Tools of the Freelance Trade

Tools of the Freelance Trade

Whether you consult or freelance full-time or part-time as I do, certain freelance business tools can help to keep you on track. But which tools (i.e. software)? After eight years of freelancing, several software applications became my ‘go to’ apps. Now that I’m expanding my business to include author training courses, books, and book support services, it’s even more important to pick the best tools of today.   My Six Best Freelancer Tools and Why Harvest Chosen by The Freelance Collective members as the time tracker of choice, I have used Harvest as an invoicing tool and tracker for five years. It offers project time control with inbuilt reminders. In settings, you’ll find and tick “Estimates” – for years I didn’t know this existed, but it’s helpful for turning a quick quote into a deposit invoice. Price: 1 user, 2 projects…
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How to Start a Freelance Business article
Home-Based Business

How to Start a Freelance Business – Part 1

It may feel daunting to launch your freelance business from scratch, so here we get right into the setting up process. For the uninitiated, there can be numerous hurdles to overcome on the way to having a successful freelancing career.  As a freelancer myself, I lived some of these hurdles firsthand. My working knowledge is summed up in “How to Start a Freelance Business in Australia”. ____ What is it?  Freelancing typically refers to copywriters, designers, programmers and so on, providing a business service. Freelancers offer their services to clients without a long-term commitment to them. They charge by the hour, day or job (fixed fee) and are usually soloists. (They may opt to outsource tasks they don’t specialise in, under one project fee). ___ Reaching out to a community of freelance professionals certainly helps get you started in the right…
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advertising books in magazines
Book Marketing, Self-Publishing

Advertising your New Book in Magazines

Advertising a new book in magazines is a choice fraught with spending anxiety. Most Australian authors self-publishing (those surveyed) do not make much income from their writing — about $12,000 p.a. from royalties on average — so advertising and its results need to be assessed with a realistic view. Australian Book Advertising The first choice is whether to advertise in a Title Showcase in the dual deal:  Books+Publishing magazine and Good Reading magazine ($340 for a small listing). For Good Reading magazine, however, this advertising goes to a huge market of 50,000. This would be more worthwhile if you have a distributor, because that’s just the way it works in book retail land. If you’re a nonfiction author doing a blitz, then consider pulling out all stops with their combo deal. Combined Marketing Package for $530 AUD (incl GST): 1 x Title Showcase listing to appear…
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freelance marketing

Market any Freelance Service in Just 4 Hours a Week

I know you just adore marketing (she says dryly), but why four hours a week? Well, if you consult or freelance around 20 hours a week, that’s 20% on top of your work time, and with proposal writing time, it brings you to a handy 24-26 hours – a perfect primary school parent work schedule. On the other hand, a full-time freelance schedule is often not thought out enough. The fact is, 30 billable hours (like on my calculator) is probably the best you can achieve in busy periods. Why? Because you need that 7-10 hour leeway to account for pre-work calls or emails, talking to peers, changing your website, setting up invoices, and doing proposals. And if you can fit it in… some other marketing. Click to get my new Hourly Rate Calculator offer via email. So based on 9…
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freelance writing jobs
Freelance writing

Why the Freelancer Lifestyle and What Writing Jobs Can You Get?

False pretense aside, yes I have a short book coming out next week, entitled ‘How to Start a Freelance Business in Australia’, so of course I’m somewhat selling the benefits of a freelancer lifestyle. But as an experienced freelance copywriter and editor, I can shed some light on the truth of it.  If you’re new to looking for freelance writing jobs, you might have these questions: What kind of money can I expect… What hours can I work… Do clients expect a miracle? What kind of money will I earn… To which I answer:  Your income will reflect the confidence level and expertise of your promotional skills – which you must deliver on. So anything from $20 an hour to $180 an hour is possible. The more specialised your writing (read, pandering to the needs of the corporate world), the more you can potentially…
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A new tool for creating ebooks / lead magnets

Sometimes a designing service comes up that makes me think: “why did I even bother doing it the hard way?” An online ebook builder (for websites), ‘Designrr’, is making me think this. It’s a simple way of creating a lead magnet — or perhaps a larger ebook for distribution — from your own web pages…. without the stress of learning Adobe InDesign. Feedback from author users leads me to suggest it is not ideal for full Kindle eBooks. You are perhaps best off taking the designed PDF & native file and getting an online freelancer to convert that to your .ePub or .mobi file. Another paid tool for creating ebooks that I’ve used in the past is Jutoh. But Jutoh is not for the fainthearted. It requires knowledge of what to clean up, why tick “make NCX”, and pre-conversion things,…
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