How Can You Manage and Develop Trust With A Virtual Client

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 28th October 2019.

Imagine that you lived in Emerald in the middle of Queensland, Australia and needed to build trust with virtual clients in London, United Kingdom, how could you do it?

This is the situation that is frequently faced by freelancers working on the internet. Yet, it is critical for freelancing success to learn about managing clients and developing trust with virtual clients that they may never meet because they may be in another country and from another culture.

Clients are only a few computer mouse clicks away but can be on the other side of the world. I know that this can present some freelancers with a problem because when you are pitching for a gig over the internet it is not unusual to be requested to have a Skype interview with the person posting the job on a freelancing platform.

It is possible for some freelancers to be reluctant to do this. The reason is that harassment could possibly follow. Here is what the Upwork Community thinks about the issue. In summary it is what you feel comfortable with.

Chris Sturgess from the Freelancer Union has written How to earn a client’s trust for their Blog and you can read it here. Chris is of the opinion that there are many ways that you can earn a client’s trust.

Sara Horowitz and Toni Sciarra Poynter have covered this issue of trust in Chapter 4 of the Kindle eBook The Freelancers Bible. Chapter 4 is entitled Getting Clients and has a notation:

“You can’t be a pest, but your name has to come to mind when
they need someone.”

That is the truth of the matter. The more information you gather about getting clients and developing your skills and knowledge, the more successful you will be as a freelancer.

If you have not yet got The Freelancers Bible it is available by clicking on the icon below:

Motivate Yourself!

“Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It
happens when you are ready to face the questions you have
been avoiding your whole life.”

– Shannon L. Alder

Who Completes Your Annual Performance Review and Pays Your Bonus as A Freelancer?

self-performance-evaluation-and-reward-yourself.

Rewarding yourself for achieving self-imposed goals may seem foolish when you start out freelancing, but there are sound reasons why you should.

When you are at work for an employer in a 9 to 5 job with a large corporate, they often have an appraisal system for your performance. This is quite often linked to a bonus and promotion system.

The more innovative employers also have a system of minor monthly awards for achieving specific goals.

These appraisal and reward systems are part of managing motivation and you usually sign up for the goals for the forthcoming year so that you know what is expected of you and how to get your bonus.

Andrew Blackman from Envato’s business.plustuts.com has looked at How to Set Effective Goals for Your Freelance Business, check out the article. You’ll find how you manage your motivation, by setting your own goals.

Jay Douglas from the Upwork Blog has written about how to stay motivated to achieve your goals with 10 Tips entitled Staying Motivated as a Work-at-Home Freelancer which you can read about here.

How will you reward yourself for achieving a goal so that you stay motivated, not sure? Florante Valdez from the FreelanceChannel.com blog gives you some tips on how to go about it here.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

Do You Know How To Manage Your Mood To Increase Your Productivity?

Have you ever heard of sports people saying that they were “in the zone” after a peak performance? Those people who have had an experience in their sport by playing in the zone will tell you that everything they do seems to flow effortlessly, and they can’t do anything wrong.

After the performance, they all want to know how it happened so they can repeat it. As a freelancer have you had an experience of being “in the zone” with your creativity and productivity?

Like sports people you should ask the question as to how to recreate this high productivity performance because it translates into increased earning power and more money in the bank.

The question, of course, is how can you manage to be “in the zone” when your mood is less than optimal and you feel like taking the day off and having a lazy day at the beach, but you know that you have a gig with a deadline.

When you think about the issue as a freelancer it comes down to managing your mood so that you can increase your creativity. Nils Salzgeber from Medium.com has written Six Reliable Strategies to Improve Your Mood which you can read by clicking on the title.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Do You Use A Grandparents’ Emergency Response Team?

grandparents-help-freelancers-in-emergency

If you have children, you will know what I mean! In our senior’s bike riding group, there is a standing joke about riders that are unexpectedly absent.

The other riders will shrug and say that they have been called away on GERT (Grandparents’ Emergency Response Team) duties to help their children by minding their grandchildren.

If you are a freelancer, GERT teams can be especially helpful when you have a tight deadline for producing a gig for your best client.

However, for co-working freelancers, there is the possibility of developing Community Emergency Response Teams, also known as friendship groups. That is why the community is so important to freelancers. It can transcend families and last a lifetime.

The Freelancers Union have developed the concept of Hives to give fellow freelancers a helping hand with an issue that they have not come across before. Hives is an international movement and they have now started in Europe.

Financial Tip of the Week

How Do You Manage Late Paying Clients?

For international clients, freelancers should always use a freelancing platform in my opinion. This means that the payment of your contract will be held in an escrow account.

Providing you fulfil the terms of the contract and the quality of your work is acceptable, you know that you will be paid. If there is a dispute you know that the arbitration system of the platform is there to help you settle a dispute with the person for whom you are working.

However, there will always be freelancers who prefer not to use a platform for either local or international contracts.

In the situation where this occurs and you have a late-paying client, you must have a strategy for dealing with these clients. If you delay too long a bad debt may result. This means, of course, that it is a loss to your freelancing business.

Rebecca Knight has written How Freelancers Can Make Sure They Get Paid on Time for the Harvard Business Review and you can read about it here.

There are some freelancers who advocate that you should reward clients for early payment because it helps with your cash flow as well.

Taylor Gordon has looked at this issue for the Due.com blog. Taylor’s article Why you should reward clients for early payment appears here

There is an interesting article written by Ali Montag for cnbc.com entitled Kevin O’Leary explains one big thing people don’t understand about bitcoin (but need to) which you can read here.

Kevin O’Leary looks at the situation where he was considering a transaction in bitcoin. Freelancers should read this article because it is a warning from Kevin.

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 Talk by Dr. Ivan Joseph “The skill of self-confidence”:

From Tali Sharot TEDX Cambridge “How to motivate yourself to change your behaviour”:

From Amy Morin TEDx Ocala “The secret of becoming mentally strong”:

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 ten on the list is Go Development. If you are like me, you will probably want to know more about Go Development. I looked it up on Wikipedia of course and this is a what the company does 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.

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:

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 the second by Amelia Jee (click to follow the link): Reasons why pressure washer cleaning for concrete drives is essential. If you too would like to write an article on a similar subject of home maintenance and DIY our Guest Post policy is here.

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.