How To Overcome The Fear Of Pitching For Freelancing Gigs

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 11th November 2019.

When you start out as a freelancer you must face one of your greatest fears, it is the fear of pitching for freelancing gigs! Naturally, you will have rejections because it is a part of being a freelancer, but you must not let that discourage you.

When you start pitching, you must ask yourself how you can benefit from others’ experience so that it will increase your chances of success. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, it does take some freelancers a while to realize it, including me!

Carol Tice who owns the Make a Living Writing blog is on a mission to help writers and similar creative people succeed. She has written this article 3 Guest Post Pitch Emails That Got the Gig. You can read Carol’s article here.

Carol has also included a link in her article to bad guest post pitches from her blog. It is worth placing Carol’s blog on your subscription list because of her support.

The Freelancer’s Union’s Lisa Fourman has looked at The fear of pitching for freelance gigs. You can read Lisa’s article here.

Carol Tice has extended her support about overcoming fear with FEAR NOT! Confidence-Building Insights, Tips, and Techniques for Freelance Writers (Make a Living Writing, Book 3) which you can obtain here or by clicking on the icon below:

Motivate Yourself!

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is
more important than any other.”

– Abraham Lincoln

New Year’s Resolutions Are the Ultimate Self-Motivation Goals

It does not matter what you do for a job, self-employed or in a 9 to 5 job, at the end of the year it is normal to take stock of what you accomplished during the year.

Some freelancers even write their resolutions for the forthcoming year down and then review them at the end of the year. However, keeping them is a different matter entirely.

Charlotte Alter has had a look at this issue as to why it is so hard to stick to your resolutions. Charlotte has written Here’s the Secret to Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolution. Charlotte’s article appears in Time.com and you can read her evergreen article here.

If you are like me, I read Charlotte’s article with great interest as I have the same problem as many other freelancers. I think that this issue of working in the gig economy and keeping your promises to yourself can be tricky.

Katie Perry has written about New Year’s resolutions for the Freelancer’s Union blog. The title of Katie’s evergreen article is 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Freelancers and you can read it here.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

Do You Focus On Productivity Or Activity?

Critical to the success of being a freelancer is learning to focus on productivity rather than being busy. This is because the indicator of success or otherwise is your cash flow or money in the bank.

It seems very simple, doesn’t it, but it is not always easy to implement if you have worked in a 9 to 5 job as an employee where your activity does not relate directly to cash flow.

Smashingmagazine.com has an article by Tim Mercer entitled 6 Simple Ways to Increase Your Productivity as a Freelancer.

You can tell from reading Tim’s article that he has had personal experience of this issue and sharing tips to help new freelancers. You can read Tim’s article here.

Miranda Marquit for the Upwork Blog has looked at How to Focus on Productivity, Not Activity, for Your Business. You can read Miranda’s article here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

How To Overcome Anxiety When Working As A Freelancer?

How to Overcome Anxiety as a Freelance Writer

Anxiety can be very tough to overcome when you are working alone as a freelancer. This is particularly true for freelancers who are under pressure for one reason or another.

Family budgets can be a source of anxiety with the cost of living rising while employees’ wages are stagnating.

Very often both parents in a family are already working, but they have decided that they need to lift the family income and have decided that one or both members have skills that they can freelance.

I recently received an email from Jenny Holt, a freelance writer, asking whether I would be interested in a guest post on overcoming anxiety for Freelance-Work-Guide.com. I thought it was an outstanding contribution from Jenny and her post is now live here.

Overcoming anxiety is not simple and is well recognized as an issue by Harvard Business School. In the articles in the series Working Knowledge, Michael Blanding wrote Overcoming Nervous Nelly which can be read here.

The difference is that freelancers must manage themselves. The article gives some insight into the importance of self-talk and self-management.

However, Dan Johnston’s Amazon’s Kindle eBook picks up the issue of self-management and looks deeper into the solution with Self Confidence Secrets: How To Overcome Anxiety and Low Self Esteem with NLP.

Financial Tip of the Week

How Are Your New Year’s Financial Resolutions Going?

It is hard to believe that Christmas is next month! The end of a calendar year is a good time to make financial plans for the forthcoming year. This does not matter whether you live in a country where the financial year end aligns with the end of the calendar year or not.

It is time to review the calendar year that is ending and to think about what you can do better in the forthcoming year. Because you are self-employed one of the items that is sure to be on the agenda is better financial management. Items like managing your cashflow, setting aside money for tax, saving for retirement and protecting your income.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s Money Smart Service has a special section for the self-employed and you can visit it by clicking here.

If you are in Australia it is time to look back and see whether you have been keeping the right records for your tax accountant to make their job easier. To help you with this review here is an article entitled Tax deductions for freelancers from www.etax.com.au which you can read by clicking here.

Jon Dwoskin has written 10 things to do now to start your business off strong in 2020. Jon’s article appears on www.forbes.com and you can read it by clicking here.

Skills Development and Inspiration

Image Credit Pixabay.com

We are constantly searching for news articles and videos on skills development and inspiration for freelancers as well as developing our own products.

Each week we have decided to bring you the links to what we consider are the top three articles or videos. Here they are for this week:

From TEDx Lehigh River Salon by Laura Briggs “The Future is Freelancing”:

https://youtu.be/BGY8vO3KRTk

From Rory Vaden TEDx Douglasville “How to Multiply Your Time”:

David Allen “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” at TEDx Claremont Colleges:

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer, according to Upwork’s 2nd. Quarter 2019 Skills Index which you can read here.

Number fourteen on the list is Atlassian Confluence. If you are like me, you will probably want to know more about Atlassian Confluence. I looked it up on Google and this is a what it is here.

What is interesting about Upwork’s list is that there are new digital skills and they are evolving very quickly. Innovation and technology are very important to countries.

In Australia this is particularly important because these skills are applicable to country areas impacted by drought. The value of the digital economy to Australia is shown here.

Articles now on our website that are relevant to the outcome of new skills training are listed here:

The latest one is here:

https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/retirees-freelancing-medical-hospital-ancillary-insurance.html

Amazon News

The weekly AWS news video link to acloud.guru is here. They are the leading trainers globally for Amazon Web Services certification for freelancers.

Amazon Associates Website Case Study

As discussed in previous newsletters we are focussing on the niche website in the future because it is producing better results i.e. sales.

We have changed our strategy to include guest posts and this is one from our cybersecurity website. The guest contributor is Rebecca James with How we can prevent email-based social engineering attacks (click to follow the link).

We will let you know when another is posted. The goal is to increase traffic and diversify product promotion. There have been approximately 30 Amazon product sales (across all our websites) in the past month due to the keyword research and skills of Mamun, my virtual assistant.