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By all standards, Marketing Examples is an incredibly useful resource for any freelancer, not to mention marketing professionals. As a directory of both classic and innovative marketing campaigns, it presents each example in a compact and accessible form, including visuals. Examples are carefully selected and sorted into categories like Viral, Content, Cold Email, Copywriting, Pricing, SEO, Sales, PPC, etc. You can also subscribe to a free weekly newsletter by the site’s curator and founder, Harry Dry.
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Fortune explains why the Upwork CEO believes the pandemic will lead to more work with freelancers. As in any major economic downturn, there’s a surge in demand for freelance services, as well as the rising need of many freelancers to strengthen their marketing efforts.
What’s missing in the article, though, is that despite getting so much media attention, less than 1 % of the total U.S. workers go to online platforms like Uber, TaskRabbit, or Upwork to get work (according to Gig Economy Data Hub).
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Crisis Directory is a crowdsourced global directory of COVID-19 crisis resources to support freelancers, the self-employed, gig-economy workers, etc., built by the team behind the Coworking Library to support coworking spaces and their members.
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Live interview with Freelancing.eu founder Robert Vlach hosted by Nina English for her community of freelance English teachers covered a broad range of topics relevant to any freelance business. It also touched on some sensitive issues like the lack of financial self-management of many freelancers, or requesting feedback and recommendations from clients. The interview is available as a video or podcast.
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One in five highly skilled UK’s freelancers expect to have to close their business because of the coronavirus crisis, according to new research Falling through the cracks by the University of Edinburgh Business School in association with IPSE. The underlying problem seems to be that most of them could not access the government’s Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) either because they work through their limited company (73%) or they were earning over the £50,000 threshold (13%), making them ineligible for state financial support.
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Preserving your savings and financial reserves for the future and protecting them against inflation is one of the long-term goals of a freelancer’s financial self-management. When it comes to investing, one of the best options is stocks — over the last 120 years, their annualized real return after inflation has been 5.2 %, according to Credit Suisse. Yet stocks are also hard to grasp for a layperson. It often comes down to a choice whether to buy a broader index like S&P 500 (through an ETF) or pick individual growth and value stocks (like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway). The hedge fund manager and bestselling writer Daniel Gladis addressed this dilemma in his insightful article Berkshire Hathaway or S&P 500 Index?
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If you are running a coworking space, or you are a freelancer working in one, here are some ideas for improvements: What are the signs of an advanced freelance economy and how can they be supported by coworking spaces is the title of Robert Vlach’s 15-minutes talk for the international Coworking Symposium online conference that presented some early takeaways from our research of European resources.
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If you work in a noisy environment or travel often and still want to focus fully on your work, an excellent aid would be headphones with a noise-canceling feature, which suppresses sounds and surrounding noise. There are many models available on the market. However, when it comes to the noise-suppressing quality as well as reviews and our experience, Sony’s product line beats the rest of the pack, especially with the latest model WH-1000XM3.
The headphones are wireless and can be paired with your laptop or mobile via Bluetooth. A stereo mini-jack cable is also included as an option if the battery runs out — it can play up to 30 hours per charge. The touch controls are fairly intuitive. For example, if you touch the right earpiece, the Quick Attention feature suspends any playing music and lets environmental sounds in so that you can hear or reply to someone without needing to take the earphones off.
These are not the cheapest noise-canceling headphones, but since they have already been selling for quite some time, you may be able to buy them at a large discount. A drawback for some people might be a less sensitive microphone if one wants to use these headphones for calls. Still, for work in a café, busy home, coworking space, on a plane or a train, it’s a perfect choice.
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When you cross borders as a freelancer, pricing can be a greater challenge than setting prices on your particular domestic, national or local market. This requires making an intelligent assessment, asking peers, and weighing numerous pricing factors. One of the most useful research tools here is Clutch. It isn't primarily a gig platform for freelancers and their typical clients like, say, Upwork. However, it may still be very helpful in reviewing regular hourly rates in IT, (web) development, and marketing for companies as well as independent professionals. The results can be filtered geographically (or to freelancers only, by the Employees filter), enabling you to estimate a price range for given expertise and location. Unlike many closed platforms, Clutch is also free to use and access websites of listed companies and professionals.
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If you are a freelancer working in a coworking space (or interested in coworking trends), there is a free, international Coworking Symposium online conference on May 27 worthy of your attention. The event organized by Marko Orel from Prague’s University of Economics is packed with leading coworking researchers and supporters from the European Coworking Assembly, Coworking Library, etc. There will also be a talk (by Robert Vlach) about the signs of an advanced freelance economy and how can they be supported by coworking spaces. Free online registration takes only a minute.
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