Business is always about monetizing one component from among a host of other important things. The reason behind every business is to make money or generate revenues. Given the inherent focus on revenues, when launching a business or a site, it is critical to understand how to manage finances, which is one of the major factors for successfully maintaining a site or running a business. In addition, when maintaining a website, it is important to consider factors such as the unique selling product, the main idea, and employees—namely, freelancer or full time, salaries, bonuses, and funding.

Most website owners try to handle freelance staff for their convenience, but many times freelancers fail during the early stages. This article discusses all these factors about managing money, including why most freelancers fail early to provide guidelines about monetizing your business.

Before moving into the details about managing finances, you need to understand that any business or website needs time to grow; only after a period of time will money come in based on the generation of the value of your product. You need to sell something useful and valuable and that will bring you money in return. If you want to make money, quality is the main requirement. Managing finances is vital once you start earning money from your business. The following discussion explains the issues faced after money starts coming in and how to handle these issues. In addition, tips for handling money as a whole across your business will be included.

What is There to Manage?

It takes time for a business or site to grow, and you should always be prepared for the early failures that will result from a business. An owner needs to be patient enough to overcome such failures in order to sustain and work harder to welcome success in the future. If you are the only one maintaining your website, then losses will not be as financially significant; instead the loss will be in your effort, hard work, and time. However, if you are managing a staff, you will face financial losses as well. In the latter case, you need to handle your monetary issues carefully and manage your finances cautiously. To overcome such a crisis, it is imperative to have sufficient capital—long before you start a website. In addition, it is imperative to analyze and develop a strategy to balance your finances. Research your competitors, discuss the issues with experts and make your own plan. Do not be afraid to experiment. You need to experiment with new things and take some risk at times to succeed, subsequently analyzing the outcomes. The risks are important pebbles that need to be considered in order to move further.

The first important factor to bring money through your website is to make it popular and accessible to the audience. You can do so by advertising your site in a variety of ways, such as newspapers, other popular blogs, advertising banners and posts, and emails to generate name recognition. You can also use Google adsense which is currently one of the major marketing tools, although it comes with its own challenges.

There are many ways through which you can make your products sell and your effort count. One of the important factors in blogging is to brand it. One can brand a blog using various techniques, such as deciding the correct name and the correct content. In order to sell your content or products, you can try selling related products, thereby attracting an audience and offering them something valuable to share. You can experiment with selling products online. The following examples will help you understand this better.

• If you are an educational website, try selling books or ebooks online. You can also make a smaller attempt by selling solved question papers or term papers, research projects, and so on. There are many sites that earn revenues by selling related products, such as Lifehacker.com, huffingtonpost.com, and zenhabits.net.
• If you are a website focused on custom products, you can sell a few custom products online. For example, provide options for users to customize a t-shirt, mug, or card online; after you create it, deliver it to them. This is an easy way of generating reviews and has been used by many merchandise sites.
• If you are a website related to digital goods, you can sell digital products online such as software, music tracks, videos, and images. One example of using this method is photojojo.com.

All these ways of selling products do work for earning revenues. In order to sell these products online, you need to use certain resources to deal with the payments. Thus, you can generate revenue by advertising and selling products online. Both of these methods do work, and many sites benefit from them. These are ways of earning revenues or making efforts to create an income.

Once you are generating revenues, suppose you are making a sum of money and are handling a staff of employees to make it greater. Many website owners choose freelance staff over regular salaried staff in order to avoid factors like office space, holidays, and provident funds. However, there are many incidents where freelancers fail in the early stages. Before encountering this failure, first let’s understand the reasons why most freelancers fail early. Such understanding will help you resolve such issues and handle the finances for freelances in order to ensure success.

Major Reasons for Freelancers Failure

While dealing with a freelancer team you might face a host of financial issues. Even after paying your freelance staff you might see failures. In that case, first try to understand why your staff is failing and then try to resolve the identified issues. The following points summarize the most frequent reasons for freelancers’ failures.

• When you hire freelancers, you are not interacting with them face to face. You either mail or phone to speak about your requirements. If you are not clear and direct in making your initial points, you might fail to ensure that the freelancers understand your goals, which will lead to failure. Even if you feel that you are making yourself clear, the other parties might fail to understand that the information. Therefore, make sure that while sending information or listing your requirements you are mentioning guidelines with clear and simple language. Also highlight the major guidelines. Moreover, keep interacting with your team regularly and ask them for feedback in order to improve the understanding between you and your employees.
• Freelancer teams usually work in their own space and might not be as target and time conscious as a salaried team. Therefore, clarify the deadlines before assigning the project itself. Mention the target and specify the time limit. Do ask about the team’s convenience, but make sure that you define a time limit as well. This will help them to be aware of the deadline and complete the work within the fixed time.
• Defining a time limit helps a freelance team be more time conscious; however, it might also hamper your quality product. Therefore, try to strike a balance between the two. Also make the need for quality clear to the team during the initial stage. You can also do a quality check before handling the project to verify how your team will work in the future.
• Freelancers often fail due to a lack of financial security or payment issue. If you are maintaining a freelance team, make sure that you pay them at the correct time. Otherwise, they might feel a lack of security, which will lead them to quit or adopt a less serious attitude toward the work.
• Most freelancers use their own personal computers or laptops to complete their work. Their computers might not have enough RAM to support high memory software, which might cause a host of issues in the middle of the work. Therefore, if your project requires high memory software or files, clarify with your freelance team before starting the project. This will help avoid messy issues in the middle of the project.
• One of the major reasons for freelancers’ failures is the lack of reliability from both sides. Mutual trust and understanding are always required between an employer and an employee, and the importance becomes more evident in the case of a freelance team. Appoint persons you trust and try to assign small projects initially to check both efficiency and quality. You can hire from referrals or go to online sites that provide good freelancers, such as odesk.com and freelancer.com. In addition, when you hire a team, it is your responsibility to take care of their finances and maintain them in a timely manner. As they are not your regular salaried employees, they might fail to trust you if you ignore your responsibilities.
• Handling a freelance team is not very difficult if you follow certain rules. One of the most important rules is to interact with the team regularly. You need touch base with you team throughout the project to ensure that they work efficiently and build up their trust. Even after completing the project, maintain a minimum level of interaction so that your team does not feel left out and move away, which might hamper your future projects.
• While building regular interactions with your freelancer team, make sure that you do not overdo it. You do need to interact regularly, but you should understand your limits as well. Don’t make your interactions an irritation for your team. This might again result in losing your team or other adverse effects.
• Most freelancers also fail due to lack of quality checks throughout the process. If you are dealing with daily or weekly reporting, it is your responsibility to make a quality check regularly for every report. If you fail to do so and complain about it later or after completing the project, it will hamper the process in two ways. First, your project will be affected and might lead to wasted time. Second, when you ask the team to rework a project after its completion, your team will take it as an extra headache and you might end up losing the team.
• Freelancers also fail in many cases due to a lack of interest stemming from many problems. Therefore, it is important to keep a clear picture of everything in the beginning so that they can effectively respond if they are not fascinated with the project.
• Freelancer teams work from their own space and use their own resources. However, there might be a time when you can help them with resources without much effort. Don’t hesitate to do so. For example, if your freelancers require some references to work on your project, try to provide them yourself, thereby reducing their extra work. This will help them work more comfortably on your project.

