so you can view your schedule, add timed entries, and optimize your work week.
Automation
Automation has become a near-ubiquitous trend with modern software tools, letting those tools perform certain repetitive tasks so you don’t have to. The more you can automate with your free online copywriting tools, the less you have to manually track, so you can focus more on meeting that pressing project deadline. While many apps come with some level of automation, some tools allow you to create automation between your integrated applications.
Automation in action:
Consider Zapier, a program that lets you create automated workflows between your copywriting apps. With the ability to connect over 5,000 apps, there are practically countless combinations of automated processes you can create between apps. For example, you can connect Notion to your Gmail account so that when you add a new database entry, it’ll trigger an automatic email to be sent. If you use Jira and you add an issue to a project of your selection, this can be set to automatically trigger the creation of a new card on Trello.
Make Your Copywriting Tools Work for You
Through centralization, integration, and automation, you can get the most out of your free online copywriting tools and the functionality they provide. The more your tools work for you, and the less you have to manually manage each, the more you can focus on being the best copywriter you can be.
Author Bio
Connor Holmes is a content writer with Content Workshop who comes from a diverse writing background. He worked as an award-winning public safety staff writer at his hometown newspaper, The Cape Coral Daily Breeze. He earned his MFA in creative writing and has professionally published fiction and poetry. He has also tutored English to students from grade school to grad school.
At Copywriter Exchange, we’re a group of master content marketing pros who bring their diverse talents and backgrounds to bear on the art and science of creating high-performance content, tailored to your needs. We exist to help copywriters thrive in today’s economy by connecting them with the resources they need to step up their game. Join now to access our templates, guides, and courses to help you grow your career, skills, and network.
