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A freelancer is a self-employed
person who offers services, often working on several jobs for multiple clients
at one time. Freelancers usually earn money on a per-job basis, charging hourly
or daily rates for their work. Freelance work is usually short-term. While a
freelancer is not officially employed by another company, they can be
subcontracted by other businesses. It’s common for freelancers to work on
several different jobs or projects at once, but some freelance contracts may
restrict who else the freelancer can work for until they complete the project.
Some of the most common freelance jobs are within creative industries such as
graphic design, copywriting, website development, or photography; however,
freelancers can work in almost any service-based industry, such as translation,
consulting, or catering.
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Self-discipline
Freelancing gives you freedom, and
you become your boss. This sounds fascinating, but at the same time; you need
to be self-disciplined. You have to be very sincere about your work. Especially
if you are an online freelancer, you are bound to get distracted easily. You
need to understand “Time is money“, and you need to keep your focus on your
work.
The most important factor of
freelancing is to finish the projects within deadlines thus if you are planning
to start freelancing make sure you have good time management skills. Initially,
it may sound like not a big deal kind of thing, but as soon as you move ahead
in your career, you will face the biggest problem of getting stuck in multiple
things. If you stay organized from day one, you are bound to get success.
Self-motivation
When you are working with a
company, there are many programs and factors to help in motivation. But, when
you work alone from home there are lots of factors which demotivates you or at
least you can feel the lack of constant motivation. Problems with
friends/family, lack of productivity, not enough earning, the bad day with the
client and lots more, these factors can easily drag you away from creativity
and your work. Thus, If you are like me who needs a mentor to keep me motivated
and help you to get best out of you then to freelance would be the tough job
for you.
A good idea is to keep your
freelancing desk surrounded with stuff that keeps you motivated. It could be
anything related to your earlier work, photos, motivational posters, or
motivational music in background. Once in a while, you should consider watching
motivational movies, to keep pushing you for more.
Dealing with clients
Apart from dealing with motivation,
discipline, and planning, you also need to deal with your clients to get
success in freelancing. The first job is to search for clients for the services
you provide and for that you need to be innovative in your marketing skills. Once
you get a lead, you need to interact with him for pricing, job requirement and
other information related to the project. Not every client are the same, and
every time you will be dealing with different kind of clients. Few of them will
be perfect to deal with, and few of them will be the biggest critics of your
work and would hardly get satisfied with your work. Thus, if you can’t take
criticism, then it’s going to be a tough way to be a successful freelancer. You
have to keep your ego aside and learn to deal with different type of people
when working online.
Money Matters
Maybe freelancing is your dream
work, but you can’t ignore earning. Earning is always secondary when have
passion in what you do but it do count. Thus, before leaving your full-time job
make sure you have sufficient savings because it might take the time to start a
good earning as a freelancer. Lack of money might discourage you. Once you are
fine to start with freelancing, you need to be confident about your work and
charge for your services according. Analyze the market, clients and then decide
how much you are going to charge. And do remember “never put all eggs in one
basket.”
Build your portfolio
To get better clients, you need to
work on building your portfolio. When you work with freelancing sites like
Freelancer.com, upwork, it’s becoming easier to create a portfolio. At the same
time, you should work on building your personal portfolio on your personal
website. WordPress makes it easier for any freelancer, to get their portfolio
website up and ready with few minutes of work. Not only you can showcase your work,
you can also add a blog to it, to target more clients from search traffic.
Having your own website will help
you to get more clients, and will also cut down the middle-man cost. Thus
helping you in getting better clients with better incentives. This is highly
recommended, as you can’t always rely on freelancing sites for new jobs,
because couple of bad reviews on these freelancing sites, might become biggest
hurdle of your freelancing career.
Above are few factors which you
must consider before choosing a full-time. Sharing these factors doesn’t mean
that you can never be a successful freelancer, I shared it so that you know
what basic qualities a freelancer should have and if any of these qualities are
missing then you can improve them and give a kick-start to your freelancing
career.
[Source]
a) One of
the website, that many beginners hit is freelancer.com, as it has very good
ranking on google, given the advantage it gets because of its name.
b) Another
good website is oDesk.com (now upwork), it seems to be the most famous website
for getting a job done.
c) A very
interesting online marketplace that started in 2010 and was able to acquire
good portion of freelance job market is fiverr.com, the name fiverr came from
its concept that the seller have to create a gig of the services that they are
willing to provide for $5, the buyer can browse through various gigs and choose
the service they would like to buy, there is option to attach a video to your
gig which made it very interesting to browse through the gigs.
d) There
is another good website for crowdsourcing called peopleperhour.com where the
users, i.e. the buyers and sellers, are mainly from the United Kingdom, maybe
because it was founded in London. But nothing restricts you to join and get or
post work there.
You must
be wondering how do the payments take place internationally on websites like
these since most of the time the buyer and the seller are from different
countries, to facilitate the payment there are various online payment systems
supported by these websites, the most famous of these payment system is Paypal,
it takes some amount for every transaction it handles and provides a secure and
smooth experience to transfer or receive the money.
One of the
most important thing about profiles on these freelancing websites is the
rating, a user has, after completing a job the seller and buyer have the option
to give rating to each other. If a profile gets good number of good ratings
they tend to attract more customers and thus have the option to take more
orders or increase the price of the service they provide.
There are
many service based startups which have these websites as the main source of
acquiring the projects. The same can be checked by visiting the sources I
mentioned and estimating the money flow that happens on these crowdsourcing
websites. Because of websites like these people have the option to sell their
skills across various countries and build their business abroad a lot more
easily.
By my
freelancing career I was not able to make the money I used to see flowing on
the internet because I was choosy about the projects I accepted and some other
reasons. If a person’s target is making money by freelancing, there is
considerable market online.
