Have you been furloughed and your employment prospects aren’t looking great? Have your hours or salary been recently reduced?  If you're looking for a way to make extra money online, consider starting an freelance side hustle.

Job interviews on Zoom can feel weird, awkward and disjointed. We’re all used to sussing the client’s vibes in person and adjusting our behaviour accordingly. That said, Zoom interviews are the future of freelance employment (whether we like it or not!). This means that adaptation is key. With these simple 10 tips, you should be on your way to nailing your next freelance job interview on Zoom!

To help get businesses off the ground, many start-ups hire freelancers with specific skill sets (app developers, web designers, content writers etc.) for a short period of time. We really wanted to understand the process of hiring freelancers from the perspective of a startup. What challenges do they face? What could freelancers do better? How can startups and freelancers work together more harmoniously to support each other? To find out, we spoke to three startups, Petal, 1001 Stories and Big 7 Travel, who told us about their experiences of employing freelancers.

The coronavirus outbreak of 2020 has stopped the world in its tracks. The streets are empty and there is no evidence of the once common hustle and bustle of the 9-5 workday. Despite this, most businesses (both large and small) continue to operate, albeit from the comfort of their own homes. It is an anxious time, and the depleting workforce of many businesses reflects this. Staff may be suffering with poor health, both mental and physical. What are your choices? Accept a dip in productivity? Throw in the towel? Or find solutions to keep the show on the road. You’re an entrepreneur, a problem solver - of course you’re going to find ways to make it work. 

As any freelancer would know, when it comes to finding new work, there’s nothing more valuable than a word of mouth referral or recommendation. Beyond that, there’s more to self-employment than who you know, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to cut through the noise and stand out against competitors—especially when applying for a gig via an automated recruitment system.

“Freelancers working in the creative industries lose an estimated £5,394 each year through working for free.” Despite a growing number of people choosing to work independently (there are around 1.9 million freelancers in the UK), unfair pay is still a major issue. Fair trade image licensing company, Picfair, have called upon some experienced freelancers from various sectors of the creative industries to share their best advice for setting a fair price.

  The BIG question of 'How to find work as a Freelancer'  is a make or break one for most freelance businesses and an area that many have difficultly with. Most creative freelancers struggle with this aspect of their business as they simply have no experience in sales or marketing and find the art of finding paid work a problem. In a previous article we conducted a study of where freelancers are finding work and now we're looking into how they are landing these freelance jobs.

The main reason most freelance businesses fail is that they simply run out of money. Overheads are generally low but generating a steady flow of income can be a challenge. Creative freelancers in particular often struggle with this side of the business as it's not in their nature to go out and hustle for sales. To help see where sales are coming from we dug into the data, went through our stats and asked a bunch of established freelancers where they get jobs from. Here's what came back.