These are the major reasons that freelancers fail. The points mentioned above and their supporting solutions are some of the more common issues. Try to analyze the factors and make your list of do’s and don’ts to make sure that your freelance team doesn’t fail. As the previously discussed factors indicate, interacting with the team and demonstrating reliability are keys to success. The latter is related to managing your finances with your freelance team, as discussed in the following section.

How to Manage Your Finances

Most website owners hire a freelance staff during the initial stages of the business for their own convenience and to avoid issues related to employing a regular salaried staff. Freelance staff members are definitely helpful, although they are not without their disadvantages. Freelancing comes with its own demerits (and can fail early in the process, as previously demonstrated). One of the most difficult issues in managing freelancing is based on monetary issues. The following recommendations make managing your finances easier.

Time is one of valuable assets for freelancers; as their work is based on time, time counts against the money they earn. Your failure as a website owner to finance your freelance team on time might hamper your business. Unlike a regular office team, freelancers work in their own space, meaning face-to-face contact is limited; consequently, both sides can lose trust in the other side. Therefore, from the beginning of your project, maintain invoices between you and your freelance team, which will help deal with payment issues professionally and will avoid misunderstandings. Invoices are used for accounting purpose and contain an invoice number, the amount payable, and details of freelancers’ name and address as well as the status of the payment. Manage your invoices even after payment is completed for future reference. You can also mention clauses on your invoice regarding payment modes so that neither you nor your team faces any payment issue while or after completing the work.

Freelancers often fail due to miscommunication. Both the employee and employer should share interactive sessions and build a good foundation of understanding. Failure due to misunderstanding can cause freelancers to abandon the work in the middle of the project, which will harm your business both financially and professionally. You might not be able to afford the loss of the team in the middle of the work. Therefore, it is beneficial to sign an agreement or contract with the freelance team, stating the major requirements therein. Such a contract might identify the time by which the work has to be completed, payment to be made in installments or at the completion of the work, and repercussions for leaving the work in the middle of the project. Maintaining contracts or agreements will help you avoid future monetary issues by helping you manage your finances better and will enable you to control the quality of the work through your own quality check efforts. Moreover, it is always beneficial to maintain paperwork along with your freelancing team. This will be helpful not just for you but for your team as well. Such an agreement or a contract will help them gain trust in you and also make them serious about the work, promoting the feeling of responsibility, which they will work hard to maintain. This approach will further avoid failures of freelancing due to the lack of seriousness.

You should also make the most of online banking or PayPal accounts, which is a very easy way of transacting money. When you are managing quite a number of freelancers, maintain a separate account for their payment. It is beneficial to maintain separate accounts for personal and professional dealings, which will help you maintain a balance between payment and income.

If you are new to hosting a website, you might need certain guidance regarding managing salaries for your freelance team. Consult with your friends and colleagues regarding payment issues. You can also check through salary.com, which helps both employers and employees make salary decisions. You can get an idea regarding how much to pay for a particular job against a specific time. The salary you offer or request might slightly differ as well based on experience, so keep track of your salary history to ensure a balance over time. Although more pay will cause you losses, less pay will make your team less serious about your work and result in more losses in the long run. Thus, it is always advisable to decide on a salary together (i.e., employer and employee). As money is the main root of every business, managing it properly will help build a healthy relationship with your team.

Conclusion

This article has outlined some of the fundamentals for managing finances for you freelancing team. Ultimately, quality is the only way to bring money to your website. Focus on providing quality work for your website and don’t compromise based on finances. Maintain accurate records for your entire business, including expenditures, investments, payment records, and income sources, to avoid monetary issues in the future. Most importantly, understand that it will take time to grow your business. A few losses in the early stages are natural; analyze such losses to understand and address them as quickly as possible. Interact with your freelance team, and do not panic if they make initial failures; rather, try to make them understand their faults and overcome them. Trust them to gain trust from them and be responsible toward them as an employer to make them responsible for their work. Managing finances will be easier and simpler within a healthy relationship; therefore, try to build one with your freelance team and maintain it throughout the process to build a healthy and successful business.

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