Costs and Expenses of Running a Freelance Writing Business
Watching the costs and expenses of your business as a freelance writer is critical to ensuring you don't end up spending all your income. Knowing which costs and expenses to expect and focus on helps you cut down on shiny object syndrome, only pay for what you need, and maximize profitability. We're going over some of the main costs and expenses to ensure you know what to expect and what to cut.
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All right. Welcome in everybody. Hi Jenny. Hi Linda. Hi Tommy. Hi, everybody in my dogs are being a little wild today. So if I have to reach down and grab them or do something, you know, then I will, uh, I'll have to do that. So today we're talking about Costa, I already un-muted it today. We're talking about costs and expenses that have to do with our freelance writing business. So we're going over all the things that we need to consider when it comes to having the right, um, financial outlook, basically for our freelance writing business. So, um, if you guys have questions about expenses or costs that you think are associated with your freelance writing business, then, um, put them in the chat and we'll go over that. So, all right. Let's talk about costs and expenses. So let's start with expenses. So there are things that come up in our business that, um, we just have to use to run our business, right?
So these are things where we are, um, you know, there are softwares that run our business or their programs that we need to do our taxes, right? We're talking about, um, QuickBooks, we're talking about dub Sato. There's a bunch of different things here that we're using to run our business. And these are regular expenses that we need to kind of, you know, deal with in our freelance writing business. So, um, expenses can be anything from software. Like I said, to do taxes, to deal with expenses, to track your business. Um, it can also be things like calendar, a calendar apps. It can be things like certain, um, things that you use to create, uh, proposals and contracts. It can be something like HelloSign or DocuSign, something where you get electronic signatures, or it can end up being something where, um, man, there's so many expenses like health insurance, right?
We have to have health insurance as freelance writers, and we don't have someone giving it to us. We have to go out and find it and make sure that we have it so often we're working on it. I'm working on the rough start. Sorry. This is how, you know what, this is a part of running a freelance writing business. Sometimes things get off to a rough start. That's kind of how your financial situation is. A lot of times in freelance writers start, they get off to a rough start because they don't realize all the costs and expenses that they have to plan for. As a freelance writer, they're just working on getting work. They're working on getting clients and actually making money, doing something they like to do. But man, running a business, just like we do. It's a small business. It's really important to make sure that we know what, what we need to look out for.
So that means like when we need something to schedule appointments, that's an expense when we need something to Charlotte, Charlotte, get out of there when we need something, um, to help us create a proposal or get an electronic signature, that's an expense we need to pay for. Right. And then we also need to end up paying for an accountant sometimes to do our taxes. Like I have an accountant do my taxes because when I was using turbo tax or another online program, or when I went to HR block, I just felt like they didn't really, they just kind of said it through a system. Right. And they didn't know all of the little tricks and all the little things, a little robots, weren't doing all their job. And I prefer having someone I can talk to about it and ask them about, you know, how many square feet is the office space in your house.
Right. Like you do you only use this for office space or like, can we deduct that? I prefer having those conversations with people about expenses. Yeah. Linda, I think sometimes we all have a rough start. So, um, yeah. And one of my dogs is sitting on my cable. So, um, the, the, um, expenses that we're looking at in our freelance writing business are really important to track. So like I used UB Sato to track them and I end up, um, making sure that like I put them into that Sato, um, so that I can see like how much profit am I really making, right? Because revenue is what we have coming into our business expenses subtract from that. And profit is what we have leftover. Right. And we have to make sure our business is profitable. So watching our expenses, being able to track what's coming in, what's going out and knowing our profit is super important.
So, um, one of the expenses you can have in your business is that you can buy profit first, right? Books or learning materials can be an expense. So like I always recommend profit first because it helps you run your business a lot better. So that basically means that when you have profit first, you have five different bank accounts that you deal with. So you have five different, um, categories that you put your money in. So you can know how much profit you have, how much you're paying for taxes, how much you have for operating expenses, which is expenses and costs like what we're talking about, and then how much you have your own compensation, like the money that you actually take home. And it really helps you map out your financials. So I would look into that. Um, other expenses are learning materials. Like maybe you enroll in a course, right?
