Freelancing As A Programmer Is Hot Now!

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 10th June 2019.

Do you believe that top freelancing programmers can earn $1,000 per hour? It seems incredible, doesn’t it?

According to an article in the Hired Blog, this is correct. However, it is important to remember that the laws of supply and demand work in every market – even freelance programming.

Hot markets have the habit of attracting top talent to earn the top money. If you decide to go down this path it is always important to be aware that markets change. It is wise to save for when the market changes – because it will.

This quote seems very appropriate to hot markets and keeping a sense of balance:

“I think the greatest demand actually comes from within, not
from outside.”

– Steve Easterbrook

Brenna Flores has written How to Start Freelance Programming: Tips for Software Engineers. You can read Brenna Flores article here.

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

Are You A Member Of A Freelancing Meet Up Group In Your Community?

Image Credit Pixabay.com

Our children have grown up now, but my wife still goes off to meet up with her “young mums’ club” members who are still in the community. She has established lifelong friends from this group.

Similarly freelancers have a vested interest in being motivated to search out other freelancers in their area.

It does not mean they would be looking for co-space working environments, but networking and sharing of ideas and the trials and tribulations of freelancing at home provides a lot of plusses for the members.

There clearly is a need for the formation of Meet Up groups for freelancers. Where there is a community need it does not take long for this to provide the motivation for someone to initiate a solution. There is now an App for this.

I live in Melbourne, Australia where there are a lot of freelancers according to the last study of freelancing in Australia by Edelman which you can read here.

This report by Edelman is a bit dated now, but I imagine that there would be about 4.5 million involved in freelancing in Australia now. This is very much in line with the experience of the United States.

Here is the link to the Meet Up groups in Australia here. However, it is now a global movement as can be seen by this map here.

If you live in another country and would like to find a similar group, I believe that a Google search will soon find a lead.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

What Freelancing Jobs Can You Do From Anywhere In The Word?

Image Credit Pixabay.com

If someone said to you twenty years ago that there is a long list of jobs that you can do from anywhere in the world so long as you had internet connection, you probably wouldn’t have believed them.

That has changed forever. I recently had some excel spreadsheet work done for me by a freelancer in New York. He was an excellent worker and I was very happy with his work.

However, he made no secret of the fact that he was moonlighting and he also had a day job. When I was out walking the dog I was thinking about him working away at night on our project while he was half a world away.

Yes, there is nothing to stop freelancers working on similar projects while they are in transit to work on public transport (so long as they have a seat!).

You can see that, with the global high prices of housing, there is going to be an increasing number of people starting to moonlight to help balance the family budget.

From the family’s perspective this is going to lift its productivity. The alternative for many families is that they will get themselves in deep financial trouble.

In the early nineties this opportunity to lift the family productivity and income didn’t exist.

Johannes Volkner has written an article for the Web Work Travel Blog entitled 18 jobs & skills that enable you to work from anywhere and travel the world. You can read Johannes article here.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Are You A Member Of An Online Hive Which Is A Community For The New Workforce?

Image Credit Pixabay.com

The Freelancers Union could be called an association or federation of unaffiliated workers. It is often referred to that way because it is not a traditional union that is bargaining with an employer.

One of the benefits of being in the Freelancers Union is that it has started cells of like-minded workers who can share ideas, stories and tips from members who can live in various countries.

The Freelancers Union has called them Hives. Sara Horowitz who established the Freelancers Union has called for your opinion about the future of Hives. You can help her by commenting here.

One of the Hives could be for graphic designers and artists who can ask questions of their fellow Hive members and get answers and support. This can lead not only to better Work-Life Balance, but also to increasing your income and cuttings costs.

These are typical questions the Hive members have asked:

“How to handle Copyrights/Usage Rights when quoting Character Designs”

“How do concept artists handle the way they grant rights? One area that I am not very experienced in, but growing, is creating concept art.”

“Has anyone stumbled upon a thorough check list for becoming a freelance designer? I’ve done freelance side jobs for years but I would like to …”

I intend to post Sara’s article on our Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/FreelanceWorkGuide/ and invite our community to participate.

Financial Tip of the Week

Who Controls The Finances In Your Family?

Who controls the family budget and finances in your family? You might think that is not an important question, but it is.

Even if you are young and never had day’s sickness in your life, it matters that both partners know how to manage the family finances even when you are the work at home freelancer as well as looking after the children.

It does not matter whether it is Mum or Dad who goes off to work in the 9 to 5 job or who earns the most money. The following story illustrates why it is important for both Mum and Dad to understand family finances:

Laura Lifshitz has written an evergreen article entitled Why Moms Should Be Mindful of the Money in Marriage for the Pop Sugar Blog. You can read Laura’s article 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):

Katy Cowan with How to recognize, prevent and deal with burnout in a creative job with the www.theguardian.com
Jon Younger with Managing the stress of freelancing: six ways to take control with www.forbes.com
Charles Wilson from www.freelanceuk.com with Five freelancing tips for when you’re not paid

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 twelve on the list for this quarter is kubernetes. You can read about what kubernetes is by clicking 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: 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.

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.