Freelancers Need To Understand Their Digital Market Place

Weekly Newsletter for The Freelancers: Here is the latest newsletter of the week starting on 19th November 2018.

Can you remember this old proverb: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you”? Obviously, the person who said it didn’t live in the digital age when clearly things that you don’t know can hurt you.

This is especially true of freelancers and internet workers because there is just so much to know to keep up to date. I have told you in previous newsletters that Google Adwords is the biggest marketing tool for advertisers in the world.

Many freelancers should be using it if they are not already doing so, but you have to be careful. This story is an important tip:

I was promoting a website’s landing page. The products and services that were being promoted were based in the United Kingdom because the European General Data Protection Regulation training was underway for implementation on 25/5/2018.

Clearly, this was business related and I needed to target the UK geographic area and I needed to set the time zone for displaying the ads correctly.

However, what was not clear was whether US Pacific Time settings were taken into account when setting the time of display of the advertisements in the UK.

I went through the process of finding a clear answer to this. It was something I didn’t know that could clearly hurt me by impacting on the effectiveness of my Google Adwords campaign and cost me money.

The purpose of the Google Adwords story is to let you know that mistakes can be costly. It is better to learn from someone else rather than by experience which can be a hard teacher.

Nicole Malczan has written an article entitled 20 Freelance Mistakes You Make That Could Hurt Your Income Stream. It appears in the Income School Blog and you can read Nicole’s article here.

If you would like to read more about avoiding mistakes you can read the preview of The Top 25 Mistakes Freelance Writers Make (And How to Fix Them) by Courtney Herz by clicking here.

Motivate Yourself!

“Before you can become a millionaire, you must learn to
think like one. You must learn how to motivate yourself to
counter fear with courage. Making critical decisions about
your career, business, investments and other resources
conjures up fear, fear that is part of the process of becoming
a financial success.”

– Thomas J. Stanley

Do You Know How To Find Local Freelance Gigs?

Image Credit: performingbiz.com

If you have been freelancing even for a short while, you will know that the international freelancing market is enormous and very competitive on price. You will find that you are competing in a global market place where the hourly rates can be a lot lower than in your country.

This can be very demotivating and discouraging. In this article, we are going to try to motivate you to think outside the box as to what you can do to counteract this. This quote about will power is very appropriate:

“The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be
a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply
wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.” Will Self

Recently I wrote about Upwork and Hiring Guides. The reason for the article was to make freelancers think about strategy and to place themselves in the shoes of a potential employer.

The question that the freelancer was encouraged to ask then as it is now: why would a local employer choose a local freelancer over an overseas freelancer where they could probably get the job done cheaper?

This article entitled How to Find Local Freelance Gigs appears in the SkillShare.Com Blog and you can read it here.

This article will help you address this issue and I will be on the lookout for you to find information to help you with this strategy. It is all about helping you get fair and reasonable payment for your skills in a very competitive market.

Productivity Tip of the Week

Do You Know What A Chatbot Is And Why They Matter To Freelancers?

Work changes that increase your productivity matter to freelancers. Chatbots are mostly aimed at increasing productivity and that is why they matter to freelancers.

If you are not too sure what Chatbots are, you can read more about them here.

Technology innovations are constantly evolving and chatbots are an evolution from apps to increase productivity. It is one of the reasons why freelancers need to be constantly upgrading their skills.

If you use Facebook for your freelancing business, there is a good argument that you should understand chatbots.

There are now Udemy courses about chatbots, see here: How To Build A Facebook Messenger Chat Bot From Scratch.

This is what the course is about: “The latest craze in software interfaces is messenger bots, and Facebook has the largest chat platform by a long shot.

In this course, I’ll show you how to build your own Facebook Messenger Chat Bot using node js. We’ll use git to push and deploy our local JavaScript code to Heroku cloud. We will be creating a package .json file and installing some dependencies that our chatbot app will need.”

You can read more about this Udemy course here. This is not an affiliate link.

Matt Schlicht has written an article entitled The 7 things everyone needs to know about chatbots for chatbotsmagazine.com which you can read here.

