I recently read on the 4 Reasons Why Freelancing Sometimes is not Desirable. All the while, I am promoting the advantage of full-time freelance life. However, Logan Strain enlighten me on the disadvantage of becoming a full time freelancer. Let’s share her thought with you folks.
Though freelancing has become a revolution in the way people earn their living, some things haven’t changed for years. Many freelancers find it difficult to cope with, which ultimately leads to an abandonment of this avenue. This article will shed light on such 4 reasons, which compels many freelancers to think twice about the prospect of their work.
Children
For those freelancers who are married, it is important to earn enough money to provide sufficient daycare service for the children in the early stages of their lives. Freelancers often do not earn as expected, and they tend to leave out the optional luxuries of life and family. But it is important to remember, ‘daycare’ service is pretty much on the top of importance list for a child. And you must have that extra bit of income to ensure that service for you children.
Free Time
Sometimes freelancers have to work real hard and at a stretch for long hours. If this is done in a regular basis, life can become quite strenuous; which ultimately takes its toll on the health issues. However, with effective time management techniques on a regular basis, this problem can mostly be tackled with good effect.
Insurance
This is another aspect that is vastly important for those freelancers who is having a family. Due to the fluctuation in earning rate and sometimes insufficient revenue, many freelancers might have faced problems affording the insurance. Thus, many freelancer choose to completely ditch this burden of maintaining insurance for his family members, which, in the long run, may not turn out profitable.
Security
The hardest drawback of freelancing is the fact that there may not be any stable pay-cheque at the end of month. If you don’t know in advance how much you are going to earn, it may become pretty problematic to draw up the budget scale. This is one issue that hurt majority of freelancers at some point of their career.
Thus, it’s a mix baggage. If you are truly courageous enough to withstand all this problems with bold virtues, and are ready to deploy counter plans and measures to ameliorate these unwanted situations, you will surely reap the benefit of freelancing.
Photo by Parthshah.
Hey folks, I recently read an Interview With Adrian Diaconescu of Rubiqube. I would like to share part of the interview which talked about essential tools that Adrian used for his freelance work. If you don’t know who is Adrian, here is a short introduction on him:-
My name is Adrian Diaconescu and I’m a freelance designer based in Bucharest, Romania.
Professionally speaking, I tried pretty much everything: the 9 to 5 job, the entrepreneurship,the corporate world. I took the plunge and quit my last day job in March 2007. Since then, I made a lot of new friends and worked on many cool projects.
Freelance design is an exciting form of freelance work, which can be of great fun, creativeness and challenging . However, to successful, modern day designers must use various kinds of available tools. Here is the essential tools to help you success :-
It is a product from Adobe, which is widely in use for creating and optimising images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. The primary advantages the software renders are its ability to integrate between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, improved layer organisation, improved scaling, integrating Adobe Bridge, customisable asset, integration between Flash and Dreamweaver and multi-page support. I guess most of the freelance designers should know about this tool. Personally, I am using Adobe Photoshop to edit some simple images on this blog. Perhaps, I should try out Fireworks as well.
Well-known application to make phone calls over Internet. It is actually free when the called person is also using Skype, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a pretty low affordable cost. All in all it’s a one-stop shop when it comes to communication with your clients. Personally, I’ve been using it to call my customers from oversea in a very low rate. I guess, the rate is cheaper than the rate offered by any of the local telco such as Maxis, Celcom or Digi.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It has number of features that makes it arguably one of the most efficient products in its field. Personally, I would recommend you to Add-On the FireBug to help on website designing. Another good add-on is the color picker which you simply capture a color from any nice website.
It is a web portal aimed at the freelancer and managers who are looking for solution to manage, schedule time allocation and adjustments for the involved projects. It has a central database with all employee timesheets in one place, generate the detailed timesheet reports for each employee (in fact reports on employee performance can also be generated). It is ideal for geographically distributed teams. Use this tool to keep track on your project management.
Software that furnishes a way to manage your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Wordpress is such kind of web based blogging tool. It has various useful and necessary features. Now, blogging is part of the lifestyle for Freelance Designer. Most of them use blog as the platform to showcase their freelance portfolio just like what Adrian did. Perhaps, you should have a good showcase to show off your previous works. It helps in gaining confident from your client.
These were few of the most reputed and useful tools for freelance Designers. Effective use of these tools can really make your freelance life a lot easier.
According to Mike, there are various money-making schemes can be found on the Internet. One of the newest is generating income by giving away free magazine subscription. The idea is to give away free magazine subscription, products and white papers relevant to your blog or website.