Of course is something that is helping you build your business. It's helping you write better. It's helping you do a lot of really cool and important things. So that can be something that you put on there as an expense and something to expect. Right? So as writers, it's really important that we keep learning and reading and sometimes learning and reading means taking a course or reading a book or reading articles. So sometimes your expenses include things like business journals. Like I have my, my local newspapers, local magazines, um, local business journals, um, local like newsletters, some of them are paid. So that's another expense is like, we have to keep learning about our niches, our industry writing what's going on. And those are expenses that we need to expect. Um, sometimes you need them to get kind of in-depth information. So for example, a piece that I wrote last year, um, about the real estate outlook in Austin, I needed to have different subscriptions for that to make sure that I could read all these different articles that my editor sent over to say, Hey, like pay attention to these themes and these things, and, um, pay attention to this neighborhood.
And you have to have subscriptions in order to read all these things, right? Like there's a paywall where you can't just go in and read whatever you want anymore. Um, just like the wall street journal or the New York times or anything else, or they'll give you, um, like business insider or one of them gives you like four free articles. I think New York times might do that too. But having these subscriptions are expenses to expect in your business because they not only help you with your local market, but they teach you a lot about your niches and where the businesses are going, right. Where the trends are going, what's happening so that you can kind of stay up to date on that and, you know, come up with ideas for clients or pay attention to hot businesses in your life that are coming up in your niche.
So that's another thing, another thing to expect in terms of expenses could be something like, um, a new, um, thing that you started implementing. Like, let's say we were pre pandemic, right. And we're going to have, um, in-person meetings. Like, so for my expenses, um, I drove a lot to in-person meetings within Austin and there's a lot of businesses in Austin that do my niches or that, um, you know, like to have in-person meetings. So before the pandemic and I'm sure, kind of like afterwards, when people get more comfortable being in close quarters with people in restaurants and stuff, I'll have more meetings, but that's an expense, right? The expense on your car, like any repairs that you have to do, cause you're driving your car all over the place, gas mileage on your car, these things can all go on your tax sheet, right?
So you need to know how many miles you're driving. You need to know how much gas are putting in and all these things to make sure that you cover that in your expenses. So that's kind of like something that I had on my tax sheet a whole bunch, right? Like that was something that I did before the pandemic. And I'm sure it'll come back, but that's another thing. Um, in terms of costs and expenses, you can also expect for, um, services that you need to do to complete your job. Right? So zoom, uh, interview things. I tape a call with something that I used for phone interviews, which I think I'm going to switch away from just because so many people have become more comfortable with zoom. They've been way more comfortable just getting on a zoom, calling, recording it when it used to be a huge struggle to do that.
They'd be like, no, no, no. I just want to get on the phone and don't make me turn on my camera. It's like, we don't have to turn on our camera. We can just talk and record it. Just like we went on the phone except I don't have to give you my phone number and you don't have to give me yours. So tape a call, zoom. Um, anything that you use for video calls, like if you use Google meet, that's free, but, um, you can use zoom for free for a while, but there's a lot of different programs, um, that we need to use to do our jobs, to get things done. Maybe you end up needing more storage space. So for example, for me, I needed a program to store things. So I had Dropbox and I reached the free limit. So I had to pay for a subscription that wasn't expense in my business.
Um, and I have to have that in order to have enough photos because with magazines, you know, a lot of times they've been asking for people to gather photos for articles now. So that's an expense. Anything that helps you do your job, Google drive, Dropbox phone calls, you have to make, excuse me, sorry. Um, programs you need to buy. Like if you decide not to use Google docs and then you end up using Microsoft office, you have to buy office, right. Or if you're like me and you have to do a lot of photo editing or you need different tools to do different things like video, then you need Adobe creative suite, right? You need like Photoshop and premiere pro. And sometimes you need to play around with illustrator. These are all expenses that we need to understand in order to do our business. So, um, anytime you find yourself in a situation where you're doing something over and over again, there can be an expense for that.