Work-Life Balance Tip of the Week

Do You Know When To Use The Two Letter Word?

When you are a freelancer with family responsibilities you have to weigh the pros and cons of a lot of your decision making. You need to have one eye on your family responsibilities and the other on the flow of gigs and income to pay the bills.

To achieve a work life balance it is sometimes necessary to say “No!” This week’s article is aimed at helping you say “No!” when it is necessary to both family and friends demands plus those of clients and gigs.

This quote from Steve Jobs is right for all of us:

“It is only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

I have chosen two separate links, taking the two different viewpoints: of when to say no to family and friends and when to say no to clients and gigs.

Kayla Matthews has written an article How to maintain boundaries between work and home when you telecommute for flexjobs.com which you can read here.

Emma Morgan from the Freelance Collective has looked at When to Say “No” to a Client and How to Do It Without Burning Bridges. You can read Emma’s article by clicking here.

These are important issues worth sharing on Twitter and Facebook and you can do so by clicking on the social media links at the bottom of this newsletter.

Financial Tip of the Week

Can Freelancing Help Families Avoid Mortgage Stress?

For low-income families living on a tight budget, mortgage stress is their number one financial issue. It is because during the past few years families in many countries have taken on very high mortgage debts because of the global housing affordability crisis and low-interest rates.

However, those on variable home loan interest rates are starting to be concerned because global interest rates have started to show signs of increasing.

Where I live in Australia, some political leaders have stated that this is the case. It is an important truth that has to be admitted. I strongly support this approach because it allows people to start to plan for what is inevitable, see here.

One of the world’s leading economists, Andy Haldane, who is the Chief Economist with the Bank of England, has warned the world’s home loan borrowers about variable interest rates with a graph that looks back at interest rates over 5,000 years.

Andy’s graph can be seen in this article https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2018/04/06/what-innovations-are-needed-for-better-mortgage-interest-rate-management/

These press articles and even national television programs such as this one here have families thinking about what they can do to prepare their family for increasing loan repayments.

One way to prepare for the increased loan repayments and the rising cost of living expenses is to increase the family income. It is possible to do this by freelancing part time. This newsletter is aimed at helping you do this.

When people are starting to consider freelancing from home they want to know whether it is possible to make a reasonable income. It is possible and this article by Roshan Perera entitled How Much Do Freelancers Really Make? (Hint: It’s More Than You Think) explains what a reasonable expectancy is.

Roshan’s article appears in the Freelancing Hacks blog and you can read it by clicking here. You can share it by clicking on the social media buttons below.

Drought News

The www.abc.net.au is keeping a full coverage of the drought crisis in Eastern Australia and you can read about it here. You can learn how you can help the farmers here .

I will maintain the links for my opinion of the New Economy and that skills and job focused training is one of the possible solutions for long term structural assistance to rural communities.

This article sets out the reasons: Training choices matter for freelancers and career changers. You can read it by clicking on the link.

There are now 5,000 skills in 90 categories that the digital economy can offer according to Upwork’s 2nd Quarter Skills Index for 2018, see here.

Articles now on our website that are relevant are listed here:

There will be more over the coming months.

Amazon News

For those who missed the newsletter for last week, I think that this article about why Amazon is so successful globally is worth repeating.

If you have ever wondered why Amazon is now so successful and generating record profits the article Amazon’s stunning success down to Jeff Bezos willingness to defy Wall Street and take a long term view by James Moore which appears in www.independent.co.uk explains why. You can read it here.

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

The latest article on www.bestsellershourly.com Amazon Case Study website is entitled Winter clothing shopping with Amazon Wardrobe – 15 top reasons to use the service which you can read here.

The interesting part about this article is that it is aimed at the northern hemisphere winter market under Amazon One Link which you can read about here.

Freelancers And Cyber Security

Pinterest: 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 gives self defense and personal safety seminars. Robert provides safety and identity theft fraud prevention tips and advice on multimedia channels in the United States. We have his approval to bring you weekly extracts from his books: