Family Budgets Can Be Helped by Moonlighting as a Freelancer

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 25th November 2019.

Family budgets are squarely in Amazon’s sights with Amazon Prime. It does not matter whether it is a major purchase, regular purchases of everyday items and now even to the extent of family clothing with Amazon Wardrobe.

You can read about Amazon Wardrobe in our Amazon Associates Website here.

That would mean better help for your family budget. However, even though this is on the horizon what matters is that you start to think about moonlighting to help the family budget.

This is because the cost of living increases are occurring globally and wages for many people are stagnating.

We have looked at this issue with Moonlighting Freelancers – 20 Success Tips to Help Balance the Family Budget which you can read here.

Motivate Yourself!

“People ask me all the time, ‘What keeps you up at night?’
And I say, ‘Spicy Mexican food, weapons of mass destruction,
and cyber-attacks.”

– Dutch Ruppersberger

Should You Be Motivated to Complete Your HTTPS Project?

There are still website owners that have not completed their https conversion project. Are you one of those website owners?

On the 27/2/2018 newsletter summary, we printed this article HTTPS matters to your business. Do you know why? If you are one of the minority of website owners who have not decided to do the HTTPS Project it is time to revisit Chris Hoffman’s What is https, and why should I care? Which appeared in www.howtogeek.com and you can read here.

There is another reason that you should be motivated to tighten up on the cybersecurity of your website and that is the on the 25/5/2018 the European General Data Protection Regulation (EUGDPR) came into force.

It has substantial fines if you do not comply with the regulation if you deal with the identities of European Union citizens. This is especially true if you are freelancing to a company dealing with E.U. residents. This is what it means here.

It is our job to tell you about these issues that impact on freelancers even when they are global issues.

Productivity Tip Of The Week

At A Time When Wages Are Stagnating and Family Budgets Are Under Pressure What Can You Do to Increase Your Income?

managing budgeted income and expenditure

Imagine that you were a young couple planning how you were going to rescue the family budget that started to run at a deficit of $5,000 per annum.

The overtime penalty rates have just been cut back and that was the bottom line on your family budget.

You were in the red (deficit) to the tune of about $420 per month on your family budget. Your total savings outside of superannuation was $2,250. Does this happen in real life? It sure does and you can read an article about it here.

If you are in Australia, you will know that Amazon Prime has started well and truly and is targeting family budgets with savings because that is their global approach. Amazon Prime spans the globe. This is true and you can read about the savings here.

If you are both working an 8-hour day job which now has no shift work loading and have a daily commute to the city, where do you start?

You start your research with: Upwork releases Q2 2019 Skills Index, ranking the 20 fastest-growing skills for freelancers which you can read here.

Whether you have any matches close to your current skills or not, you are checking this for a purpose that is here.

You need to motivate yourself to better manage your time to be more productive.

Work-Life Balance Tip Of The Week

Have You Ever Attended A Remote Work and Digital Nomad Conference?

The Future of Work is changing rapidly, and it is possible for people to conduct a successful business over the internet from virtually anywhere in the world where there is good internet access.

For the more experienced freelance workers they will know that it is about teams and working together remotely. When you are in different countries communication and working together are critical.

You may have wondered what this has to do with work-life balance. The short answer is – a lot! In the situation where you are moonlighting as a freelancer and holding down a full-time day job as well, this is especially true.

You may well have dissected a project so that your remote workers on the other side of the world are working on part of your project while you are at work. You can’t very well run your freelancing job from your 9 to 5 job desk and expect to keep your day job.

It isn’t fair to your employer. That is why remote work and digital conferences matter to freelancers. It is about sharing ideas and new ways of working with your team.

By improving your skills and knowledge in this area you can become more productive and efficient and protect your family time. Therefore, it matters for work-life balance.

This is not a new occurrence, back in 2018 Hailley Griffis wrote about this issue for the Upwork Blog with the article 12 Remote Work and Digital Nomad Conferences Happening in 2018 which you can read here. However, this trend has grown as shown by this article here.

Financial Tip of the Week

You Can Moonlight on Your Public Transport Commute

Credit: itv.com

Imagine that you needed to find an extra ten hours a week to meet your freelancing moonlighting income plan goal and still protect your family time.

If you are one of the millions of people that face a long commute to work on public transport this presents you with an excellent opportunity to utilize this time.

It is a matter of arranging your schedule and planning to do tasks that you can easily do while traveling. Therefore, it is wise to use a scheduling app like ToDoIst.

In this way, you can plan your projects and identify the tasks that can be done from your smartphone or tablet while traveling. There are many organizers and assistants, both paid and free, in the marketplace. You can access the best sellers in both categories from Amazon by clicking here.

Sara McCord has written 5 Tips for Actually Getting Work Done While Traveling which appears in Themuse.com and you can read here: https://www.themuse.com/advice/5-tips-for-actually-getting-work-done-while-traveling.

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. This week we thought we would bring you some more TEDx talks on important issues for freelancers:

From TEDx Youth by Maria Ploumaki “The Art of Negotiation”:

From Dr Ivan Joseph TEDx Ryerson U “The Skill of Self Confidence”:

Jay Johnson “How to Deal with Difficult People” at TEDx Livonia cc Library:

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 eleven on the list is Neo4j. If you are like me, you will probably want to know more about Neo4j. I looked it up on Google and this is what it is 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. The value of the digital economy to Australia is shown here.

We have been developing an Amazon eBook series on freelancing for those starting out freelancing. Here are some early eBooks listed below. Click on an icon to have a look inside at the index for each one:

Amazon News

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 one from our Amazon Associates website. The guest contributor is Larson Simmons James with How pressure washers can be safe and environmentally friendly (click to follow the link).

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.