IS FREELANCING A
CAREER?
[Content]
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.
[Elaboration]
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.
[Elaboration]
[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.
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