Right? So what I'm saying here is if you find yourself doing something repeatedly, maybe there's a way to automate that. And there's a program that you can use to automate that, to cut down on the time you spend and put out a little bit of money in order to do that. Right? So for me, a lot of times that ended up being dip Sato, where I got tired of doing this back and forth emails like five or 10 emails, just to schedule an interview rather than saying, like, here's my calendar, here's a link, go schedule it. And I did Calendly, but then I switched it up sourdough. Cause I had that built in, but anything where you find yourself needing, like you do something over and over again, right? Do it over and over and over again. That means we can automate it. There's some other way that we can kind of get a template.
We can kind of, um, cut down the time that we're using by paying a little money to get it, to do something. Right. So the calendar one is a good one. Boomerang is another one. Everybody knows how much I love boomerang. Boomerang is free, but you can also get the paid version. So I have the paid version cause I use it a ton. Um, so if you end up using boomerang, which basically means that you send an email and you're like, Oh, I want to follow up on the email. I want it to boomerang back into my inbox. Right? So all you have to do is click a little button and it brings it back to your inbox. And to me that is worth the payment, right? That's worth the payment to get the thing back in my inbox to make it very easy for me to automate follow-up.
And if I really wanted to get spicy about it, I could end up writing a up email and just saying like, if nobody replies, please send this email on this date and it automates the whole process. And yeah, it's, I think boomerang is maybe somewhere between 60 and a hundred dollars a year, but it's totally worth it to me because it ends up cutting down on my time on other places. But yet it's another cost and expense to, to running my business. Another good one is like marketing stuff, right? Boomerang is part of our marketing part of our follow-up process. But another piece of our marketing is a lot of LinkedIn stuff, right? LinkedIn has become a much more robust and um, really great platform to do a lot of marketing for freelance writers. So that means sending InMails messages, growing your network, liking and commenting on posts from I do appliance, joining groups, there are going live like LinkedIn now has a live feature, but they're rolling it out super slow.
So you have to apply to be part of it. Um, but there's a lot of features here on LinkedIn that we need to use, but the problem is LinkedIn free just keeps getting more and more limited. So that means that we need to probably pay for it. So I think for me, like you can pay up front for a year for LinkedIn or you can end up paying for it monthly. So I've paid for it monthly. And I think it's $65 a month. But to me it's worth it because I'm getting 10 InMails or 15 InMails every single month. And those InMails are $10 each. So if I run out of those 15 InMails a month, I have to pay $10 to get one more. So if I wanted to buy 15 more, that'd be 150 bucks. So if I pay $65 and I get 15 every month, that's worth it for me. And I get a lot of my business from sending marketing emails on LinkedIn or growing my network, um, or using LinkedIn's paid features to search for different clients. Like if I go into a company and I searched for content or I searched for marketing, that's how I find people to reach out to. So for me, LinkedIn premium has been totally worth the investment.
Yeah.
Okay. So Felicia, I want to pull this up here real quick. So Felicia yeah. Use your InMails before you cancel. So,
Um, the, the
Deal is now LinkedIn used to let you keep your InMails. So they used to let you, like, if you canceled premium, they were like, yeah, you can have these InMails and um, you know, you already paid for them, but now they delete them completely. Right. So that sucks. Like you used to be able to just have those InMails cause you already paid for them, but now they delete them completely. So here's what we want to do. We want to use those InMails to market, to our ideal clients. So I would make a list of your niche clients that you want to reach out to. So like Google different lists, Google different. Um,
Yeah. Felicia.
Yeah. So I would just do a bunch of prospecting just for later. So even if you're not doing it right now, think about your marketing or your business three, six, nine, 12 months from now. And I can guarantee you that like the marketing sometimes takes a long time for people to get back to you. Right? So the marketing that we do now and use up those InMails is planting the seeds for later on. So if you send an InMail and someone doesn't get back to you for six months, doesn't matter because you already used your InMail and now you don't have to sweat fill in your pipeline. So make the list of your niche. Clients go through them on LinkedIn, you know, fi like search their companies and say like, like their title is content or their title is marketing and then send all those InMails and then you can cancel LinkedIn premium.
