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5 Financial Tips For Freelancers

Take a look at these five financial tips for Freelancers before you start your freelancing career and be prepared for anything.

Published

3 years ago

October 27, 2019

Tracey Clayton

Making a career change and moving into the freelancing sector is an exciting prospect. Let’s face it: who doesn’t like the sound of being one’s boss? Yet, with great power comes great responsibility; especially so in the financial department.

Take a look at these five financial tips before you start your freelancing career and be prepared for anything.

Table of Contents

1. Learn How to Budget

Just because your income is erratic doesn’t mean your expenses should follow suit. In fact, as a freelancer, keeping your expenses in check is the only thing you can do (most of the time). Speaking of erratic income there is a handy tool which helps you calculate your monthly income.

Start by determining your break-even number — the number you need to shoot for to stay in the green each month. List all the essentials you need including food, utility bills, transportation fees, etc. and add them all up to get a total that you need to save up to (and surpass) every month.

5 Financial Tips for Freelancers

Preparing for tax season is yet another thing freelancers should do more of. Too often people get fooled by the amount of money they make only to find out that almost a third of that doesn’t even belong to them.

Separate your personal and business expenses (accounts) to get a better idea of what you’re up for and audit your taxes regularly. It pays to be prepared; quite literally.

2. Make Use of Contracts

The Internet — you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy; except for Mos Eisley, perhaps. By now, probably everyone and their grandmothers were scammed at least once over the Internet; freelancers face this issue almost daily.

The solution: draft a contract for every new job you do to protect yourself from being ripped off by unscrupulous clients. Of course, this does not means you should make potential clients sign contracts for every small gig you do online; use common sense.

Overall, making use of contracts is not only good for your financial well-being but also for your reputation. By insisting on signing contracts before certain jobs, you’ll give off a sense of professionalism and clients will take you more seriously as a result; understand them, they too have been victims of scams in the past.

Protip: for some larger jobs, always include a deposit. That way you won’t have to live primarily off of air until the project’s end; 20% to 50% is the industry standard in most niches.

Make Use of Contracts

3. Know Your Limits

When you’re a freelancer, it’s easy to get carried away by present successes. Yet, the sporadic nature of the job can often leave you in great debt without any real source of income.

What’s more, missing any outstanding payments can impact your credit history beyond repair. The moral of the story — known your limits!

To get a good idea of where you stand, be sure to check your credit score, regularly; especially so when you’re thinking of applying for a loan.

Keeping an eye on this will make it easier for you to apply for mortgage and car loans later in your life, so do try to stay on the safe side.

4. Set up an Emergency Stash

Flexibility means having the freedom to organize yourself, not being free to do whatever and whenever you want (all of the time); that’s called anarchy.

Usually, the best way of protecting oneself (financially) is by setting some money aside in the form of an emergency fund. When you’re a freelancer, you learn the true meaning of a dry season on your skin (too many a time).

Apart from the obvious financial benefits, another thing a stashed cache does for you is — it provides you with an ease of mind. With some funds safely tucked away, you won’t feel as pressured as you would otherwise during these few dry months.

So, start chipping off some funds from each paycheck from now on and put them into a savings account, just to be on the safe side; use an automatic billing system if necessary to keep the payments flowing.

5. Save up for Retirement

The story of the ant and the grasshopper — my favorite. You might be enjoying your high-life now, but, in a few years, you’ll regret not putting away more money for your retirement fund. Of course, by that time it will already be too late… start today!

Since you’re self-employed, you need to sponsor your retirement plan. Depending on your country, there are a few options at your disposal, including:

SEP IRA — lower taxes than a traditional IRA.
Solo 401(k) — a simplified version of the regular 401(k) plan; made for the self-employed.
SIMPLE IRA — employer contributions are tax-deductible in the form of business expenses.
Self-managed super funds — a superannuation fund you manage on your own.

Whichever one of these you pick, remember to always contribute to your plan, and contribute often.

Business

4 SaaS Link Building Tips For Beginners

Published

1 week ago

November 25, 2022

TwinzTech

The most effective techniques to promote your software as a service (SaaS) business and increase organic traffic to your website are content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Note that improving your SEO rankings entails acquiring more high-quality backlinks. Thus, it’s essential to increase the number of backlinks to your SaaS business’s website from authoritative, high-quality websites in order to boost its search engine optimization performance.

In reality, link-building is a tough process, especially in the SaaS context. Why? Backlinks for SaaS websites are difficult to come by, and with the rise of new SaaS businesses, this will get more challenging. Therefore, building links the right way is the key, and you can find out how to plan your own link-building strategy from https://linkflow.ai/saas-link-building/ and other helpful resources.

Link-Building Strategies For SaaS Companies

Regardless of your niche, you may need to actively develop backlinks to your SaaS business in order to get your content discovered, consumed, and, ultimately, attract new clients. Here are ways to do it.

Table of Contents

1. Write Guest Posts

Building backlinks and establishing yourself as an authority in your field can be accomplished effectively through guest posting. When you create content that is both original and helpful, other websites may link to it.

Take the website’s domain authority into account when guest posting. It’s recommended that you start with a well-regarded website with a Domain Authority (DA) of 50 or above. In addition, it would be beneficial to search for niche-specific websites interested in your writing.

After discovering a website open to guest posts, your next step is to learn more about the site’s target audience and content before seeking content marketing managers. Also, check to see if there are any guest posting requirements for the site.

However, you should exercise caution in deciding which blogs to publish on. There’s a wide variety of authoritative websites, and the same holds true for blogs.

2. Take Advantage Of Brand Mentions

Utilize your SaaS network to its full potential and make the most of brand-mention opportunities.

Backlink mentions are an excellent approach to making use of the websites, businesses, and services that you discuss in the content you create. Utilize methods such as co-mentioning or mention-me-back to get the advantage from your network.

This is an excellent strategy to obtain backlinks with very little effort on your part.

Link-Building Strategies For SaaS Companies

3. Pitch Link Round Ups

SaaS isn’t the only industry that can benefit from link roundups, but it is one in which they excel.

A link roundup (also known as a link list) is a regularly scheduled set of external links to relevant online content, such as articles, blog posts, and other online resources. Audiences can use them to find new content to read and share. They provide a dependable method for website owners to acquire inbound links.

Creating high-quality content that follows SEO best practices is the first step to being featured on authoritative link roundups.

Content that is educational, thoroughly investigated, and supported by reliable sources has a much better chance of being included in link roundups. The odds of being featured will improve if you establish yourself as a reliable source of high-quality information.

4. Use Digital PR Tactics To Earn Backlinks

Digital public relations (PR) is one of the most effective long-term approaches to building SaaS links. Digital PR entails expanding a company’s brands using means like podcasting, webinars, and more to attract the media’s attention.

Here are some suggestions for digital PR link-building:

Surveys and studies
Trend reports
Podcasts, webinars, and conferences

In order to get journalists and publications to write about your material and include links to it, you need to generate linkable assets (also known as link bait) and market these to them.

Important Factors In Back Linking

There are differences in the quality of the links. However, how can you evaluate whether or not a link is of high quality?

A link’s anatomy can tell you if it’s high- or low-quality. Look at these principles:

Relevancy
Anchor Text
Domain Strength
Page Strength

Once you’ve made it to the first page of Google’s search results, you can take it a step further by analyzing the anchor texts used by your top competitors to learn which type of anchor Google prefers and then using that data to guide your own link-building efforts.