As a freelancer, you know that time is limited. There's only a set number of hours available for billable work each day.
If you want a more comfortable lifestyle as a freelancer, you only have two choices: carve into your precious non-work time or use your billing time more effectively.
Assuming that you don't want to carve even further into your personal time and lose touch with family and friends (or sacrifice your health and quality of life), your best choice is to use your billable hours more effectively.
There is a lot of excellent information and support out there to help freelancers like you lead the kind of life you want.
Listed below are some freelancing experts to follow. Take a look at their websites - you'll pick up many powerful ideas to help grow your business the right way.
In the meantime, however, here are two simple, clever ways to use your time more effectively to increase your profits as a freelancer.
In order to improve your profit from your billable hours, you'll need to improve your profit margins, particularly when dealing with international clients and suppliers.
As a freelancer, you may receive money from foreign clients and you may need to pay foreign suppliers - all in different currencies.
Unfortunately, when you use a bank or PayPal for these international transfers, you lose a large chunk in excessive fees and exchange rate mark-ups.
With one simple move, you can now reduce your costs by using CurrencyFair to bypass these unfair charges. In many cases, you or your client will save up to 90% of the cost of the money transfer.
An easy way to increase your income without doing any extra work is to introduce additional sources of revenue to your freelancing business by partnering with other companies in similar but non-competing areas.
Companies such as CurrencyFair will pay you to refer new customers to their business. Web hosting companies pay referrals as do other types of companies.
In CurrencyFair's case, you would receive a sizeable amount of money for each new active customer you refer and the best part is this: the new customers will thank you for it. You'll be saving other businesses a lot of money they would normally have been forced to pay to a bank - they can now use those savings to spend more on your services.
If you'd like to add a new income stream to your freelancing business, we'd love to hear from you.
To join (it only takes two minutes), click here.
If you're looking to grow your business or bring in more money so that you can have the type of lifestyle you want, you're well-advised to take a look at these excellent sources of information and support.
The community at the Freelancers Union is very proactive and focussed on sharing useful information on how to grow your freelancing business. We particularly enjoyed the infographic they shared on the perennial freelancer's question: How To Calculate Your Hourly Rate As A Freelancer.
Sometimes you need helpful resources, sometimes you just need a good laugh to get you through a tough day. For the latter, take a look at Sarah Miller's very funny (but sadly very accurate) account on The Toast of a freelancer just looking to get paid.
If you're still on your way to building a successful freelancing business, then Guerrilla Freelancing could be a handy starting point. The website run by Mike Smith aims to be a voice for those who have not "made it" and to provide straight to the point advice and tips for the guerrilla freelancer.
We love the down to earth, helpful advice shared by Bryan Collins on the popular freelancer writing website, Become A Writer Today. You'll find a range of articles, ebooks and resources available to help the budding freelance writer create the desired writing career.
The team at Millo have put together a handy free guide on how to find more freelance clients. There are also many interesting articles such as '3 Ways I Doubled My Freelance Profits While Still Working A Full-Time Job.'
Business branding and growth expert, Dallas McMillan, shares many powerful insights with freelancers and SME businesses via the Influential website. The popular 'Creating An Influential Brand' ebook available for free download is full of clever tips and advice to help any freelancer grow their business.
Remotive is a high quality, curated online newsletter sent out to over 14,000 remote workers every fortnight. The Remotive newsletter may well be the largest newsletter on the topic of remote working and productivity.
Click here to learn more about the CurrencyFair partner program.