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The Wealthy Freelancer doesn’t contain shortcuts to success. But it does provide solid strategies you can use to pump up your income.
Whether you’re a freelance artist, caterer, consultant or writer, freelancers need the same things as all workers: clients, income, and the lifestyle they desire in return for their hard work.
But freelancing has a complex relationship with money, unlike most corporate jobs that pays set dollars for a particular job description, with raises and bonuses to keep you working.
Freelancers need to create their own job description, know how to price their services based on the value of their work, handle marketing and prospecting, time management, and adapt to change. That’s a lot to expect, without corporate perks, paid vacations and a 401-K.
If you are or desire to be your own boss, you’ll find The Wealthy Freelancer offers good advice on managing both your time and money. Like other books that create a matrix to determine what is urgent vs. important, the book uses a brainstorming matrix to determine how to best use your marketing time. Are your efforts wasteful, or effective but time-intensive, or the ultimate goal: effective and efficient?
A similar mindset mastery technique helps identify the best way to focus your energy by balancing your performance vs. stress level. Finding what makes you most productive and efficient can target your energies. The importance of mindset is something that comes more naturally when you’re in a corporate setting surrounded by other worker bees and bosses. But if you’re in your sweatpants til noon, mousing around the web and waiting for inspiration, The Wealthy Freelancer’s four tenets of mindset mastery should set you straight.
Most workers today, especially those involved in freelance careers using technology, suffer from the problem of having too many priorities that all need our attention. The Wealthy Freelancer has a clever Jigsaw Puzzle Visual™” to illustrate what you have to do. And since you have just a finite amount of time, you’ll see when something has to go, or you have to start saying "No." Author Pete Savage knows the feeling…
“We cram project after project into our schedule. We work late, we get up early, and we let work bleed into our nights and weekends and overrule our other commitments. (Perhaps it’s because we have so much control over how we use our time that we also think we can control the amount of time we have!)”
The book benefits from each of the three authors’ experiences in their own freelance careers as copywriters. They teach what they learned. You can use their goal setting strategies as a vision for the future. Shouldn’t you know what you want out of life and what you’re working for?
A few important secrets about pricing your work can help you by the time you finish reading Chapter Seven. You can act on them singly and assess their value before you move on, as you can with all the other strategies in the book.
If your work life is stalled and you're thinking about starting out on your own, or if you are a freelancer and your business isn’t all you dreamed it would be, The Wealthy Freelancer can inform your decisions, and improve your success and finances. Take a few days to read the book, and at least a few weeks to put these strategies in place.