And I know a lot of people who get premium for like a big marketing rush and then shut it off and then premium for a marketing rest and then shut it off, which is why I haven't paid for annual. I've really thought about it a whole bunch. But the important thing is that you use the InMails, right? We use the InMails first. And if you like, think about prospecting as a longer term thing. So think about prospecting in terms of three, six, nine, 12 months. And that people may not get back to you for a long time or that you can add those InMail replies. Like someone says like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. Try again later. Or basically like, um, we will put you on our list and we'll reach out if we need help. Those kinds of things. Now you can follow up with them later and now you're filling your pipeline. So you get more work in, even if you're busy right now, filling that pipeline is super critical. Then not feeling like you have to rush to get work all the time and rush to do, um, a lot of marketing. So I would use those. Then I would cancel like use your InMails, send them all out, fill your marketing pipeline
And then move along. And here's the cool thing.
If someone gets back to you right now with your, with your InMails, you can just say like, Hey, thanks for getting back to me. Let's talk about a project. And then they're like, Oh, well we need this thing. And you're like, Hey, I'm not available until June. Right. You tell them I'm not available till June. That makes you look in demand. It makes you look busy. Right. And you are right. But it also makes them get this like weird feeling where they're like, Oh no, I can't, I can't have Felicia right now. I need Felicia. Right. And that's really cool because it shows that you're in demand and busy and they're like, Hey, we want Felicia. Right? So then you have something coming up in June, right? Let's say right now you sign a contract with them, which we all know. Sometimes it can take people like three weeks just to sign a contract, give you the money, get the project all set up, whatever. So by that time it's almost June anyways. So if someone gets back to you and your calendar's further out, that's even better because it makes it look really good. Right. It makes it look really good because you're like, Hey, I'm busy. Like I'm busy. People want to work with me, I'm doing my stuff. And that looks really great to potential clients. So I would go back and do that. And then Linda, I'm going to hit your question real quick. So, um, yeah. Dump Sato,
Right. Was pro something. Uh, I used, I used
Sato to track all my expenses. And then you can use like QuickBooks, maybe that was it. Or you can harvest there's a, or you can use fresh books, but I like Deb Sato, D U B S a D O M and Linda. We've talked about them Sato. So I think you already
Know about Deb Sato, but you
Can track expenses in there. It's really, really easy. You just put them in. Um, and you can connect your accounts.
Pulls them. Okay. Do do do Oh
First. Yeah. Linda. Okay. So maybe it was profit first. It's a book by Mike [inaudible]. Um, I would definitely buy that. I love profit first. It always, I like it. It just teaches you so much about,
Um, Oh my, I have all these things. Okay. It just teaches you to
So much about your finances and it teaches you a ton about it.
Um, Oh my all these reminders. Okay.
Was you a ton about running your business and making money and making sure that you end up, you know, allocating the right funds to your operating expenses, to yourself as your own comp to your profits and to your taxes? Okay. Let's see. I see their stuff
Come in. Um, yes.
Ah, Felicia. Yes. This is exactly. I want to share this Felicia. This is a good point. So if you're like, for me recently, my client runway has been very long. Like my client runway for onboarding new clients or following up or warm leads has been three to nine months. Like I went back and looked at it. I thought it was six to nine months. I think it's been like three to nine months. Six to nine months has been more accurate. Yeah. If you have a slow response, which I feel like people are still in this wiggle room right now, they're kind of like, we want to do some marketing. We want to get out there, but we're not totally sure yet. And how much we can do. And our business is still a little worried. So fill the pipeline, fill the pipeline, Felicia. And if they get back to you, just tell them when you're available. And if they can't, you know, you can't make it work this time, they just go back in the pipeline or following up later, they just go back in the pipeline, which is really great.
Okay. Here we go. Um, one
Program make cats sleep longer. I don't think that's a business expense though. Linda, you can't have a program that makes cats sleep longer and call that a business expense. So let's not do that. Okay. Cool. Profit first is the best. So Lydia. Yeah. But all right. I got off track here with my expenses. Um, so it was tools and software. It was anything that runs your business. It ends up being like scheduling things or, or, um, expensive trackers. Yeah. Felicia. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Use those InMails crack on, get them out, send them because fill that pipeline. Like I promised you, well, you will have tons of work if you have like, um, I sometimes end up with 45 InMails packed up because I am not keeping up with marketing sometimes. Or like I ended up doing my marketing quarterly. Um, so send them all out.
Yeah. Send them all out. Okay. We did all. Um, what was the other ones that I wanted to talk about? Expenses could be, um, we already talked about learning and program expenses. We already talked about car stuff. We talked about LinkedIn premium. Um, we talked about what other expenses, um, let's say you were going to change directions in your business. So this was something I was thinking about. If you're going to change directions in your business, maybe one of your expenses is that you have to pay a VA to help you. So maybe one of the expenses of your freelance writing business is that you have a VA come on and help you create some free downloads, help you schedule your social media, which is what I did. Um, and she was great. So if you guys want recommendations, let me know. But, um, you have a VA help you manage your community.
You have a VA help you create different things for your business or help you update your web copy or have a VA do your marketing for you. I have a couple of friends who have multiple VA's. One VA sends out all their marketing, right? They give them templates, they give them access to their inbox or, um, LinkedIn. And they do all their marketing, their other VA handles responses and scheduling and, um, anything that comes in their inbox that they need to deal with. Right? So another expense that you can think about as a freelance writer is if you get to like a certain place in your business where you're like, I need help. Like I can't manage all these things myself. I need help. I need someone to manage my inbox. I need someone to like, do my marketing or help me with my marketing or answer all these client questions.
Or I need someone to help me with design or help me with whatever's coming up in your business. Right? As long as you have a specific plan for what you want them to help you with, you're in good shape, but at VA can help freelance writers in a bunch of different ways. So if you find yourself needing help, a VA might be an expense that you need. Yeah. There's another. Yeah. So like, we can talk about websites too, right? Another thing that we need, and that's a cost and expense that we can expect as freelance writers or websites, right. We need a website. We need a place where people can learn about us, see our portfolio, reach out to us, um, see all the cool things that we're doing. Understand if we're a fit. So websites like Squarespace blue host. If you use blue host and WordPress or show it, um, or templates you need to buy, or like for me, um, connecting G suite and Squarespace together.
So my email paying for my email and with like, uh, you know, my mandate, Mandy Ellis email, not just like Mandy at Gmail, whatever I'm paying for, that kind of stuff is an expense that you can expect. Right? Any kind of thing that you need to, to run your business, right. We're back to running our business. So our website, um, maybe the thing that you need for your website is, um, like email marketing, right? Maybe you get to a point in your business where, um, you're trying to grow an email list, whether your email list is other freelance writers or email lists is specific niche clients, right. Um, that, uh, program is going to be something you have to pay for. Right? So I use flow desk and flow desk is how I said, no, my weekly emails out. Um, it's how I connect with my core students.
It's how I connect with some of my coaching students. I think sometimes. Um, but flow desk is I have all these things that are on my website for people to sign up for my email list or get my free pricing guide, which you can get below. Um, but there's all these different things that like, as you grow your business, you're going to think about different things that you need, like different automation, things like Zapier, like a lot of things that I use in order to set up, my course was through Zapier to make sure everybody got tagged and flow desk as the right thing. And that they all got sent to the right place. And that my webinar software talked to my, um, email software. And then it talked to teachable and the circle where I had my community, where all of our students are percolating, um, all that stuff, right?
Those are all expenses that we can expect as we grow our business and change. There's also different things like, Oh, Linda, put a good one in here, your phone. So your phone technically can be, can be a business expense if you buy a new phone, but you have to figure out the percentage. So this is where it kind of comes down to, um, where you are, uh, saying like I do 40% of my business on my phone. So you can subtract 40% of the cost of your new smartphone and the plan that goes with it. Like we, you know, Verizon or whatever, um, that can be subtracted on your taxes because you use it for business expense. You can't be like a hundred percent of my phone is for business. Like nobody uses unless you have a dedicated phone and you have two phones, nobody uses one phone, a hundred percent for business.
Unless I don't know, you're a magic unicorn and you don't play games on your phone or like checking in or anything. So your phone is a good one. Um, I'm going to put Jenny up here too. So Jenny says the more my business grows, the more I find I need different tools. I had to get Otter when I started doing tons of interviews. And now I think I need an SEO tool, Jenny. So let's talk about that. So I like Tammy better than Otter. And here's why otter.ai is not as accurate as Temi T E M I and Timmy is the robot baby of rep. So rev.com is where they give your transcription from your interview or whatever you have, like the live stream. You give it to humans and they give it to several different humans and they put it together. They're listening, but Temi, an otter.ai are little robots that re like they transcribe your transcript digitally.
So I like personally, I like Timmy over Otter because Tammy's more accurate. Now. SEO tools are interesting, so you can get a bunch, right? Neil Patel has Uber suggest. Um, you can also get SEM rush, you can get keyword finder. Um, I know that, um, there's a bunch of SEO people out there who recommend all these different tools. Um, I think if you need an SEO tool, I would get the SEO tool. If you're going to use it for clients, if you're going to use SEO for yourself, like in terms of just your website or stuff like that, I would just try to get as the free version, as much as you can. Um, if you're going to use SEO for your articles, like you really want to double down on being an SEO strategist and you want to, you know, boost all the SEO of all your magic stuff that you make then yeah.
Pay for that tool. But the tool itself should be serving an end need, right. It should pay for itself. So the SEO tool shouldn't be something that you pay for month after month or a yearly subscription that you only use like, Oh, every once in a while, I'm gonna update my website or every once in a while and do this, use the SEO tool all the time. So that was kind of something that we've talked about in an earlier video free first then paid. So any tool you use, um, if you need an SEO tool, I would use a bunch on the free version first, see which ones you like best then pay for the one you liked best try different ones because different people like some people like keyword finder and I have a free, um, keyword finder, a Chrome extension. So like in Google Chrome, I have keyword finder as a free extension.
So every time I go into Google and I Google something on the right hand side of the screen, keyword finder tells me keywords. It tells me long tail keywords topics, the relevancy, blah, blah, blah. It gives me all these stats. So that's free. You don't have to do anything to get that. And that's a great little tool that like, if you really want to go in depth, you can pay more for keyword finder. But I found the Google Chrome extension is just like very robust and really great. So try the free free ones first and then figure out which one you want to do for paid. Um, yeah. SEO for clients. Okay. Jenny, Jenny, if you're doing SEO for clients, um, try different, try different ones. And then you can also, if they have WordPress, I'm sure you know about Yoast SEO, so you can install a Yoast on their WordPress site and then use that as a double, like basically like a double whammy on Yoast plus another tool.
Um, there's like so many SEO tools. So that's the thing is like different people, like different tools. Like I, I like keyword finder. I also like Uber suggest SPM Russia's one. Gosh, there's just, there's so many, um, there's like a monster one or like a, uh, what's it called Mo um, there's another one that starts with an M that's really famous, but yeah, if you're going to use it for clients like T trial at first, Oh, also, um, you're going to want to see if you get on, on the back end of their Google analytics. So if you do more SEO for clients and you have Yoast SEO on their WordPress, see if they will send you reports or let you get into their Google analytics, that will tell you a lot that you can then be followed up with your SEO tool. Um, yeah.
As the M rush is expensive, that's the thing is like these SEO tools, like a lot of people are using them. So like the price keeps going up. Right. So that's why we have to make sure we're using it for clients. So it pays for itself. Um, yeah. Heatherwood Martin is someone MAs. That's what it is, Jenny. Good job MAs. That's what I was thinking of. Yes. Yeah. Heather Lloyd Martin, Martin is like SEO all over the place. She's really smart and knows all these things. So I would check her out for SEO. I'm definitely not like a, an SEO genius. So, um, yeah. And she used it as a free tool. Yes. MAs all right. We are almost, Oh, we just hit the end of our time. So if you have more questions, pop them in the chat, um, and I'll answer them, but there are so many expenses and costs that we don't think about as we're running a freelance writing business.
There are things that just pop up. Like, you know, like for me, a lot of times that's learning materials, right? A book that pops up them like, Oh, I want to learn more about that. Or a course that pops up that teaches me more about case studies or teaches me more about how to write a better article or a course that teaches me how to write or how to run my business better or how to do more email marketing or stuff like that. So when you're thinking about costs and expenses of your business, some of them will be kind of surprising. And pop-up, um, there's also this one I did want to mention. So I don't forget. When you decide to make your business an LLC, that's a cost and expense. So every year you have to pay for a registered agent for your LLC.
You, I guess you could be your own registered agent, but I think that's a pain in the butt. So every year you have to pay for, um, a registered agent, you have to pay to set up your LLC. You have to figure out how you're going to do your business bank account, how you're going to get all that together. So there's other things about our business. Like when it gets bigger that we have to deal with, hello? You having a great day. All right. We will do a pup date cause we haven't done one yet. And I've been rambling around. We have a lost pup. We have one over here. There he is. Oh, you look super grumpy. Can you go to your Hobbit hole? Can you go over to your house? You have to go to your habit hole, go back to your huddle hole over there. Follow the treat up. You have to go back over here. No, it's over there. Good job. You did it.
Good job. Good job. Okay. There you're so far away. Oh,
All right. Oh, you're not even on camera now. There we go. There we go. Now we got everybody.
Good job. Good job guys. Good job. All right. Okay.
Yay. I'm glad this was helpful. Yeah. So there's a lot of other, I'll probably end up doing another video about costs and expenses. Cause there's a lot of ones that we just don't think of like right now, right? This is an expense. I have a software called e-comm live that runs my live stream. Right? Like this is how I broadcast them to YouTube. I have a camera over there. Hello camera. I have lights over here and here. Um, I have a light behind me. I have lights back here and this thing that I built, right. This thing, I built myself. That was an expense to build all this stuff. Right? So this is another step of my business that our business expenses and costs. If you wanted to start live streaming or have you wanted to start making videos, um, or doing things for clients, maybe you're making videos for them.
But think about, I think when it comes to costs and expenses, I think what really helps is to think about the direction you want to take your business, where are you going? What kind of tools or helpful things could you add in or might need in the future? So it's not just getting like programs to get started, like word and it's or like Google docs. And it's not just saving photos to Dropbox. It's like tracking those expenses. It's software that helps you make appointments, send proposals, sign things. Legally like electronic signatures are really important, um, tools that you use to like cameras. We're, we're getting on camera a lot more. Right? We're um, doing a lot more zoom interviews or we're getting on camera a lot more with our potential clients. So maybe you get a webcam, like a really nice high quality webcam. There's a lot of things, right?
Think about where your business is going, what you need to track. Um, Jenny had a great one. She's moving more into SEO for her clients. She wants more robust tools. Maybe you want to do more SEO strategy. Maybe you want a better tool, like base camp to track all the things that you're doing for a content marketing project. Right? You want to look ahead and you're like, I want to get more into content marketing, but I need a place that I can share with my clients where we can see all the tasks we need to do. Base camp is a good example of that. Um, but, and then boomerang for email follow-up DUP, Sato flow desk, all the goodies. Um, those are all the ones I can, I want to cram into this one. All right. So I think that's it. We don't have any more questions.
If you feel like this has been helpful so far, I'd give it a thumbs up. If you feel like you want to hear more about how to run a better freelance writing business, that's both profitable and sustainable. Make sure you hit subscribe below. I'll do one last update because updates are fun. And Charlotte looks really funny sitting there like a weirdo. Charlotte you're so French, Charlotte, how did you get to be so French? And let me fix this so we can see you sitting there like a goop there's bear. Here we go. Charlotte. You're so funny. There you are. You're a little Frenchie, certainly weirdo. All right, here we go. There. You're so far away. There you go. All right. All right. I really appreciate you joining me today. This has been a fun one, even though I got off to a rough start. So thanks for hanging in there and I will see you next Friday. Same time, 12:00 PM central. I hope you have a great weekend and happy writing.
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