In honor of tax day, a look through the annual explosion of articles offering tax tips for independent workers, weeding out the obvious and repetitive and highlighting the genuinely helpful, including the SEP IRA and a round about approach to sorting out health insurance. Read more »
At Net:Work Gene Zaino of MBO Partners made a bold prediction: Independent workers will be a majority in the U.S. by 2020. Can the same be said in the UK? A new survey offers evidence that at British small businesses freelancing is on the rise. Read more »
Gary Swart, CEO of freelancer sourcing site oDesk took the stage at Net:Work 2011 to talk about how work is changing in the face of remote work trends. He started by pointing to a key competitive determinator all companies seek and must compete for: talent. Read more »
Many digital freelancers earning U.S. dollars are now receiving substantially less for the same work, as their own nations’ currencies gain strength against the U.S. dollar. The rates that U.S. companies offer to remote workers may no longer compete with their local firms. Read more »
Business is all about the bottom line and web work offers new ways to bolster that bottom line. But not everyone sees paying according to the prevailing local wages as without its moral complexities, especially when companies begin to look overseas for additional help. Read more »
Like it or not, these days, if you’re in public, you’d better be comfortable with anything you do being captured and possibly even posted online. I thought I’d provide some tips from the PR industry to help you feel better prepared for those impromptu publicity events. Read more »
Side projects can be businesses or just-for-fun efforts that we do in our nonworking hours. While there are some risks with taking side projects, I strongly believe that most of the time they benefit both the individual and the employer. Read more »
As I noted in my post about the amnesty offered by the IRS for those with hidden overseas assets, the flexibility of web work can encourage cross-border collaborations and contracts and allow location-independent workers to live abroad for a period of time. Taxes, predictably, get complicated. Read more »
I’ve been given a sneak peak at an Elance study that investigates the attitudes of “millennials” to work, their careers and job searching. Perhaps the most interesting finding in the study is how positive the millenials are about freelancing as a career choice. Read more »
Solo is a project management app with a difference: It’s beautiful. Designed and built by U.K-based company Thrive with solo creative freelancers in mind (hence the name), Solo’s clean, attractive design means that it’s much nicer to look at than most clunky project management apps. Read more »
Independent online workers appear to be doing relatively well, according to a report from Elance, which shows earnings increasing for online workers in 40 out of 50 states. And that’s true even for those workers are located in places where other job hunters seeking are struggling. Read more »
New data released today by online work marketplace oDesk shows that small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) are making use of freelancers in record numbers. oDesk says that the data points to an increasing number of SMBs using contract staff to grow their businesses. Read more »
Despite a fairly weak jobs market overall, freelancers should be optimistic. Online labor marketplaces oDesk and Elance have both released data showing strong growth in demand for freelance workers over the past year, with both sites reporting a large increase in the number of jobs posted. Read more »
As crowdsourcing goes mainstream, there’s a heated debate going on about whether the practice commoditizes expertise. Having built an expert crowdsourcing site for the past year, I’m convinced these services don’t have to commoditize expertise. Quite the opposite, I think they can give it direct value. Read more »
DoNanza has just released its quarterly Work-From-Home Market Trends report, which tracks the demand for freelancers in various job categories. To gauge how well the report may actually reflect reality, I decided to analyze my own niche to see whether it tallies with my experience. Read more »
Freelance work is on the rise, according to a new survey by Elance — a service that helps freelancers connect with employers — and more workers are choosing the life of a freelancer, rather than being forced to work part-time while looking for a “real” job. Read more »
At the beginning of a new project, it’s easy for the freelance remote worker to leave the decision-making about the project to the client. Often, I find myself thinking, “Well, they know what they want; I’ll let them explain it.” Read more »
We’re always talking about tough clients, bad clients, boring clients. But what about the great clients who are simply having a hard time? When you work remotely, it can be difficult to tell when clients are having trouble achieving a task you need them to do. Read more »
There are a number of downsides associated with freelancing, which is why I’ve made the decision to go back to a full-time corporate job as a community manager. I’ll still be a web worker, but I’ll be doing it as a full-time employee. Read more »
When you’re trying to run your own business, you need time to experiment and try new methods and approaches to your systems and your work, but you also need time to reflect on what’s working so that you can modify your direction as you go. Read more »
