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When the alarm went off this morning I had a terrible moment when I thought that it was Sunday and the week was about to start all over again.

Come the real Monday morning I’ll be able to cope with that but, right now it’s Friday and I’m hanging out for the weekend. It’s not that this week has been particularly stressful because it hasn’t thanks to a new tool that I have that allows me to escape from the office and work down by the beach any time I want to.

Of course I have a laptop and I guess that most webmasters do too but they’re not as portable as you think. If you can’t find a power outlet then the time you can spend at somewhere like the beach is going to be a limited. There’s nothing worse than just getting into the groove and then get the battery life warning.

And working on a tablet or an iPad soon loses its appeal when you have to write large amounts of text. While there are keyboards available for some tablets I’ve never found one that really worked reliably so I have always been tethered close to the office but now I have something that does work and does let me spend some time at the beach.

Why I’m becoming an Apple fangirl
A couple of weeks ago I invested in a new iPad Pro and bought the genuine keyboard to go with it and I love it. I’ve found it so useful that I’ve given my almost new laptop to my partner. Moving files around … and up and down to Dropbox … was a little bit of a hassle so I spent another $A99 yesterday and bought a Sandisk flash drive that will plug into my iPad and my desktops.

I think I just might be spending more time out of the office this year and I’ll still be able to get work done. Just imagine, the sound of gentle breezes in palm trees and the soft waves caressing the beach instead of the raucous ring of the telephones … who wouldn’t want to head for the beach.

I’m free because of Buffer … well almost
Another great tool that has given me back some of my valuable time is a little tool called Buffer. Imagine being able to sit down and post a bunch of updates or posts to a range of social media sites, from a number of different social profiles, all from the one simple interface. Buffer lets you do that for a whole $10 a month.

There is a free version of Buffer if you’re so tight that you spend $10 a month but it limits you to just one social profile. HootSuite will do something similar with free and paid options but it’s not as user friendly as Buffer.

If you are doing a lot of repetitive work every day or every week a great way to save time and still get the job done is to do the work in batches. We do that sort of work for a number of clients and instead of taking time out of every day to get the work done we can sit down once a month and do it in batches and schedule the work to appear on set dates … and it does, thanks to Buffer.

Need mainstream images?
In some ways it’s a good thing to be able to work in an industry where we have access to lots of relevant free images but, if you’re doing some work over in mainstream, the businesses that we are marketing for rarely provide any images.

That shouldn’t be much of a hindrance though because there are over 20 different sites that provide free images with a licence that allows you to use them for just about any purpose … including print. Perhaps the best free image site that we have found is pixabay.com.

The images are good, you can grab them in descent sizes and there’s no download limit. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it … until you compare them with the images you can get on Adobe’s stock photo site. The difference in quality is really noticeable and, because we all know that images sell products, the better the image you use the more likely you are to make a sale … well it’s almost that simple.

However, there is no doubt that Adobe’s stock photo site does offer a huge range of high quality images but the catch is that you have to pay for them. The cost of joining the site isn’t huge … a bit over a dollar a day … and for that you get 10 images a month.

If you’re a rusted-on user of free or very cheap junk, then you might think that a dollar a day is a huge amount to pay but the fact is that you really do have to spend money to make money in any industry.

Spending money to make money is just a fact of life and the sooner you accept that fact … and kick the free or cheap habit … the sooner you’ll begin to make serious money.