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Develop Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

Several years ago (in the pre-social media days), I was the director of sales and marketing for a software company. My job was to promote our software and to make sure that people, organizations, and state governments bought it.

I was in charge of trade shows, the website, brochures, press releases, and so on, not to mention selling the product all over the United States, as well as other parts of the world. I was making sales calls, traveling, designing, and doing things the sole marketing person in a company does. These were my strengths, and they were the reason I was hired.

Which is why my boss said I should develop my customer support skills.

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “I don’t do customer support.”

“I just think it’s important that you strengthen your customer support skills, since you don’t do it very often.” He added, “I may even have you start learning some coding.”

“So will the customer support team learn how to work trade shows and create brochures?”

“No, why would they do that?” he said, completely seriously.

His rationale was that, since I didn’t have strong customer support skills and I didn’t know how to code, I needed to learn or improve these skills.

I asked him if it wouldn’t be smarter for me to just focus on getting better at marketing or graphic design, and he said he didn’t think that was as important. I needed to be well-rounded and well-versed in everything the company did. (I was also the only one in the entire company that he thought needed to be this well-rounded.)

Your Strengths Make You Money, Not Your Weaknesses

I see a lot of companies make this mistake, whether large or small. They think they and their employees should be jacks- and jills-of-all-trades. Everyone should be a generalist. Everyone should know how to do everything. As a result, no one is great anything, they’re all just mediocre at a lot of things.

(It’s no surprise that these companies are not leaders in their industry.)

The pressure to be a generalist is especially high for entrepreneurs. We often have to do everything because there is no one else.

That pressure wastes more time and kills more businesses because we spend all our time doing the things we’re not good at, which takes us away from our strengths, which is how we make our money.

The dentist who spends four hours a week handling her bookkeeping and staffing requirements is missing four hours of billable time. That’s four hours’ worth of patients she’s missing out on. And if she tries to do her administrative stuff in the evenings and on the weekends, that’s just cutting into personal time, which wrecks her work-life balance, which is the whole reason she started her practice in the first place: to have a fulfilling personal life.

The bookstore owner who spends an hour or two a day handling his inventory and fulfilling ecommerce orders is losing the time spent dealing with face-to-face customers. To solve the problem, he’ll end up hiring someone to help deal with customers when he should really hire someone to fill orders and count inventory.

The consultant who spends three hours each week researching possible new clients instead of actually dealing with client work is losing 156 hours of productivity per year (3 hours x 52 weeks/year = 156 hours). That’s nearly an entire month of time wasted on not creating products or writing reports that help him get paid. In effect, he only worked for 11 months in a year.

In all of these cases, the business owner is spending time doing the things they don’t really need to be doing. Instead, they’re doing things that take time away from the things they should be doing. Their weaknesses are sapping their strengths and they’re losing money.

And instead of trying to solve that problem, they’ll find ways to improve their skills in that weak area. The dentist will invest in bookkeeping software and watch videos on how to use it. The bookstore owner will get better ecommerce software (and learn how to program it), and work to streamline the shipping process. The consultant will invest in business databases or lead gen software and spend more time writing the content needed to bring in new clients.

This is a terrible waste of time, and we need to stop it. This is where it makes sense to hire someone else to do the things we’re not good at.

The dentist can hire a bookkeeper to manage the books for 4 hours a week. The money she spends will be a lot less than the money she makes in seeing patients for 4 hours.

The bookstore owner can hire a college kid to handle the shipping and inventory. Let them streamline the process for you and figure out a way to make it more efficient, then they can teach it to the bookstore owner.

The consultant can hire a virtual assistant to do all the client research for him, even setting his sales appointments.

Don’t spend time or money trying to develop your weak skills. Hire someone whose strengths fill your weak areas so you can focus on getting better at the things that make you money. Try to become one of the best at the thing you do. Get great at your strengths, not slightly better at your weaknesses.

If you’re a writer, take writing classes or read books on writing. If you’re a graphic designer, watch design videos and practice on pet projects. If you’re a dentist, go to conferences and take continuing education classes. If you own a bookstore, focus on your customers and finding new ways to bring people into your store.

For the things you’re weak at, hire a professional to get it done. Hire the graphic designer whose work is continually growing. Hire the writer who creates great work. Work with the consultant who produces great results for their clients.

Trying to strengthen your weaknesses, especially those so completely unrelated to the thing you actually do, is a colossal waste of time and can have a negative effect on the growth of your company. Get better at what you’re good at and you can charge more and work less.

Photo credit: Stocksnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Four Ways to Protect Yourself Online

This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of The Florida Writer, a magazine by the Florida Writers Association. They hold their conference in Orlando every October, and Erik will be giving talks on blogging for writers and humor writing.

Twitter was down for a lot of the Northeast during the Florida Writing Conference this past October (2016). In fact, a lot of streaming and Internet sites were down, including Spotify, Netflix, and even The New York Times.

That’s because a major Internet hub was hit with a DDOS attack — a dedicated denial of service, pronounced DEE-doss — which tied up a major portion of the Internet on the East Coast. In short, some “bad actors” (what Internet security people call the bad guys) were sending massive amounts of data to that one particular hub. Imagine the Three Stooges all trying to go through a door at the same time.

It coincided with a question I got during my personal branding talk at the 2016 Florida Writers Association Conference.

“How do you protect yourself online?” a woman asked. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to discuss it — I could have spent an entire hour on that subject — so I thought it was worth an article here instead. Here are four ways you can protect your blog, your social media accounts, and even your personal safety online.

1. Use a Password Vault to Generate Random Passwords

A lot of people use simple, easy-to-remember passwords, which can be broken by a hacker’s software in a few hundredths of a second. That means you need complex passwords that are difficult to figure out, but those are hard to remember, especially if you use a different password for each account (which you absolutely should do).

That’s why there are apps that will not only store your passwords, they’ll automatically log you into your accounts. That means you can use complex, nearly-impossible-to-crack passwords without ever having to remember them.

I use 1Password, although LastPass and KeePass are also options. I like 1Password because it operates on Mac and Windows, and works on multiple devices, including my laptop, mobile phone, and tablet, and on every web browser. And I can generate 20-character passwords that use lowercase and capital letters, numbers, and special characters, which look like *8)R83CRD[$3cuZGq.

I can also use it to string together four random words instead, which is easier to retype, should the need arise. I generated manpower-lite-feather-pacific for this example, and checked it on a password strength calculator.

According to GRC.com, manpower-lite-feather-pacific would take “7.32 hundred trillion trillion trillion centuries,” at 1,000 guesses per second, to crack (most hackers can only guess a few hundred times per second). And *8)R83CRD[$3cuZGq would take “1.34 billion trillion centuries.” (Check out www.grc.com/haystack.htm if you’d like to test your own passwords.)

2. Turn on Two-Factor Authentication Everywhere

You can also ask for additional protection on certain websites, in case someone ever actually does hack into them. That additional protection is a 6-digit numeric code that is texted to you when you log in to that website. It’s a random number, and is only used once for that particular login. It will even expire after a few minutes.

Services like Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Evernote, Apple’s iCloud, iTunes, and even GoDaddy all use two-factor authentication.

When I log in to my Gmail, I’m immediately presented with a dialog box that asks for my 6-digit code. I grab my mobile phone, and within seconds, the 6-digit code has been sent. I enter it into the dialog box, and I’m finally allowed in to my Gmail. That means if someone ever does guess my password, they can’t get past the second factor. This is important, because if someone were to control my Gmail, they could use the “Forgot My Password” feature on every service I belong to, and dismantle my entire life.

3. Never Share Deeply Personal Information

We all like to tell our friends when we’re having fun, so we can rub their noses in it. We share photos of us on vacation, at dinner, at the beach. But you may want to consider who else can see your updates, photos, and personal information.

Just by looking at your social profile and your various photos, people can tell when you’re away on vacation, as well as where you live, while other people are just concerned for their personal safety and people finding out their whereabouts.

To that end, I always recommend the following:

  1. Never share photos while you’re on vacation, only afterward. Don’t tell people when you’re not at home for an extended period of time.
  2. If you live in a smaller city, and don’t want people to know where you live, list a bigger nearby city as your hometown in social bios. For example, if you live in a Louisville suburb, just put down that you live in Louisville.
  3. Don’t share photos of fancy or expensive gifts you received. You don’t want to give thieves a shopping list.

4. Keep Your WordPress Blog Secure

If you host your own WordPress blog on a third-party server, pay careful attention to your security. Your host will manage their server’s security, but you’re responsible for your own blog. (If you use WordPress.com, they’ll manage all security for you. Just make sure you have a solid password!)

