Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 30th June 2019.
Freelancers need to have repeat business and keep their clients engaged. Do you think it costs more to get repeat business from an existing client rather than to start afresh and find a new client?
Hmm! For freelancers, this is an important question about productivity and having the right strategy with clients because it is about the profitability of your freelancing business.
Research has shown that it costs 6 times as much to find a new client as to keep an existing client.
This article by Tricia Morris of www.business2community.com entitled It is 6 times more expensive to win a new customer than to retain an existing one looks at the issues.
You can read the article that shows the reasoning behind it here.
If you have now decided on the strategy to retain clients, rather than to chase new ones, you will ask yourself how to go about it.
There has been a lot of research done on this topic, but nothing will surpass this quote:
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again
and again and bring their friends.”
– Walt Disney
Lis from the www.Bidsketch.com Blog has written an article entitled 5 Ways to Win Repeat Business and Keep Your Clients Engaged. You can read Lis’s article here.
Motivate Yourself!
Affirmations Matter For Freelancers!
Image Credit Pixabay.com
Many freelancers and other creative workers have a background voice of negativity that can prevent them achieving their best potential.
I guess that this comes with having a creative mind that is essential for being a success in many creative endeavours, e.g. writers, graphic designers or programmers to name a few. The trick is how to overcome these thoughts.
It would be good if you could directly talk to your subconscious and tell it to stop interfering with your creativity. The question is what techniques can you use to switch your background voice to positive mode?
I believe that affirmations and visualization are very important tools to do this.
“Yes, I can,” is a very strong affirmation, but I think the most powerful quote to overcome negative thoughts about speaking out personally or creatively is:
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about
things that matter.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
I believe Martin Luther King Jr’s quote is so important because many creative people are, in fact, speaking creatively about things that matter to them.
Nick Usborne has written an article and produced a video entitled Do I believe in affirmations for freelancers? You can view the video and read the article here.
If you are interested in further reading about affirmations and visualization you can obtain the following book, from Amazon by clicking on the icon below:
Productivity Tip Of The Week
Have You Used Publicity To Get People Talking About Your Business?
Image Credit Pixabay.com
Using publicity to help your business is an important part of being a freelancer. It does not necessarily mean making a press release.
It can entail a broad range of options from actually doing a press release, to writing articles and blogs and to having your own website that shows a portfolio of your work.
If you have written a Kindle eBook as I have, with a lot of help from other freelancers, you will know that promoting your Kindle eBook is quite an art and getting publicity is an important part of getting sales. You can read about writing your first eBook here.
The linked article also lists a lot of the training that is available from Udemy on being a successful eBook publisher. I am sure that marketing and public relations are a very large part of being a successful eBook producer.
One element of public relations that you may not have tried is that it is essential to have a very good landing page for your promotional campaign which leads to a sales funnel.
You may find it hard to believe, but there are freelancers who have made careers of being specialist eBook producers for other people and others that are landing page specialists.
You can see an example of a landing page that was produced by a landing page specialist by clicking here.
Amy Sept has written an article for the UpWork Blog entitled How Public Relations Gets People talking about Your Business. You can read Amy’s article here.
Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week
What Do You Think Are The Pros And Cons Of Working From Home?
Image Credit Pixabay.com
If someone was to ask you, “What do you consider is your greatest benefit of working from home?” what would you say?
If you have children and you are a freelancer, you might say that it was the flexibility of family life and being able to fit in with the comings and goings of your children.
There are others who would say getting out of the workplace toxic culture and being your own boss. However, it is rapidly changing as we start to recover from a five thousand year low of interest rates and record house prices.
The main advantage of working from home is going to be the ability of the family unit to lift their productivity to make more money to service their loans.
The alternative of seeking additional employment in the workplace would put a lot of stress on families.
Here are two great quotes about work life balance from some leading figures:
“We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own
“to do” list”. Michelle Obama
“You can’t have everything you want, but you can have the things
that really matter to you. And thinking that way empowers you to
work really hard for a really long period of time”.
Marissa Mayer
There are some more great work-life balance quotes from famous people here.
Jennifer Costa has written an article for the Freelancers Union Blog entitled The Pros and Cons of Working from Home. You can read Jennifer’s article here.
Financial Tip of the Week
Have You Ever Written Off A Bad Debt As A Freelancer?
Image Credit Pixabay.com
It is very disappointing when you are not paid by one of your customers that you believe owes you money for work that has been delivered fairly and has been accepted by them.
You are not alone. It becomes more complicated when your client lives in another country, because there is very little you can do about it.
That is why my advice to you is not to do work for an overseas client unless the contract payment is held in escrow with a freelancing platform.
This is primarily the reason that large freelancing platforms are flourishing. Their growth has been astounding.
There is one example of an international freelancing platform where the number of global users is more than the population of that country. This freelancing platform is based in Australia and is https://www.freelancer.com.au/.
The number of international users is approaching 34 million and the population of Australia is 25 million. At the time of writing there were 15.8 million contracts underway.
What can you do with a bad debt in your own country when you have gone outside the protection of an escrow account? If you are not sure, here is a book to help you with sample forms and letters:
If you are considering passing the debt to a debt collector because half the account paid is better than nothing, you may find this article by Sheilla McClear that appeared in the NYPost.com helpful.
It is entitled Finally, there is a debt collector for freelancers. You can read Sheilla’s article here.
For Australia, Brennan Dunn has written How to ensure you get paid as a freelancer for www.lifehacker.com.au which you can read here.
Freelancer 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 (click on the article description):
- Helping a friend or family member in financial hardship from Australian and Securities and Investments Commission.
- Sharon Levine 6 Freelancer Tips for Managing Inconsistent Cash Flow from www.getoxygen.com
- Jeanne Dorin How to deal with financial stress and sleep at night from www.forbes.com
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.
Magento is number thirteen on the list for this quarter. You can read about what magento is on Wikipedia by clicking here.
Articles now on our website that are relevant to the outcome of new skills training are listed here:
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/drought-proof-your-farming-business
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/freelance-retirees
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/millennials-freelancing-home-mortgage-save
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/students-freelancing-student-loans
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/freelancing-repay-housing-negative-equity
- https://www.freelance-work-guide.com/millennial-families-pay-energy-bills-by-freelancing
The latest one is here:
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: Best creeper for mechanics: Top 5 recommended.. There have been 62 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.
This week we have found a section for the self employed and sole traders published by the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre which you can read by cutting and pasting this url : https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/information-for/self-employed-sole-traders
We have gained approval from Robert Siciliano to bring you extracts from his books related to cyber security for freelancers. Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert and consultant.
He also runs a cyber security and fraud prevention website which you can see here.
Image Source: ROBERT SICILIANO
What Is Criminal Identity Theft?
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