Five Pointers to Help You Get Your Freelancing Career Off the Ground
People are ditching their traditional 9 to 5 desk jobs in favor of more modern and adaptive forms of employment at an increasing rate in today’s society. The term “freelancing” was once used to refer to this phenomenon; however, it is safe to state that this concept has recently obtained an undertone that is best described as being mixed. It is a term that is frequently used to denote very difficult labor, a great level of unpredictability, and unstable pay. Because a modern freelancer is primarily beginning a lean business, which depends on one’s skills and instinct, we prefer the term “solo entrepreneurship” because it more accurately describes the situation.
You might not consider yourself to be an entrepreneur, but the truth is that you are putting yourself in the same position as other people who are beginning a full-fledged business and facing the same challenges. Choosing to work for oneself as a freelancer is an endeavor that can be extremely lucrative, but it is also extremely difficult and requires a great deal of self-discipline and sacrifice. However, those who are successful in this endeavor will never be able to return to working in an office setting.
When embarking on a career path that relies solely on your efforts, there are a few key pieces of guidance that you need to keep in mind. In this post, we will go over those five essential pieces of advice.
Be Conscious of the Value That Your Time Carries
Your time is the first factor that needs to be analyzed so that you can determine its value. When we work for ourselves as compared to when we work for another person our sense of time can shift in unexpected ways, which can make certain situations challenging.
When we are hired for a job, we have a natural inclination to find out as soon as possible how much our employer values the time that we put in on a monthly, weekly, or hourly basis. We typically think a lot less about the worth of our time now that we are freelancers rather than employees (we are using this term for clarity).
The Majority of This Can Be Attributed to Two Factors
We have the propensity to think an excessively long way into the future. When we begin a new project in our lives to see it through to completion, we tend to fixate on the result and view every day’s endeavor as an “instrumental” step on the path to the ultimate prize, which is to be our managers and earn a living that is satisfactory to us.
This is a healthy mentality to have because when we make “something from nothing,” we have to consider what will happen to us in the distant future. In contrast, we need to ensure that we properly manage our finances by implementing a cash flow strategy that has been meticulously planned. It makes no difference how much money you are going to earn in the next year; the most important thing is that you get there first.
If you don’t come up with a plan for generating income in the real world, regardless of how much money you have saved up, it’s likely that you’ll go through it all very quickly. This is because cash flow is directly related to your ability to earn a living and plays a significant role in your professional life. Because of this, many people find that they need to keep a stable income while they wait for their freelance professional life to take off, which is why they work two jobs at first.
There is a good chance that your budget only accounts for the costs of getting started, and not for testing. In the process of launching your company, you may find it helpful to perform some estimations concerning the costs that you’ll need to meet to “set up a base.” We don’t generally take into consideration the fact that the initial phase of launching a company is not “hard selling” in the sense that it is “testing” our goods and services, generating a community, and determining the best business strategy to serve our clients.
However, this is a crucial step in the process of starting a business. Before investing any money into the creation of a physical structure, it is something we strongly recommend testing out in several different ways first. In the vast majority of occurrences, our presumptions about our target audience will need to be modified in several different ways. A thorough testing phase might go on for anywhere between six months and an entire year. This stage can take a long time because many of your company’s assets will consist of personal relationships and connections, both of which require time to cultivate and develop. As a result, this stage can take a long time.
You Have to Educate Yourself in the Art of “Speaking Business”
You have likely chosen to leave the relative ease of an office job to participate in a talent pool that is significantly larger now that you are working as a freelancer. Presently, however, you ought to keep in mind that working just one job is not likely to increase your chances of being successful, and this is something you need to take into consideration. When you work as a freelancer, you are responsible for becoming every department of your business.
This indicates that you cannot restrict yourself to “doing what you do best;” rather, you need to educate yourself on how to be successful in all aspects of life and make time for this education. You must be able to organize workflow processes and time management strategies that will allow you to take care of different aspects of your professional role as you arrive at this realization.
When I first began my freelance business operations, one of the most difficult challenges I faced was determining how much money to charge for my services. Some people will tell you that you ought to charge an hourly rate, but I don’t see why you would want to do that: if you are going to be charging more for speedy delivery, then time will work against the profitability of your business.
In addition, pricing is a highly unpredictable and intangible component of your overall marketing mix. The same price level could either be too high for some customers or very cheap for others, depending on their individual preferences. Because of this, pricing cannot be determined by the work that is performed but rather by the impact that it has. This is referred to as ROI, which stands for return on investment.