There are hundreds of security plugins to keep your WordPress blog secure. I prefer Limit Login Attempts, which will block IP addresses that try unsuccessfully to log into my account eight times, and they’ll email me about the attempted break ins.

Next, I’ll copy that IP address, and then add it to the list of blocked IP addresses in WP-Ban. This permanently bans future login attempts from that IP address, which shuts out any “zombie attacks” — infected computers that are programmed to attack other computers.

Finally, delete the Admin account on your WordPress blog. When you first create a WordPress blog, the default account is called Admin, and it’s usually the account hackers try to break into.

When you first set up your WordPress blog on your server, create a new administrator account with your name. Then, go back and delete the Admin account. That way, hackers can try and try for “7.32 hundred trillion trillion trillion centuries,” but they’ll be knocking on a door that doesn’t even exist.

It’s easy to protect yourself online, thanks to the available tools and best practices the experts have created. The hard part is remembering to stick to them and make them a habit. But if you can follow these steps, you can better protect yourself and your loved ones from an otherwise-unsecure Internet.

Photo credit: TypographyImages (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Coffee Shop Etiquette for Entrepreneurs and Writers

My favorite office smells like coffee.

It’s not any particular place. It’s any independent coffee shop that has decent wifi and grinds their own coffee beans every couple of hours. I love the sounds and the smells of the place, although the milk steamer is a little obnoxious at times. And I appreciate the relationships I have with the baristas and the regulars.

Inside Duo 58. One of my favorite local coffee shops, and the inspiration for this article.

Any old coffee shop will do, although I prefer independent coffee shops. I even made maps of the independent coffee shops in Indianapolis and Orlando, and often visit new ones just to find hidden gems around the city. I’m even sitting in one of my local favorites, Duo 58, as I write this.

Several years ago, for four months, my business partner and I left our old office and spent our rent money on coffee, working six hours a day out of the Hubbard & Cravens in Broad Ripple (Indianapolis). It got us outside in the winter, we met a lot of new people, and I came home every day smelling like freshly ground coffee. It was only because we wanted somewhere more quiet and with faster Internet speeds that we returned to our old office.

I learned a few lessons about coffee shop etiquette and some of the things that drive coffee shop owners and managers nuts, or make things difficult for entrepreneurs, writers, and laptop warriors to find decent shops to do any work.

Here are five coffee shop etiquette rules every coffee shop commuter needs to follow when working in your favorite local java joint.

  1. Buy something every 2 hours. I make it a point to spend at least $5 every two hours I’m at a coffee shop. It gets expensive, but when you consider that a shop not only has to pay their baristas, they’re paying for their equipment, lights, HVAC, and fresh beans. If you camp out for six hours on a single $2 ice tea (that you keep getting free refills on!), you’re taking up valuable space that better-paying customers could be using, and you’re eating into the owner’s already-thin profits.
    2. Heidi and Kelly. They’re studying to be physicians assistants. I invited them to sit with me while I wrote this.
  2. Never take up a 4-top for yourself. A lot of coffee shops have 2-top tables that are ideal for one or two people, but also have a few 4-tops for larger groups. Try to avoid sitting at a 4-top unless you’re either holding it for more people, or all the 2-tops are taken up. Remember, the whole reason the coffee shop exists is to get the highest number of people in there, and if you keep four other people from sitting down, they lose a lot more money than you’re spending. At the very least, be willing to share your table with other people. Which reminds me. . .
  3. Always offer to share your table. A friend told me she once went into a coffee shop that was filled with single individuals sitting at 2-top tables. She asked one young woman if she could share her table. The young woman said “No!” rather rudely, and my friend sat down and said, “I’m sorry, the place is crowded and this one is big enough for two people. I’ll move as soon as another one opens up.” Instead, the young woman insulted my friend, and called her “entitled and selfish” before storming off, no doubt to look up the definition of “irony.” If you’re at a full coffee shop, be a decent human being and invite someone to join you at your table. I’ve been at Duo 58 all morning, and I’ve invited three different people to sit with me during my time here. Besides, you never know who you’re going to meet as a result of your kindness.
  4. Keep conversation volumes low. I’ve been in coffee shops that sound like a high school cafeteria at high noon. While you don’t have to whisper to your meeting partner, you don’t need to use your outside voice either. It’s especially bad when you can hear someone else’s conversation from 30 feet away. Or as my friend, Sheryl Brown (@BionicSocialite) says, “Set the tone of your voice to that which is comfortable to the space. Pay attention if you naturally have a booming voice — people tend to follow your lead. (T)hey think you’re hard of hearing and start yelling to match your voice.“
  5. Don’t watch Netflix or YouTube. Video takes up way more bandwidth than audio, photos, and text. And a coffee shop is not here to give you free broadband so you can binge watch Disjointed. Other people are trying to do actual work and/or study online, and your videos only slow down everyone else’s experience. It’s one thing if there are only one or two of you in the place, but when it’s half-full, you’re slowing everyone else down. Either switch to your personal hotspot or download movies when you’re at home. Don’t use more than your fair share of the wifi, especially since you only bought a small coffee to begin with.

