Category: Advice for Freelancers
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Full disclosure: I’ve written two blogs for the manufacturers of Spike email, including a review of it, but after trying it out for a week it’s become a part of my desktop. Spike calls itself conversational email, and that term makes total sense. Your email conversations look like text messages, down to the “…” on…
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When you get going as a freelancer, you’ll eventually hit a lull. Or two. Or seven. When work dries up, a natural reaction is to hunting for more, leaving your traditional venues behind and trying to get as much coverage for yourself as possible. When this happened to me during 2017, I took a suggestion…
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Summers can be tough on full-time freelancers because the peace and quiet you get used to during the day can vanish in a heartbeat and take a three-month vacation. Such is the case for me with the Twin Miracles and my wife all out of school/work from late May to mid-August. My home office very…
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I had an email this morning from Upwork celebrating my 5-year anniversary as a working freelancer on the site. I took a look back on my epic list of complete contracts and sure enough, on January 16, 2013, I finished my first-ever job for the website formerly known as ODesk. Those were some humbler times…
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I was invited to interview for a job on Upwork yesterday wanting a host of articles every day about all manner of things – entertainment, food, retail advertising, etc. I talked to a lady (I guess) on Skype who was offering $22/500-word article or 25 articles a week – a tidy $550 week. As the…
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It’s never easy to say goodbye to a client if you’ve worked together for any reasonable length of time and success. It’s counter-intuitive to leave someone who’s paying you for your services, because, it’s money! We make our living by finding clients who are willing to pay us for our services. It’s a hustle, a…
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If you’re an Upworker like myself, you were probably outraged by an email sent two weeks ago that was disguised as good news. “We’re lowering our rate to 5% on jobs above $10,000!” it trumpeted in the subject line, only to reveal the real sucker punch inside – it was also raising its fee to…
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The informality of working online sometimes sees us drop our guard when it comes to things like official contracts and formal agreements. We talk to clients in casual, informal settings like email and Instant Messenger, and it tends to lower our guard and our parameters for how we typically do business. But whether you’re dealing with…
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About 15 years ago, every man and woman who worked for a newspaper started being told by management that the Internet was the Devil; that we would all lose our jobs because of its freedom of information distribution, and that a degree in Journalism would be worth less than the paper it was printed on…
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Quite recently, I decided to raise my hourly rate on the major marketplace where I cultivate a majority of my freelance work. Unless you’re independently wealthy, the early times when you decide to start freelancing often involve beginning with low-paying jobs and then slowly building up to a more favorable rate of pay as your…
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