Do you know what “fair use” legislation means? Yesterday I attended a seminar run by The Copyright Agency in Australia and this was being discussed in the open forum session. We do not have this as the current law in Australia and it is a topic of hot discussion. It is a hot topic because it has the potential to reduce the earnings of the creative producers of intellectual property by way of copyright.

I will let you know more as it evolves. However, there is another similar topic that is certain to reduce your earnings as a freelancer and that is not reading your contract.

I often used fellow freelancers when developing this book which is copyrighted:

Kindle eBook: How to be Self-Employed: A Freelance Work from Home Guide

Freelancers from a number of countries were involved in various projects, but we always made sure that we knew where we stood. I needed to own the copyright and this was a part of the contract. I expected that I would pay more and probably did. You need to be quite certain where you stand on copyright as it can seriously impact your income.

The Freelancers Bible (Sara Horowitz and Toni Sciarra) has sections on copyright and contracts. You can get a copy of her book here at Amazon and also look inside at the index.

Disclosure: I am an Amazon affiliate and member of the Freelancers Union.

There is no substitute to Know Your (Copy) right. I found an article by Ashlee Christian in the archives of the Freelancers Union Blog. You can read it here.

Anxiety and depression can be tough when you are starting out as a freelancer. Quite often freelancing is not choice, but as a result of downsizing or restructuring as an employer seeks to cut costs. This is very prevalent in the print industry as the revenue streams from advertising start to dry up in what has previously been a very lucrative business. A lot of advertising is done digitally by business as it costs less and can be more focused. If you have used Google Adwords or Facebook advertisements you will know that this is true.

Often redundancy in the traditional fields of journalism comes late in your career and you not only have to start out afresh by being self-employed, but also need to retrain yourself in social media. This is because freelancing often means having multiple streams of income. It takes a very strong person to counter anxiety and depression, especially if you still have a mortgage.

There are ways to enjoy the freedom and flexibility of being a freelancer and to control anxiety and depression. Shannon Byrne has written about this topic with 10 Ways to Beat Freelancer Anxiety and Depression that appears in CloudPeeps Blog. I like No 3 as I find it especially helpful. You can read Shannon's article following this link.

Burn out can be tough to overcome once it has bitten you. It is far better to know what it is and know how to avoid it.

In another career I was taught a very important lesson about managing burnout. This is the story:

I was a member of a specially selected team to close down the global head office of a major bank that had merged with our bank. I was responsible for the merging of the operations of the head office and our bank's state office. It was a massive task that was quite daunting as I had about 150 staff and morale was low. My boss had the wisdom to take me to lunch and present me with a copy of The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and insisted that I read it and report back to him. The overall lesson of the book that related to burnout: learn to prioritize and delegate!

This is true of freelancing because in the digital age it is impossible to keep up to date with all the skills that you need. Social media impacts on all of us and it is changing quickly. Specialization is required. Delegation and prioritising are key skills in freelancing today. They help you avoid burnout.

I have located an important article about avoiding burnout. The article entitled Finding Balance between High productivity and Burnout by Joelle Steiniger, appears in the Lifehacker Blog. Read about it here.

I had never heard of the time assets and debt method of achieving life-work balance before I read the article by Larissa Pham from the Freelancers Union Blog. It is worth repeating this post monthly because practical life-work balance tips matter a lot to freelancers. When freelancers from around the world were contributing research and ideas for the eBook How to be Self-Employed: A Freelance Work from Home Guide, one of the critical issues was having a simple practical way to manage work-life balance.

One freelancer suggested that the order of the words should be reversed to read “life-work balance”. The freelancer from New Zealand, who was doing the research and collating the information, contributed greatly to the design of the method of prioritizing. The forms come with the eBook mentioned above. I would be interested to hear what you think of the method. You can use the contact form at the end of this newsletter.

Larissa Pham's 10 Practical Ways to Create Work-Life Balance can be read here.

Can you remember when you could have a niche website optimized for Google search engines and have Adsense advertisements on it and make an easy living? Not anymore because Google cracked down on all the black hat schemes to game the system … and there were a lot!

Now, if you're smart, you must try to have multiple sources of income so that there is always something on the go to make money. If you are a graphic designer, for example, and you also have an interest in writing, you could make a pitch to write an article about graphic designing for an industry magazine.

I recently approached a local area council about promoting Hootsuite training because a major coal fired power plant had shut down which would cause job losses of about one thousand. It was a pitch letter, of course, because that is how you get gigs to diversify your income possibilities.

Have you ever written a pitch letter to an editor? If you are feeling like giving it a try Allena Tapia has written an article for The Balance Blog about how to go about it. You can read Allena's article here.