Passive Income and Active Income Matter to Freelancers

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 27th May 2019.

Many freelancers of varying skill sets have the ability to earn passive income as well as getting paid for their skills. There can be a wide variation in freelancing income and passive income mixes.

Darren Rowse who is a blogger, makes money from his blog by having a range of sources of passive income that supplement his active skills of being a writer.

You can read Darren’s blog and visit his website here which reveal some passive income ideas that might match with your skills.

There is a broad spectrum of freelancing skills being offered over the internet. Amazon Web Services freelancers are in demand and you can read about what they do and why they are in demand here.

When they have sufficient experience and clients they can develop training courses to teach others e.g. by offering courses on Udemy for which you can see an example here.

I know that Darren Rowse has been extremely successful, but for the rest of us, this strategy can also apply.

Here are two articles that argue the case for us aiming to have both active and passive income goals.

The passive income goal for most of us should be secondary:

Kevin Ocasio from Listiller.com has written Is Making the Jump from Freelancing to Passive Income Earning Possible? which you can read here.

Jessica Thiefels from Due.com has written How to become a more valuable freelancer while making passive income which you can read here.

How did Darren Rowse blog his way to success? You can read Secrets for Blogging Your way to a Six-Figure Income 3rd Edition by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett by clicking on the 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 a Freelancer Be Motivated to Become Fit?

Image Credit pixabay.com

Do you take a morning walk before settling to your daily work routine? It is easy to say “Why bother about a fitness routine.

However, there is a financial reason that you should bother. It is called productivity!

Harvard Business Review conducted a study of the impact of fitness on productivity and they found that these areas were impacted by increasing your fitness:

“Improved concentration
Sharper memory
Faster learning
Prolonged mental stamina
Enhanced creativity
Lower stress”

The list seems as though it had freelancers in mind because they tick all the boxes that freelancers must have. Ron Friedman wrote Regular exercise is part of your job for the Harvard Business Review which you can read here.

The Freelancer.com community which has over 33.2 million global users knows a lot about freelancers.

F.L. Julls has written Fitness and Freelancing: Staying Healthy When you’re a Freelancer for their community blog and you can read her article here. This quote is right on the money for freelancers and fitness:

“Your health is an investment, not an expense!”

– Source: Topsecretcoaching.com

Productivity Tip Of The Week

Do You Know What An Idea Budget Is?

Image Credit Pixabay.com

Freelancers who can operate on one idea at a time are rare! It can be contributed to the fact that freelancers, to be successful, must be self-starters and not wait to be told what to do and when to do it.

This means that a freelancer always has to be on the lookout for ideas and opportunities to make money and for getting new gigs. It is a part of being a successful freelancer.

However, it can be against good management practice of focusing on one thing at a time. This quote by Steve Jobs is right on the money:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got
to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means
saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are”

Freelancers who can switch off their brain and stop seeing opportunities can consider themselves very lucky. I am not one of those fortunate few and have a system to manage ideas and opportunities as they arrive.

James Chartrand has written Battle Productivity Brain Drain with an Idea Budget for Copyblogger.com and you can read it here. I have a similar plan for managing ideas so that I don’t get swamped.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Should You Start A Co-Working Space if You Are a Freelancer?

Image Credit startupblink.com

If your parents can’t help you look after the kids because they want to go on an extended overseas trip and you are frantically busy with gigs, what do you do? If you read last week’s newsletter, you would know that we featured Would co-working with kids work for you?

However, before you start thinking that this could be a solution for you it is important to do some research.

We have had a look at the articles that are available. The first article is by Peter Gasca who has written 7 Tips for Creating Your Own Co-working Space for Entrepreneur.com which you can read here.

Karly Nimmo has written How to Avoid Disaster When Starting a Co-working Space. Karly has written this article to share her experiences from starting The Office Collective (OC) in Byron Bay, Australia.

Karly still believes in the concept of co-working spaces and has shared her experiences so that others who try it will not make the same mistakes that she did. Karly’s article appears in DeskMag.com and you can read it here.

If you read these articles and find that you are still keen on the idea and would like to see what others have done you we have found this list of The Top 10 Co-working Space Directories which you can visit and explore here.

Financial Tip of the Week

Do You Know How To Value And Keep Your Existing Clients?

Knowing how to value and improve your work as a freelancer is important because it is linked to keeping your existing clients. It is well known that getting a new client costs you more than retaining an existing client.

The reason is simple: looking for new client’s takes time which equates to increased costs because you are not being paid while working on business development.

If you get the pricing for your work correct and give added value, it is a far more effective strategy. This approach involves two things: pricing your work correctly and adding value to your work.

Fred Schebesta has written How to Price Your Freelance Skills like a Pro for the Upwork.com blog. Fred explains why the easiest way to increase profit is to charge more. You can read Fred’s article here.

It is about how to increase the value of your freelancing services that you offer to your clients as well as the prices for your services and managing the perception by the clients as to the value of your services.

Brian Honigman has written 10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business.

Brian has made the valid point that “The #1 reason for customer attrition is dissatisfaction with customer service.” Brian’s article appears in the Kissmetrics.com blog and you can read it 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):

From www.freelance-work-guide.com, here are some tips: 9 effective stress management tips for freelancers

Ruchi Bhargava with This is how you sleep better when you are stressed from www.freelancer.com

Miranda Marquit and How to manage different time zones as a freelancer from www.due.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.

Number four on the list for this quarter is Explainer Videos. You can read an article entitled What are explainer videos? by Megan Marrs for www.wordstream.com 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

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 garage workbench of 2019. Top 5 recommended. There have been 50 sales 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 an further article from the Australian Government Department: Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network (ACORN) about what you can report as a cybercrime. You can read the article here.

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.