The Complete Guide to Freelance Success
Essentially, a freelance job is one where a person works for themselves, rather than for a company. While freelancers do take on contract work for companies and organizations, they are ultimately self-employed.
Freelancers are responsible for all sorts of things that traditional employees are not, such as setting their work hours, keeping track of time spent on different projects, billing clients, and paying their own employment and business taxes. Freelancers are not considered “employees” by the companies they work for, but rather “contractors.”
Step 1: Find A Marketable Skill
The most important, step is to find a skill you can offer as a service.
This can be something as simple as transcribing a podcast or something advanced like developing a mobile app. Whatever it is, the key to winning in freelancing is to find a skill that you’re good at and has enough demand in the marketplace.
For example, if you’re good at drawing illustrations or designing product packaging, go to a freelance marketplace like UpWork or Freelancer and check to see if there are jobs for that type of work.
If there are enough job listings on those sites for the skill you’re good at, then you’ve hit gold.
Step 2: Polish Up Your Skills
Once you find a marketable skill, you should make sure you can offer it as a service. Simply put, you need to be really good at what you do to be able to get paid for it.
For example, let’s say you want to be a freelance writer for health and wellness blogs. This category has good demand. You also have experience writing about it in school or college.
However, that doesn’t mean you can write blog posts for online audiences. Blogs and online publications use very different writing styles and formatting for articles. Mainly to attract general audiences.
So now you need to learn how to write blog posts for online audiences. Learn how to use WordPress. How to make graphics for articles. And more.
It’s the same for every other freelancing skill out there. You can’t just jump right in without even trying to learn the basics. You must polish up your skills first.
Read books, subscribe to YouTube channels, and blogs related to your skill and industry.
Also, taking online courses is the most effective way to properly learn and polish up a skill. Check the links below for recommendations.
Deloping a skill from scratch takes time. So be patient and keep learning and practicing. It could take weeks, months, or years. Just keep at it.
Step 3: Find The Right Freelance Platform
This step plays a crucial part in how easily you’ll land jobs and the quality of the clients you’ll be able to work with.
A mistake most beginning freelancers make is search for the most popular freelance marketplace and join to get started. Like UpWork or Freelancer.com.
These sites are already filled with millions of freelancers from around the world. And due to the competition, they engage in bidding wars to win jobs. They will constantly lower their prices in order to land the job. And it will get you nowhere.
So the best approach, and the approach that worked wonders for me, is to pick a marketplace that’s fairly new and join it. It’ll have fewer freelancers so you’ll have low competition. And it will increase your chances of landing jobs.
Step 4: Create A Portfolio ON FREELANCING WEBSITES
A portfolio can be a website or a webpage where you showcase all your work.
For example, if you’re a graphic designer, you can create a portfolio page on a site like Behance to show off all your designs. That way, when you’re reaching out to a client, you can simply give them the link to your portfolio to check out your skills.
Make sure to only include your best work in the portfolio.
Step 5: Try Freelancing Part-Time
Freelancing is not everyone’s cup of tea. The process of marketing yourself, selling your services, and dealing with clients can be overwhelming.
If you’re not sure whether freelancing is the right career path for you, just try doing it part-time.
Spend a couple of hours every day working on smaller freelance gigs. And learn the ways of freelancing.
When you feel ready to tackle bigger projects, then you can decide whether you should freelance full-time or leave your day job.
Step 6: Send Your First Proposal
Writing a proposal to a client needs to be done in a careful manner.
It’s not like writing a regular email or writing a social media post. You need to put serious thought into it and figure out how to persuade your client to give you the job instead of all the other freelancers.
There are some tips and hacks you can use to your advantage when writing a winning proposal. I can’t go into all the details here, so please check out the links below for more info on the topic.
Step 7: Deliver Beyond Expectations
Once you land a job, the next step is to make sure that you deliver the project just as the client has asked.
Or, in this case, I want you to overdeliver the job by going above and beyond the client’s expectations.
I’ll give you an example. In the early days of my freelancing career, I used to get jobs for writing blog articles with a fixed word count like 1000 words. What I did was write the article to be about 1100-1200 and also include a unique header image for the blog post when delivering it. Without charging extra for it.
The clients were always happy with my work. And gave 5-star ratings.
So find a way to do work that goes beyond expectations. And learn to stand out from the crowd. That’s the only way to build a lasting career as a freelancer.