🚨 The dark side of job applications

Author

Jim Hamilton
June 27, 2025

In partnership with

Happy Friday! This is the Freelance Gig, where we share news, tools, tips, and tricks to help grow your freelance business. 

Mentioned in today’s email: Fraudsters, Americans, Midjourney, Meta and Slovenia. Plus the one thing that can make or break your freelance portfolio and how to protect your peepers as a remote worker.

Read time: 2 minutes and 54 seconds

Together with Besolo

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Working With Clients

The One Thing That Can Make or Break Your Freelance Portfolio

Want to increase your chances of getting the gig?

Make sure you’ve got relevant sample pieces in your freelance portfolio.

There are two ways to think about relevance:

1) Task-specific
2) Market-specific 

Task-specific relevance means that if you’re applying for a job to write emails, you should highlight email work you’ve done in the past (instead of sales pages or video scripts).

Market-specific relevance means that if you’re applying for a job to run ads for a health company, you should highlight previous work you’ve done in the health space (instead of another niche like finance or relationships).

And if you want to pull a Mike Tyson and hit the bullseye…

Aim to have both.

Making the Rounds

POLL: Have you ever been contacted by a fake client?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Working For Yourself

How to Protect Your Peepers as a Remote Worker

Digital devices like computers, phones, and tablets emit something called “blue light.”

And some studies have linked it to:

  • Eye strain

  • Blurred vision

  • Difficulty sleeping

One way to minimize this potential risk is with blue light blocking glasses.

Thankfully, they’ve come a long way from the original gamer glasses that look more like a pair of ski goggles than computer glasses.

So if you’re looking to reduce the strain on your eyes from spending long hours on the computer…

Without looking like Spock here…

AI Prompts For Freelancers

Prompt of the Week: The Meta Prompt

This AI prompt is designed to help you come up with a list of prompts to streamline the productivity and efficiency of your freelance business.

Here is the prompt:

I'm a freelance [TYPE OF SERVICE YOU PROVIDE]. I want to optimize the productivity and efficiency of my entire business. Give me 20 different prompts I can give to you to help me accomplish this. These should not be open-ended questions, but prompts to generate specific outputs and assets. Break them down into 4 categories: Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Operations. Be specific and creative.

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Tool of the Week

Find the Perfect Domain For Your Next Side Hustle With Namecheap

Spoiler alert:

You don’t need a premium domain name to build a successful online business.

It’s kinda like having a sleek business card…

Something that makes YOU feel good, but doesn’t have much impact on your customers.

But then again…

It does feel pretty great to find the PERFECT domain for a new biz idea, doesn’t it?

(If you saw our combined domain portfolio, you’d know we think so.)

However, if you’re like us and struggle to resist the temptation to spend like drunken sailors just to acquire a domain you’re convinced you HAVE to have…

Well, then you’ll want to check out Namecheap.

They’re our go-to domain registrar because they offer domains for less across 400+ extensions.

And while it may not amount to much on a single domain…

Savings like these add up quick for any aspiring digital landlord with a growing collection of domain names.

So if you’re in the market for a new domain…

Tap below to check out Namecheap:

Bonus Points

💼 Careers: Millions of Résumés Never Make It Past the Bots. One Man Is Trying to Find Out Why. (link)

💻 Tech: How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use? I Went to a Data Center to Find Out. (link)

🎧 Work Beats: Chill House Music Mix & Outdoor Cooking In Cozy Cabin - Flavour Trip (link)