The coffee shop explosion has nicely coincided with the rise in entrepreneurship and small businesses, giving us a place to work, network, and meet with potential clients and partners. But if you’re going to spend more than an hour working in a coffee shop, try to remember the store owner is in business just like you.

If you take up space without buying anything, or make a general nuisance of yourself, you only make the experience bad for everyone else. It’s this kind of behavior that leads to coffee houses putting limits on their wifi, or removing their wifi entirely.

If that happens, then I’m working at your house.

And I won’t tip you.

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How to Learn and Understand Anything

Jon Barney is an up-and-coming writer in the Orlando, Florida area (originally from Lafayette, LA, and has a lot of big ideas about a lot of things. Jon says he has an amazing wife and two kids, and he “loves the hotel restaurant industry and corny jokes,” which makes him a man after my own heart. Jon has an interesting process about he does a deep dive into any idea, process, or event that interests him.

We live in the information age. You can access the entire world from anywhere. Add in 24-hour news feeds, posts, tweets, snapchats, marketing and you are flooded with information.

The problem we face is overload. There is no way possible to download all the information thrown at us. Our brains are like sponges, absorbing information, but it reaches a saturation point. How much water can a full sponge soak up? None. Our brains operate in the same way — if we can’t fit new information into our brains, it gets swept away, and we move on to the next piece. Or we stop taking information in altogether.

Want to learn how an internal combustion engine works? Break down the process and redefine complex terms.

To understand anything, turn on your childlike curiosity. When I was a kid, I was super annoying (some would say I still am) because I always asked “Why?” Every answer I received led to more and more questions.

After my mom said “Because I said so, that’s why” a thousand times, I realized my parents didn’t have the patience or knowledge to satisfy my curiosity. Instead, they sent me to school to let someone else deal with me for a while. I kept going off on tangents because the “broad overview” we were getting wasn’t enough. I wanted to dive into each subject, but knowing everything about American history doesn’t help you pass math. To satisfy my curiosity and keep my grades up, I had to learn to understand ideas at lightning speed.

I learned from that experience how important questions are. You have to ask the right questions to find the right answers. We all know that, but do we actually do it?

Think about these two questions “What is the meaning of life?” and “What is the meaning of my life?” Which one is easier to answer? The right question leads you to the key concept in the shortest amount of words. To find the right question start with the 5 basic ones: who, what, where, when and why. Answering those will help you create a more specific question and help you find your meaning.

Break Things Down to Their Smallest Digestible Parts

Let’s say I want to know how an engine works. I go through the 5 basic questions to form the right question. Who designs engines? What is an engine? Where do they make them? When was the first engine built? Why did someone invent the engine? The answers are difficult to understand because they are written by engineers for engineers.

I take all the research I’m doing and find any words or processes I don’t know and redefine them. (Good thing I have that Google Dictionary in my pocket.) Next, I remove technical jargon and insider slang from anything I’m reading and replace them with synonyms I already know. Using words you already know frees up your brainpower to search for meaning in the idea instead of being a dictionary.

You have all of this easy to understand information but not enough memory hold every detail in. Use the KISS formula — no, not painting your face — Keep It Simple Stupid.

How do you do that? Think of a deck of cards as your information, and break it down into groups. You know there are 52 cards, 26 of each color, 13 of each suit and 4 of each value. You have to do the same thing with information and go for the lowest common denominator.

It’s actually a complex process to understand and find meaning in things. You draw on all your life’s experiences, memories, emotions, opinions, life situations, and influences just to come up with something you can understand. That’s a lot of mental computing just to see if the story about increasing oil prices will affect you.

Making It Simple Makes It Stick

I mentioned breaking everything down in common language terms earlier for a reason: There is no point in having all the knowledge in the world if you can’t share it.

I had a sales job for a while, but not very long because I was terrible at it. I couldn’t sell water in the desert. One day my sales manager explained why I wasn’t selling anything.

“Jon, no one understands what the hell you are talking about. If you can’t explain it to a 5th grader don’t say it to your prospects!”

I quit eventually because I was tired of not eating, but I also learned two important lessons. Test your pitch on someone first. And big, fancy words are nice for term papers or to impress your snobby friends at the coffee shop, but they don’t help people understand complex ideas. Teaching someone else locks the information in your brain by building mental short cuts.

Understanding anything is simple if you can remember: to be annoying, ask smart questions, play cards and that no one cares if you know what sesquipedalian means.

Photo credit: Mj-bird (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0)

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If You Get Angry About People Who Are Late, Maybe You’re the Problem

If you’re regularly late to meetings, you’re a terrible person who has no regard for human life, and you deserve everything bad that happens to you.

I don’t know what has crawled up people’s backsides lately, but I’m seeing variations on this theme from people who are tired of being kept waiting during meetings, while some insensitive clod blithely shows up whenever it suits them.

Greg Savage got the ball rolling five years ago with his blog post, No, You Are Not Running Late, You Are Rude and Selfish, and I’ve seen it reposted ad nauseum on Facebook and Twitter.

If this is how you approach your business relationships, is it any wonder people don’t like you?
Recently, I saw someone tweet that people who are habitually late are either stupid, arrogant, or both. Then he included the hashtag #respect.

I responded, “I would think #respect also means not calling people arrogant or stupid.”

“Not if they’re habitually late,” he responded.

Talk about selfish. My time is important. My time is valuable. I don’t like to be kept waiting.

You’re not inventing a cure for cancer, you’re having a meeting. If your time is so valuable, you shouldn’t have scheduled it in the first place.

Maybe It’s You

I know it’s a symptom of the current political discourse, but I’m still surprised at people’s all-or-nothing view of humanity, elevating the smallest of transgressions into overly dramatic statements about their value as people.

Either you show up on time, or you’re selfish.

Either you show up on time, or you’re stupid.

Either you show up on time, or you’re irresponsible and you make poor life choices.

If you have this kind of attitude about your tardy colleagues, maybe you’re the problem. If you’re this uptight and easily prone to anger, look at the priorities in your life. Do you value timeliness over everything else? Would you rather have a person who shows up five minutes early to a meeting or someone who’s pleasant and a joy to be around?

Because it seems like you sacrificed the latter in favor of the former.

Yes, timeliness is something we should all strive for, and I agree that it’s frustrating to be kept waiting. But I also don’t foam at the mouth and call the other person an irresponsible turd when they’re 10 minutes late. I pull out my phone or laptop and get work done.

When you say the other person is chronically late because they don’t value or respect you, you’re probably right. They don’t respect you. They don’t even like you. You’re not a nice person.

Because you call them rude, selfish, stupid, and arrogant.

Why would anyone want to be around you at all, let alone get there on time to spend every possible minute with you? If people are regularly late to meetings with you, they’re not the problem, you are.

Try Extending Grace to the Other Person

I’ve been stood up for meetings by friends who forgot. I’ve had people go to the wrong location. I’ve had people who were involved in a car accident. And I’ve done all those things myself.

And when either of us were in the wrong, we apologized, the other person forgave, and we rescheduled. We didn’t passive-aggressively rant on social media about how “some people” were rude idiots. We didn’t trash the other person to our friends. We went about our lives and tried again later.

In short, we didn’t tear someone else down in order to make ourselves look good. We extended grace, we forgave, and we treated the other person with decency.

If you don’t like it when people are late, ask them about it. Don’t berate them, don’t call them names, and don’t rant about it online. Ask them if they’re aware it’s a problem. Explain to them how it frustrates you. Ask them to be on time in the future.

If they still can’t do it, cut them off. Stop meeting with them, stop inviting them to things, or start lying about the time, and tell them the meeting is 15 – 30 minutes earlier.

But try to be a grown-up about it. There are worse things in life to be, and worse problems in the world to stew about, like homelessness, starvation, and poverty. When you solve a couple of those, then you can be pissy about other people’s time management.