How do you go about doing that? You can do this by educating yourself on how to “talk business” and calculating how much extra income you will make for your customers. If you are successful in accomplishing this, you will receive two significant benefits:
You will have the ability to present yourself as an investment that will yield a distinct and quantifiable return. Because of this, you will be able to set the price of your services at a significantly higher point as a result of the fact that they will yield a measurable return.
You will be in a position to place more of an emphasis on quality rather than quantity. Using this method will also enable you to organize your time. You will be able to amass high-return projects if you locate a high-quality niche and produce results in a manner that minimizes the amount of time they require. If you do not pursue a quality-oriented mindset, you won’t be able to overcome the “employee mindset,” and even if you do not have a manager, you will put yourself against the cutoff date, like you would if you were a classic old worker.
Create a Business Model as Part of Your Overall Portfolio Strategy
Your time is the most valuable asset you possess as a self-employed professional. Your top priority should be improving how effectively you manage your time. As your professional career progresses, you will need to develop your workflow processes and make use of a 247 uptime that will keep you “fully operational” even when you aren’t performing any work.
You must have a website up and running, but if I were to do that, I’d just be setting the stage for the rest of our conversation. What you ought to be doing is ensuring that the efforts you put into delivering each task can be repurposed and recycled. This will allow you to derive numerous sources of income from a single project. The following is an explanation of how this process works:
- Acquire a Fee or Commission
- Record the findings of the research you carry out to deliver the service you’ve promised, and produce a postvideo discussing it.
- Distribute the content to improve both your presence online and your search engine optimization ranking.
- Make use of the traffic generated to solicit email addresses from site visitors, and then use those emails to keep your customers informed and educated.
- Make use of promotions to increase your number of commissions and solidify your brand.
This workflow demonstrates how a single day’s worth of work can translate into a one-time payment, a piece of the material, a lead magnet, or a strategy for the acquisition of new customers. Your time has just made itself five times more beneficial.
This systematic approach provides you with the opportunity to reflect on your work, optimize it, proofread it, verify it through the public, and generate an archive. This is a supplemental “intangible” benefit of the approach. The completion of tasks such as these ultimately determines whether an individual is a self-employed businessperson or a full-fledged business professional.
Maintain a steady speed and get your work uploaded to the internet so you can capitalize on the various revenue streams that will eventually result from each of these activities aimed at fostering community. It is essential that we can cultivate a community around our products and services. This topic is covered in greater detail in a five-step process that can be used to launch a business online with very little capital.
Distribute, Instruct, and Pursue Similar Endeavors Repeatedly
There is no way around the fact that talent is one of the most important factors in achieving success. The foundation of your business plan is the talent you possess on your end. However, you should not let this fact cause you to become overly egotistical because the abilities of other people are just as useful as your own. Because of this, all of us, whether we are consultants, teachers, or managers of corporations, are essentially in the same business, and that business is talent pooling. You need to give some thought to strategies that can both attract and keep talented people, and this calls for a dual positioning strategy:
A Strategy for Positioning Yourself in the Eyes of Your Potential Customers
You need to get customers and potential business partners interested in working with you. This is typically done by marketing companies through the invention of a storyline that produces your professional standards as well as your “reasons for arriving at work.”
A Positioning Strategy That is Geared Toward the Individuals Whose Talents You Wish to Employ
This can be accomplished through a variety of means, the most common of which are instruction and the exchange of information. The opportunity to improve oneself is what drives the brightest and most talented individuals, not the prospect of financial gain. This leads to a statement that goes against common sense, which is that you should charge a high price for your services, but you should give away your knowledge for free.
It Didn’t Work? Do It Again
The single most important component of success is tenacity. Those who are successful are not necessarily those with the most natural ability or the most financial resources; rather, it is those who can persevere that achieve their goals. This doesn’t imply that a freelancer should continue to engage in activity that is not generating any results; conversely, successful freelancers learn important lessons, continue to develop and keep trying new things.
The fact of the matter is that to maintain quality, time is required, even in the speedy business environment of today. Luxury brands are a good illustration of this principle because the majority of the value of these brands is derived from the fact that they have a long and illustrious history. You do not have a century and a half to build a legacy brand, but you ought to still prioritize the development of a pledge of uniformity, and developing consistency takes time.