bloomberg

👾 GIFs 4 sale

by

Happy Wednesday! Today is International Gin and Tonic Day. So here’s a fun piece of trivia to get the party started: back in the 1700s, it was discovered that a component of tonic water called quinine could be used to treat malaria. But the taste was awful. 

So, British officers stationed in India later began adding water, sugar, lime, and gin to the tonic water to make it easier to gulp down. That’s how the gin and tonic was born. Moral of the story: one G & T-a-day keeps the malaria away.

Mentioned in today’s newsletter: Meta, Giphy, Facebook, and Bloomberg. Plus what Upwork clients know about experience level, tax advantages for freelancers, and an old school trick for anyone running Facebook or Google ads.

Read time: 3 minutes and 38 seconds

Together with AdSkills

A Match Made in Direct Response Heaven

Mastering high-income skills multiplies your options. You can apply them for clients or for yourself. And that’s one of the big reasons why so many freelancers get into copywriting — so they can launch their own offer one day. But here’s the problem: you still need traffic. And unless you’ve got a massive audience on social media, that means learning how to run paid ads.

Luckily, that’s where AdSkills comes in. They represent the gold standard in paid traffic training. Which is why 9-figure companies like ClickFunnels, DigitalMarketer, and VShred rely on AdSkills courses to train their media buyers. So if you want to learn how to write killer ads, craft campaigns that convert, and scale your offer to the moon on Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, click here to try a free AdSkills class today.

Making the Rounds

  • Meta ordered to sell Giphy after purchasing it for $400M. U.K. regulators have ordered Facebook’s parent company to unwind its 2020 acquisition of the GIF-maker, stating it would substantially reduce competition in the U.K. display advertising market.
  • Facebook begins rolling out Advantage Custom Audiences. The new feature lets you expand custom audiences if it will improve results. As with most new automated Facebook features, it’s a bit murky as to how exactly it’s affecting performance when it’s turned on. And if you do decide to test it out, make sure you aren’t using it on any retargeting audiences. Otherwise you could end up showing abandon cart ads to people who’ve never visited your website.
  • Bloomberg probability model says 100% chance of U.S. recession in the next 12 months. Forget inflation with a chance of recession — Bloomberg economists are now predicting there is a 100% chance the U.S. will enter a recession by October 23, 2023. Cheerio.

Working With Clients

Upwork Client Spills the Beans on Freelance Experience Level

Estimated budgets aren’t the only thing you should ignore when looking for jobs on Upwork.

Don’t pay attention to the desired experience level either.

Before we explain why…

Here are the three options clients choose from when posting a job:

  • Entry: Looking for someone relatively new to the field
  • Intermediate: Looking for substantial experience in the field
  • Expert: Looking for comprehensive and deep experience in the field

Now this seems simple enough, right?

But here’s the thing…

Most clients don’t know what “substantial experience” might cost vs “comprehensive and deep experience.”

Or whether they really need someone who’s been in the field 5+ years vs someone who’s only been doing it for six months.

And even if they do…

Nine times out of ten, they’ll happily pay more for the right freelancer…

Or accept someone with less experience (even if they come in under budget) who’s got good samples and submits a strong proposal.

So, bottom line:

Our advice is to ignore the experience level in the job posting and apply to anything that seems like a good fit for you.

In the end, you’ll submit more proposals and (likely) land more gigs.

Working For Yourself

Charge That to My Expense Account

As a freelancer, you may not have a pension or 401k…

But you do get some tax advantages from being able to write stuff off.

And if you’re looking to save as much as possible on your tax bill next year…

Our friends at Upwork have put together an awesome list of 20 things you can and should be expensing in your freelance business.

Click here to check it out:

[READ]: The 20 Most Important U.S. Tax Benefits and Deductions for Freelancers

From The Paid Ads Gig

Running Ads on Facebook or Google? Forget Autobid and Try This Instead

Ad platforms like Meta and Google have been shepherding media buyers away from manual controls for years now.

One example of this is automated bidding.

Instead of setting your own bids or cost caps, they encourage you to use automated bidding instead.

But here’s the problem…

Ad pixels are typically trained to optimize for the lowest cost per conversion.

And which do you think costs less to acquire…

The crap leads or the high-quality leads?

We’ll give you a hint: it’s not the high-quality leads 🙃

So the end result is you get more volume, but lower quality.

How do you fix this?

By testing manual bid or cost caps instead of (or alongside) automated bidding.

This lets you take back the wheel from the pixel AI so you can improve your lead quality and reduce wasted ad spend.

Now in case it’s been a while since you toyed around with these settings…

You can find one-pagers from Meta and Google on this topic here and here.

Gig Alerts

Looking for clients? These freelance jobs were posted on Upwork in the last 24 hours:

Quote of the Day


“If you want to succeed, if you want to achieve all your outcomes, you have to think of success as a process, a way of life, a habit of mind, a strategy for life.”

— Tony Robbins

ICYMI: