Supplementing Your Freelance Career With Blogging and Expert Content
What’s the biggest benefit to you in being a freelancer?
For me, it’s the beauty of having the freedom to choose what I work on, especially when maintaining multiple skills. That means that you can mix entrepreneurial endeavors with your freelancing. In fact, if you have expert skills in something, creating expert content between projects builds up a long-term stream of revenue.
For example, take a look at a Peter D. Marshall‘s website, Film Directing Tips. Whether or not you have any interest in being a filmmaker, it’s worth a visit to his site to see how he’s supplementing his income.
I have no idea whether he’s a freelancer or not, but he is a veteran filmmaker of over three decades. He’s taken his knowledge and created expert content and made it available for sale via his website. The website’s blog is a good example of blogging as a vehicle. The blog’s posts exist solely to promote his knowledge and his paid content, which includes audio files, video, PDF reports – all geared to the aspiring director.
This is a model you can adapt for almost any expert knowledge or skill that you have. If your freelance career is based around these skills, you’re likely to be something of an expert in them. Continue Reading
Tips for Staying Ahead of Your Freelance Writing Work
While having a regular freelance writing gig is nice, can you keep up with the ongoing need for fresh content?
Can you balance the workload with other projects?
Say you have a client who has you blogging weekly or even daily. Have you found it easy to come up with simultaneously original and useful content each and every week or even every day? In some saturated niches, it’s not always easy producing regular content.
Here are some tips you can use to to blunt the edge of writing dry spells, if they happen–or prevent them altogether.
Before starting this post, I had not completed a single article or post in over four weeks–my longest dry-spell since I started to take blogging seriously in 2005. This was mostly due to recently getting into non-writing and long-term writing projects. So while I did earn some income, my concern was for what would happen when those projects ended. A creative dry spell has a habit of perpetuating beyond control if you don’t forcibly do something to get out of it. Continue Reading
Why Should Freelancers Use Mind Mapping?
Einstein once said something to the effect of, “you cannot solve problems by thinking within the same framework or mindset that discovered the problems.” The implication is that you need to step into another mindset, another level of thinking.
So how do we step into another mindset, as Einstein implies we should? One possible method is mind-mapping, which arguably triggers a much more natural way of thinking and problem solving. Continue Reading
Managing Multiple Freelance Gigs With Mind Maps
If you’ve been freelancing for a while, you probably already know that you often have to juggle several projects at a time. That’s not to say that you necessarily have to multi-task, but simply need to manage overlapping task schedules.
The more successful your freelance career is, the more likely it is that you’ll have to manage multiple tasks simultaneously. They might be part of a single big project or parts of several smaller projects. Continue Reading
Multiple Streams of Income for Digital Nomads
True or false: freelancers tend to be relatively adventurous people, given that they’ve eschewed a “regular” job to live a more free work/life style? I vote for “true,” so it wouldn’t surprise me if a large proportion of freelancers suddenly decided that they wanted to live the lifestyle of a Digital Nomad – a person who utilizes technology to combine work and travel.
Getting Through Freelance Rejection
The new year is always a good time to reflect upon your business practices of the previous year. Did you perform as well as you’d hoped as a freelancer? Or did you get rejected more often than you were expecting?
When you’re turned down for a freelance gig, how does it make you feel? It stings, right? Even when you have a few years of experience. It’s tough enough being a lonely freelancer, tougher still being rejected for a gig you were hoping for – or worse, counting on.
9 Tips for Brand New Freelancers
As the new year is just around the corner, some of you might resolve to take a step forward into becoming a freelancer. According to what’s been written in the comments at FreelanceSwitch, there are those of you thinking about this.
With the way the economy has been, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the freelancer ranks grow in the next few months. Here are a few tips to get you started.
17 Tips for Getting Through a Business Downturn
No matter how much freedom you have as a freelancer, if you’re suffering from a double whammy of recession and rejection, it’s tough going. Throw in the big holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s), and for some lonely freelancers, it’s a difficult time. What do you during times like this?
Weathering a Downturn
Here are some general tips for improving your lot as a freelancer during a business or economic downturn.
11 Ways to Banish ‘Lonely Freelancer’ Syndrome
WAHFs (Work-at-Home Freelancers) have it tough. Sure, there’s freedom of work schedule, not having to sit in traffic or otherwise commute, eating a home-cooked meal and being able to watch soap operas or Oprah everyday. But for some of us it gets darn lonely working at home all day, every day. Combine the state of the economy, the Holiday season, or the start of the winter blues and the feeling of loneliness right now can be magnified manyfold. If you’re single, it’s even worse because working at home means it’s that much harder to meet people, even for casual conversation, weekly drinks or whatever. Here are some tips for weathering that “lonely freelancer” feeling that sometimes visits.
More Tips on Managing Multiple Freelance Gigs
In a previous article, Managing Multiple Freelance Gigs With Mind Maps, I covered how to use a grid/ mind map to track your freelancing projects and tasks. In this post, there’s a bit more detail about actually working on tasks, not just tracking them. ( See bottom of article for a free MindJet MindManager 8/Pro 7 map template of my work grid, as per some requests in the comments of the last article.)
The freelance task management process is best demonstrated by an example. Since my work is mostly freelance writing, that’s what I’m using here, though you can extrapolate for other types of work. Assume that you have a big writing project and several smaller ones for a given week – possibly with some of the larger projects spanning several weeks. Here’s what you do to manage and work on your tasks.
11 Tips To Get More Out Of Your Freelancing
We all know there are advantages of being a freelancer, especially if get have the luxury of working at home. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be creative every single day, especially if you’re worrying about payments, existing clients, finding new clients, feeling overworked, or whatever.
Don’t get overwhelmed. Here are some general tips to get the most out of your freelancing efforts.
9 Tips For Staying Sane While Working at Home With Distractions
Freelancing from home has many obvious benefits over working from an office. But it also has its downsides.
I don’t even know where to begin to describe my work environment, but it has two cats, two dogs, lots of chirpy birds and a few fish. There’s the occasional car passing by with thump-thumping bass on the stereo, too. But the worst is the over-protective younger dog who literally barks if I clear my throat too loudly. Many a time, I’ve had to re-record audio segments of a podcast or screencast as a result of her barking at phantoms. Heaven forbid anyone should knock on the door, setting her off in a tizzy of barking for many minutes. There are days when I don’t get much multimedia work done.
