Month: October 2016

Recurring billing is a great way to grow your business, since you keep getting paid month after month. As you add new customers, those monthly payments really start to add up. But the real question is, are you building the kind of business that people want to keep paying you for each month? If you […]

As your business grows, you will naturally begin to have more work that you can reasonably handle by yourself. Before you run out to hire more employees, consider another cost-effective solution: Outsourcing.  Contrary to its negative connotation, outsourcing can be a really good thing. Many of the biggest tech companies, including Slack, Skype, and Box, attribute their […]

Choosing between filing your taxes electronically or mailing them in manually may seem like you’re just selecting the right torture device, but we’re here to reduce the pain of tax season. And, believe it or not, your filing method can have an impact on how smoothly your tax season goes. Paper tax filing method Sending […]

Not too long ago, I quit my full-time marketing job to venture into the uncharted waters of freelance writing. In many ways, it’s my dream job. I love being able to focus completely on writing, and to set my own schedule. However, it comes with a big downside: doing my own bookkeeping. When I started […]

Freelancing can seem like the dream job. And for the most part, it is. You get freedom to choose when and how you work, what you’ll work on, and who you’ll work for. The only rules are the ones you make. Pretty dreamy, right? But there’s a dark side to freelancing too. As a creative […]

I often get asked what software I use to keep my small-business-and-freelancer ship sailing smoothly. People tend to ask because they see that I have this swanky little laptop that never leaves my side. (Surely a person who is that attached to her computer knows computer stuff, right?) I can’t blame them, because I tend […]

Entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners often face a problem. We are our work. And because we are our work, it’s easy to lose track of when we need to stop working and pay attention to other things in our lives besides our work: our significant others, our children, our pets, even other things about […]

When I started my most recent full-time job, I lasted about half a year before I started a side-gig. I wrote a nonfiction book and sold it to a publisher. The book wasn’t anything fancy—I just put together all my teaching materials from a course I used to teach, packaged them up for a pre-existing […]

Say you have a small business. Say your small business is really small. You might even call it a microbusiness. You have a main job with a salary that provides your primary source of income. Your small business is more like a side gig. Your small business isn’t incorporated—you don’t file a separate tax return […]