For Freelancers Having A Plan B Matters

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 19th August 2019.

One of the big issues of working for yourself as a freelancer is that you must consider having a Plan B if something goes wrong, such as illness.

I know that the Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz is strongly in favour of having a Plan B. Jesse Kudler wrote Freelancers don’t get paid sick days – but it doesn’t have to be that way for the Freelancers Union you can read here.

That article was written in 2016 and I linked to it for a reason which is to show that reforms happen because people work on them. This is where it is up to now https://www.trupo.com/about-trupo. It does not matter in which country you live and work as a freelancer it is necessary that we reform the system.

In Australia where I live there was approximately 35% of the workforce engaged in the freelancing economy in 2015. Here is a link to an infographic on the research: https://www.cxcglobal.com/en-au/freelancing-in-australia. If you can find later information please share it.

Beyond having a Plan B for yourself and your family it is my intention to look at why freelancers should look at growing a passive income source that can be developed and grown over time so that it will fund Plan B requirements later in life when you really need it.

Motivate Yourself!

How Do You Handle Stress When You Are Under Pressure?

Most freelancers that have a financial goal are addicted towards achieving that goal. Some people might call it being focused and organized, but even the best of organizers can’t plan for the unexpected.

If you are a freelancer, you can be sure that the unexpected will occur. How to handle the stress of these situations can be tricky.

Daniel Rutter has written about 5 Simple Strategies To help You Perform Under Pressure in the www.Addicted2Success.com Blog. You can read Daniel’s article here.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

Do You Use Apps To Work Smarter?

Image Credit pixabay.com

Applications or Apps can be extremely useful to make you more efficient. I don’t know what I would do without Hootsuite to manage my social media accounts.

Hootsuite is a lot more than an App because it is a social media platform from which you can manage a whole series of plugin Apps to help you be more productive. How do you know which ones are the best to use if you are starting out as a freelancer?

One way you can find out what Apps are good for you to use is to search for reviews and articles on the best Apps to help you. Quite often freelancing blogs are a good place to start to find out what you should be using.

This is particularly true of freelancing platforms because freelancers are their clients. It is in their best interest to help freelancers who will then be more likely to use their platform and that is how they make money.

Anna Johansson has written 10 productivity apps every freelancer needs to know about. Anna’s article appears in the www.upwork.com blog and you can read it here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Do You Have A Way To Take A Work-Life Balance Break?

Good work-life balance tips are priceless and timeless for freelancers. If you find a good tip that will help you and resonates well with you and your family keep it and practise it. It is even a good idea to keep an Evernote file, or whatever system you use, to collect work-life balance tips. I do!

One of the most bothering and costly items on your work-life balance list is remaining fit and healthy by getting enough exercise. For me, sitting too long at the computer to meet deadlines is a trap. It usually results in a bad back, which can be very painful and disruptive to workflow.

A bad attack of computer back can result in a trip to a physiotherapist and that costs on three accounts; loss of productive time, paying the Physio’s bill and rehabilitation exercises.

I have taken up some yoga exercises to prevent the problem plus having regular breaks and using a stand-up desk. I am sure many freelancers will identify with this.

I was looking back at the Freelancers Union Blog posts on the work-life balance unit and I found this one in 2014 by Larissa Pham that has some timeless top tips. You can read Larissa’s post here.

Financial Tip of the Week

Do You Consider Your Freelancing Activities A Small Business?

It is easy not to consider your freelancing activities as a small business, especially when you are starting out “moonlighting” as a freelancer while your 9 to 5 is your main source of income. I initially made that mistake, but I read an article that changed my mind and I backtracked to make sure that I was set up correctly.

This involved opening a separate bank account and purchasing an accounting package that ensured that I had a proper profit and loss account and I started to keep the correct records.

Changing your mindset to being a small business owner makes you start to think and do things proactively. This means, for example, when you have a client who wants something done on a tight deadline, but you have to fulfil your obligations as a 9 to 5 employee you think of what you can outsource and still make a profit.

You can call it thinking outside the box or thinking like a true small business owner.

Jonathon Long has written a blog post on the www.freshbooks.com Blog about the 12 big hurdles a small business owner faces and how to get over them. Many of his tips are applicable to freelancers because we are businesses. You can read Jonathon’s article here.

Skills Development and Inspiration News

Image Credit Pixabay.com

We are constantly searching for news articles and videos on skills development and inspiration for freelancers.

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:

Many freelancers are parents or even grandparents and one of the skills that is necessary in the digital age is to be aware of young people being cyberbullied.

Here is 15 indicators that your child is being cyberbullied from our related website which you can read here. Not to know these signs early can be devastating for families. Note the affiliate disclosure on the page.

For users of Pinterest and Instagram hoping to grow their business from referrals, but find that it takes a lot of time here is our article 15 reasons to use the Tailwind App for Pinterest and Instagram from our website which you can read here. Note the affiliate disclosure on the page.
For many freelancers they will have started freelancing following a redundancy whether switching from moonlighting from their day job to full time or just starting out from employee to freelancing.

This can be challenging from a psychological point of view. Dan Collison has written for www.psychologytoday.com Redundancy – How negative experiences can result in positive outcomes. You can read Dan’s article here.

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer, according to Upwork’s 1st. Quarter 2019 Skills Index which you can read here.

Number twenty on the list is podcasting. Here is an article on podcasts: 5 must listen to podcasts for freelancers launching a business from www.lazimillennial.com which you can read 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 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.

Here is a recent article Simpson Pressure Washer Reviews. There have been 65 Amazon product sales (across all our websites) in the past month due to the keyword research and skills of Mamun, my virtual assistant.

Freelancers And Cyber Security

We have decided to expand our search for appropriate articles for freelancers about cybersecurity and online scams.

The Australian Government’s eSafety Commissioner’s article on Sextortion should be of interest to freelancers who have families because teenagers are quite often the victims of sextortion. The Commissioner’s article tells you how to deal with the situation and can be read here: https://www.esafety.gov.au/image-based-abuse/action/remove-images-video/deal-with-sextortion.

Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert and consultant. He also runs a cyber security and fraud prevention website which you can see here.