This is the third part of our series of maximizing freelance revenue by adopting the most effective 25 ways of going about freelance business.
11. Use Your Time
It is vitally important that you make every possible attempt to make use of your work hours to achieve some progress with the project in hand. If you squander away the work hours on a regular basis, then it is very difficult to catch up later on. So try to focus and prioritise the working hours for useful work only.
12. Being a Blogger
This is always a good idea to publish your work related stuffs that may help you promote your business in a better and globalise manner. Write about the nature of your work and also publish contents showing how your service can help the customers to grow their business. This will eventually attract the customers if the content is catchy enough.
13. Networking
It is a good and effective idea to network as much as you can with common mass and fellow freelancers. This will surely help in spreading words about your work and thus getting the leads. The fellow freelancers can also help you in passing their own project if they are too busy or if they lack the required skill set. All in all it doesn’t at all hurt to have an expanding network of people, both clients and other freelancers.
14. Save Ideas
You should save any creative idea that may flitter through your mind during a project or you find from some other place. Though it may not be needed for the running project, it may help you in future projects thus greatly saving your time and reducing your effort. More importantly, by doing this you are using your thoughts and creativeness in an optimum way.
This article is the second part of 25 tips showing how to maximize your freelance opportunities.
6. Be Dedicated
If you are taking up a project, you are certainly putting yourself into a commitment with the client and you should do your best (But be logical about your own life as well) to produce optimum result.
7. Keep a Record
It is best to keep a record of every expenses that you have to incur. If you have a dedicated room designated as office in your home premises, then you should have separate record keeping books for home and official expenses.
8. Do not Under-Sell Yourself
It is important to understand that at the initial stage you may not be so successful with high prices per project, but, it is also a fact that if you sell yourself too cheap. It will affect your name in a negative way as well. Thus be logical and use the following formula to go about setting project rates:
- Rate = RM R / H hrs
- R is the desired salary that you expect in a year
- H is the total hour in a year that you think is possible for you to work on projects.
The general trend is to have 15 workable days in a month with 8 hours of work, thus it gives you a total of 1440 hours in a year. The rest of the time will be spent upon other purposes such as administrative tasks, marketing, enhancing skills, having some breaks, etc. Once you know you hourly rate, apply to that in each project to determine the final rate. Besides, you should also increase your rate with time as you grow more experienced and professional.
Working in freelance mode can generate a good turn over in terms of income and freedom of work. However, to make this trend consistent, you have to ride out some rough issues such as being overworked at times and boredom. Therefore, you must apply some techniques to tackle these factors and gain maximum profit.
This article is introducing the 25 freelance tips in a five series article. Below is the initial first five workarounds:
1. Be Selective
Be choosy about which work you should accept and which you should leave out. Because, some clients will have projects that are either way too spread out or they will offer low rate for their projects. In that case it is just a time waste to engage as the project will bring too little of a profit for an extended amount of work.
2. Improve Reusability
When you work for multiple clients at the same time, in many cases you will have two or more clients dealing with similar kind of project. In that case you should do your research in such a way that you can use the information for both of the projects, thus not having to undertake multiple research attempts. Your clients will not be bothered about this at all, in fact they will be happy that you have completed the task faster than they expected.
In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.
Here are the top 8 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.
It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. (Now, this blog has a 1000++ readers, are you one of them? If no, Join us now!) Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.
Top 8 How-To Tips
8. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.
7. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.
You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.
Blogging is a good way to earn some side-cash in your spare times. And it is also a suitable way to leave a mark in the world of freelance writing. Obviously, earning is a major point to note in this work. You will surely want as much as you can get from your writing. However, it is not always the ideal case. In many cases the blog owner will have a set price to pay you for each post you write. The price will not be stated in the advertisement, and it will be decided upon negotiation. So, when you place your pre-determined rate, you should be aware of the following principles:
What Is The Market Rate?
The idea is to check from other advertisement about the type of blog you are going to do. Surely few of them will have it price stated and you can get a fairly good conception about the general pricing. Normally, picture and jokes type blog are really short and thus least paid, while blogs on specialist field such as law, information technology or medical usually pays the highest and in length these are longer than the other types of blogs. Check out the rate for blogging jobs at our job board.
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