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We like articles where freelancers recap their years in business and share tips for beginners. Such as 8 Best Freelancing Tips For Beginners by Kim Hobson:
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A so-called feast-or-famine cycle is a problem known to many freelancers — periods of busy work and strong income alternate with periods when work and money are scarce. This is followed by hustling for new work to stop the slump, the work picks up again, and the cycle repeats itself over time.
The root cause of the problem is typically connected to poorly grasped personal marketing, rather than market seasonality. As Poornima Apte explains in her article Avoid the Freelance Feast-or-Famine Cycle by Soft Marketing Your Skills, one of the solutions is the strategy of continuous or “soft” marketing, i.e. spreading self-promotion and business networking evenly over time, and not just into periods of income hunger.
Finally, the author adds a charming gamification tip: Every day counts, so she moves 3 beans from one jar to another every time she does something small to promote or present herself. One look at the jars and she knows right away how she’s doing this month. After all, good freelance marketing is a bit like planting seeds. (Want to plant one too? Join us!)
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If you love to work in cafés, coworking places, or on your travels, the new revolutionary Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED may boost your imagination as well as possibilities. It can be used as a 12,5" compact laptop but also unfolded into a big 17" monitor with a separate keyboard.
Sure, it’s just a first (and rather expensive) glimpse of future work mobility, with several issues and disadvantages, but it still deserves some recognition and praise. Watch it unfold in a YouTube video:
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Far from every company works well with freelancers. Belgian initiative Freelance Friendly awards those who do with a quality label, granted by the local union of self-employed entrepreneurs or Unizo.
Belgian freelance economy is quite advanced, home to such projects as the ongoing Freelance Business Month or the Day of the Freelancer conference. Check out 20+ Belgian resources on our list.
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Fiverr and Freelancers Union have thrown their weight behind announcing October 19 as the first-ever International Freelancer Day, along with launching the Freelancer Wellness Fund where you can apply for grants.
With Freelance Business Month, European Freelancers Week, and the Day of the Freelancer also scheduled for October, do you need more proof that this month will likely be perceived as a celebration of freelancing? Individual freelancers may not care much, but it is just great for raising awareness.
Side note: Since Freelancers Union discontinued publishing annual Freelancing in America surveys in collaboration with Upwork (which goes on producing its own Freelance Forward reports), teaming up with Fiverr seems to confirm its growing influence on the freelance economy.
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There are hundreds of AI-based image enhancement tools, but the best we’ve used so far is GFPGAN. It can upscale low-quality, low-resolution photo portraits to almost unbelievable results.
Whenever you need to upscale an older headshot or restore a family photograph, you can use the free GFPGAN Inference Demo tool. Here’s how to do it:
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Once in a while comes an article that explains some simple-yet-powerful idea of personal time management extremely well. Focus on Projects, Not Tasks, by our star member Mark McGuinness is one of those:
“We won’t remember [Beethoven, Picasso, Shakespeare, etc.] for the tasks they ticked off their to-do lists, only the major works they produced.“
Although written mainly for creatives and artists, Mark’s advice is also useful for other freelancers who find themselves distracted or spread too thin.
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New McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey suggests there are 58 million (or 36%) independent workers in the USA.
That’s a huge number but also quite controversial: The category of “independent workers” grouped freelancers (both full-time and part-time) together with contractors (including those with a single client and likely to be misclassified employees), as well as gig and temporary workers who are rarely truly independent (of their platforms or other intermediaries). In other words, the classification treats all sorts of precarious work as “independent”, which is misleading and results in overblown estimates of freelance work.
The full report has not been released. However, it is quite obvious that the new survey represents a step down from the older, highly-regarded and methodically superior 2016 report Independent Work by McKinsey Global Institute.
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Freelancing.eu’s founder Robert Vlach presented the opening keynote at the Dag van de freelancer conference (aka Day of the freelancer) in Brussels yesterday — a fantastic event organized by the joint Belgo-Dutch freelance community (Unizo, NextConomy, and Jellow) at a coworking center with an auditorium for 200 people. Gathering so many friendly freelancers in one place… what a blast!
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The groundbreaking DALL-E 2 AI image generator opens for all, giving creatives worldwide an opportunity to play with its new exciting AI technology.
Upon signing up, you get 50 free credits during your first month, and 15 free credits will refill every month after that + you can always buy additional credits.
Example: Here’s the Dalle2-generated image of “a freelance copywriter walking in a city street full of people” — do you like it?
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