The Importance Of Freelancers Sub-contracting And Building Teams

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 15th April 2019.

In my copy of the Freelancers’ Bible, there is Chapter No. 11 (page 283) on subcontracting and building teams. I will often refer to this in my articles because it is how freelancers can lift their productivity and income.

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However, it is more than about productivity and income, it is about work life balance and having a good family life at the same time. There is an art in managing teams remotely, but very importantly learning how others have done it successfully.

Craig Jarrow’s TimeManagementNinja.com has an article on the Top 10 tasks to delegate to a virtual assistant which you can read here.

In The Freelancers’ Bible Sara Horowitz and Toni Poynter ask the question, ‘Does the client need to know?’ The question relates to the person that you are completing the work for needs to know whether you have sub-contracted the work.

Horowitz and Poynter are of the opinion that the client does not need to know and I agree with them. This is because you are like any other business that uses a team approach to getting things done with the segmentation of duties.

The customer does not need to know who completed what part of the contract. What matters to you as the person managing the contract is that the quality of the product or service produced for the client meets your expectations!

It all comes down to this timeless quote from Peter Drucker:

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right
things.

For those that wish to learn more about managing virtual teams remotely you can look inside Hassan Osman’s best selling Influencing Virtual Teams: 17 Tactics That Get Things Done with Your Remote Employees by clicking on the icon below:

Motivate Yourself!

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that
changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed
to fail is not taking risks.”

– Mark Zuckerberg

Should You Feel Motivated About Learning To be A Bot Developer?

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Internet bots are regularly in the news today. The reason is that they can complete repetitive simple tasks more quickly and efficiently than human beings.

This allows the people who wrote the software script or contracted someone else to do it for them to have time to take on tasks that have a higher return. It seems pretty straightforward, right? It starts to get interesting when you realize that bots can even help employers hire freelancers.

Martin Bryant of TheNextWeb.com blog has written Tara the chatbot hires freelancers so you don’t have to which you can read here.

I don’t know whether you know but Wikipedia uses editing bots to help look after their massive amounts of articles and data. It is true! You can read about it here.

It is only when you start to think about the possible applications that bots can be used for that you realize the enormity of the opportunities for freelancers who are motivated to learn this new skill where they can see that their current skills set is starting to be less relevant.

There is a list of the bot developer jobs that are on Upwork here and on Freelancer here. There are courses for chatbot developers on Udemy here. This is not an affiliate link.

I notice that Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework: A Multiplatform Approach to Building Chatbots by Joe Mayo is available through Amazon and you can look inside it here:

Productivity Tip Of The Week

Procrastination Can Be Productivity’s Worst Enemy

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Procrastination can be a killer for productivity. It is very easy to put off items that are on your ToDoList. Quite often the items that you are putting off are important, but they require more planning and application to produce a good result.

In The Freelancers’ Bible on page 338 Sara Horowitz’s lists 10 Procrastination Busters. My clear favourite is breaking items that have been too hard to tackle all at once down into parts and tackle them one part per day. This quote from Max Brooks is right on the money:

“If you believe you can accomplish everything by “cramming” at the eleventh hour, by all means, don’t lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining.”

The above quote was one of 65 collected by Marelisa Fabrega for her blog post 65 Procrastination quotes that will shift you into action mode that appears in her DaringToLiveFully.com blog which you can read here.

If you prefer more than quotes, but action steps that you can have a look at Matt Benfield’s Elorus.com Blog post 10 ways to overcome procrastination as a freelancer which you can read here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Do You Understand How To Moonlight As A Freelancer?

Laura Shin from the Forbes Magazine wrote the article From Full-Time To Freelance: How To Make The Leap which you can read here.

Laura is very much on top of the issue of freelancing and being prepared before you try going out as a full-time freelancer. You will find a number of articles about freelancing at the end of this particular article by Laura.

However, when you signed up for this newsletter you gained access to some listicles (articles in a list format) of the questions you should ask yourself and professionals from whom you should seek advice.

It is important when you are moonlighting that you understand the taxation impact on your overall situation including your income from your day role in a 9 to 5 job.

There would be two professionals that I would put on your ToDoList before embarking on your moonlighting plan: they are your tax accountant and financial planner.

I say this because it is very easy to make mistakes that can cost you a lot in after-tax income which is what most people start moonlighting for.

The Freelancers Union blog has two posts about the taxation and freelancers that I have found. Jonathan Medows has written 7 tax tips for first-time freelancers which you can read here.

I am aware that I have readers of this newsletter from a number of countries and my strong advice to you is to not rely on general advice articles other than as background research before seeking personal professional advice from a taxation accountant and a financial planner to get your overall strategy right.

Financial Tip of the Week

Freelancers, The Future Of Work and Finance

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In a previous newsletter we talked about how cybersecurity offered freelancers a great opportunity to develop skill sets that are going to be highly in demand.

One particular area that is going to see enormous growth is in the area of data protection officers for Small and Medium Enterprises globally and this is why explained in this article here.

The European General Data Protection Regulation which came into force on 25/5/2018 is driving this demand for reform and change. It is a global reform that is also going to apply to the trading partners of the European Union’s business community.

Some countries have not fully realized this yet, but they will, and this is the reason here. If you are interested in a possible cyber security jobs this is worthy of your research.

By way of disclosure, I own and operate this website http://www.identity-theft-scout.com/ and I am an affiliate of IT Governance Limited in the United Kingdom which is the leading global supplier, in my opinion, of the training for Data Protection Officers.

The demand for cyber security specialists is staggering.

Freelancer Skills Development and Inspiration News

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We are constantly researching 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):

Abdullah Muhammed for www.forbes.com with 55 Freelance businesses you can start for free tomorrow morning

www.forbes.com freelancer specialist Abdullah again: 10 Ted talks for the freelancer who needs inspiration

Armando DelaCruz from www.getflywheel.com with 17 inspiring examples of freelance business websites

I will maintain the links on how the new economy can help rural communities. You can read it by clicking on the link here.

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer, according to Upworks 4th quarter 2018 Skills Index which you can read here.

Articles now on our website that are relevant 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 AWS 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 Air Impact Wrench. There have been 25 sales in the past month due to the keyword research and skills of Mamun, my virtual assistant.

Freelancers And Cyber Security

In view of the recent hack of Reddit we have decided to link to the Australian Bankers Association fact sheet entitled Small Business – Protecting Your Business Information Online which you can access here. We urge you look at other Fact Sheets that are available from the Association as well related to business and personal security.

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.