Until then, just get over yourself. Your missing 10 minutes aren’t that important.

Photo credit: B_Heyer (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Three Security Tips for Freelancers

This is a guest post written by Cassie Phillips, a blogger with Secure Thoughts, an Internet security company.

Maintaining a successful freelance career can be difficult. Oftentimes, the biggest difficulty is finding clients who are in need of your services and willing to pay a reasonable price. There’s another difficulty that is sometimes overlooked: staying secure on the Internet.

With money being moved between multiple accounts and contact with numerous clients, continual daily access to the Internet can be dangerous if certain security procedures are not put in place. To protect yourself against hackers, identity thieves, and other online threats, here are a few security tips for freelancers that can help protect you and your money.

1. Protecting Private Data (and Money) with a VPN

Unlike traditional jobs, freelancers cannot expect to earn a steady income. There is no single employer who is going to regularly deposit money into your bank account. On the contrary, freelancers are likely to earn money from a myriad number of sources, processed through a variety of accounts. From private bank accounts to PayPal to Google Wallet, a freelancer’s money is always flowing from one account into another. Protecting the flow of your money and any associated data is of utmost importance.

Remember that securing your finances on the Internet is not as easy as making a few clicks. If this is all you do, then you remain in an unsafe position where a hacker could see your financial information, hack into your computer or accounts, and steal your identity or just simply empty whatever accounts he can get his hands on. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the key to preventing this from happening.

A VPN creates a tunnel between your computer and a third-party server elsewhere. When you access the Internet using a VPN, your data is encrypted and your IP address is hidden. When it comes out of the third-party server, it will appear as if your computer is accessing the Internet from that origin point.

In other words, your server and your connection point remain invisible so you can remain anonymous. However, not all VPNs are created equally. Some have different price tags; others offer different speeds, and others still host various numbers of third-party servers. Do your research to ensure you’re selected the best of the best.

2. Using Trusted and Secure Freelance Contracting Services

In addition to securing your Internet connection, you need to ensure that you are working with trustworthy individuals and companies and secure websites. There are many freelance contracting services available on the Internet serving different types of freelancers. No matter which one you choose, however, you should always make sure that is a reputable service that has not been hacked. There are several ways to do this:

Use Trustworthy Services: If you’ve been freelancing for even a short while, you may be familiar with some of the larger and more trustworthy freelancing services on the Internet, such as Upwork, Elance, Guru and Freelancer. If you stick with the large and trusted services, you will be safer than looking for fringe sites that are unknown and possibly dangerous.

Check for HTTPS: Because freelancing services are responsible for collecting personal data for freelancer’s profiles, facilitating private communications, and shipping money, you need to make sure that the site is secure. One simple way to do this is to look at the URL and make sure that it begins with “HTTPS” rather than “HTTP.” The “S” stands for secure and means that there are layers of encryption being used to protect users on the site compared to the unsecure alternative. Take a look at the address bar in the screenshot for UpWork’s home page and notice the “https” in green:

Note the https in the address bar. That means this site is secure. (credit: UpWork’s front page screenshot)

Use Google: If a freelance site is using “HTTP” rather than “HTTPS,” double check its trustworthiness and reputability. You can do this with a simple Google search. Simply type in the name of the service followed by words like “review,” “spam,” “scam” or “hack” to see if anything alarming pops up. For example, if there are numerous reviewers claiming that the site has been hacked or is vulnerable to a hack, avoid that service.

3. Maintaining a Secure Virtual Workspace

There are a few more things you can do to maintain security as a freelancer such as adding a few more layers of protection to your virtual workspace. A firewall will alert you when intruders are trying to access your computer or when your computer is trying to do things without being asked. Anti-spyware or anti-virus software will scan your computer regularly to watch for malware. And a password vault, like 1Password can let you create complex passwords, but store them so you don’t have to remember them all.

These are only a few of things that you need to do to ensure you remain safe and secure as a freelancer. There are certainly other ways to protect yourself. What do you do to keep yourself safe as a freelancer?

As a freelancer, Cassie learned quickly that internet security is a must. She enjoys sharing her knowledge with others because, let’s face it, freelancers don’t make much money and they need to protect their equipment as much as possible!

Photo credit: Moleshko (Pixabay, Creative Commons)