This opportunity has been offered by RevResponse, a subsidy of NetLine. To aid you at the beginning, they will give you a co-branded site with a lot of ads and widgets. If you want the official details, this is how RevResponse describes it:
With NetLine’s RevResponse, you’re in the position to give your audience valuable content completely free of charge AND get paid for doing so. As you know all too well, this is practically unheard of. Your users see the value and sign up for the free content, and we pay you a commission on every qualified subscription or download request - including requests from your international audience. Find another network that pays you to give away professional content and resources.
Categories of magazine are various; amounting a total of 600 different offering including podcasts, white papers, trade and business magazines. Popular magazine such as eWeek, BusinessWeek and The Economist are also available. Free offers magazines makes a total of 30 and includes IT, Internet, Small & Medium Business, Sales and Marketing, Finance, Multimedia, Networking etc.
Money is paid on free subscriptions. According to RevResponse: ‘We’ll guarantee you a $1.50 minimum on every qualified subscription/request.’ This can be more. Normal payout is between $2 to $20. There is also money to be made by referring others into the program. The referral range is 20% for the first six months of them joining. Payments are carried out through Check or PayPal. Payments are made in USD and the minimum payout is $50.
The RevResponse team offers both forum and blog where you can get in touch with 100s of other members and actively share information. In the forum there is a section where you can communicate with the admin directly. The RevResponse is a free service and operates internationally.
All in all it is a new kind of business opportunity, which is worth a try.
Earn while Reading FREE Magazine
When you start a project, among the various side factors, completion of the projects within the stipulated time frame is the one that is prominently on top of all other considerations. Things get harder when you are going through multiple projects at a time. However, there are solutions and workarounds as this article will point out some of these.
SET PRIORITY
When you deal with multiple clients, it is important to prioritise the project and rank it accordingly by assigning them various levels base on requirements. It helps you to start the real work with a clear vision. Following is an example:
On a day, you are feeling a bit off and are not finding any inspiration to work for some reason. However, you still have to work as you need to satisfy, let’s say, two clients. So, you can go through any of the following:
- You work too hard despite your adverse physical or mental condition, and finish both the projects, making the client satisfied. But, as you have stressed yourself too much, thus your health can break down, forcing you not to work at all for the next 3 or 4 days; which may easily offend the other remaining clients.
- You decide to complete one project and left the other for the next day, as you know the later client will not be too stressed out and is co-operative, but the former one is not always so co-operative and tends to easily get along if the deadline is not met.
For me, option ‘2’ is much better and suitable for the condition as you are properly evaluating and prioritising the clients according to the merit of their behaviour and the gravity of the projects.
SET YOUR OWN DEADLINE
Before finalising a project, do think about your own ability. If the client asks you to finish 4 articles in 2 days, think first if you can or not. If you are really sure, go ahead, if not, ask for the reduction and try your best to surpass that limit. For example if the client agrees on 3 article in 2 days, finish it and try to finish another 1. This way if you are successful, client will be more than happy, and even if you manage to finish at least 3, you are on the safe side.
WORK IN WEEKDAYS ONLY
Do not work more than 5 days. In any case, do not cross those extra 2 days over, even if you know that you can work. Accept the projects keeping in mind that those 2 days you are not working. In this way, you will always have few extra days for emergencies, chilling outs or sudden events; and more importantly, it is vitally crucial that you take some break in the middle of continuous work.
EVALUATE YOURSELF EVERYDAY
Before packing up for the day, evaluate yourself. Analyse how much work you did against the expected scale. Decide if anything had gone wrong and how to fix that. Also plan how the next day should proceed. You must make this a habit, which will greatly benefit you on becoming a potent performer in your field with time.
KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON SOCIAL OCCASIONS
Social events are part of life and some of them you just can’t miss by any means. However, the problem occurs when you suddenly remember them and then it becomes difficult to adjust with the work you were doing at that time. To avoid this, go through the weekly schedule carefully and properly identify days that will have to be spent on outside events other than work, and schedule your work according to that. This way you will always have a nice balance of work and social life.
Hopefully the aforementioned points will aid you to become a proficient freelancer with effective grip on project deadlines.
This post is summarized from 5 Sure-Fire Ways to Meet Deadlines For Freelancers & Web Workers. Photo by JupiterImages.
Writing for the web entails a bit different perspective than writing in other mediums. A sound blog topic, that leaves a mark in reader’s mind. It is a carefully thought out product based on several abstract and non-abstract issues. When all these issues are dealt with proper cognition, a blog topic is tickled with a touch of life in itself. This article will introduce you with some of these issues.
A CATCHY TITLE
It all starts with a title, if the title of the article is not attractive enough, most probably the reader will not bother to take the time and have a look at it. The title should be something that will function as “Attention Grabber”, and will draw the user into reading the content.
Below are few idea of how you should orient a title:
- Be critical about some controversial issue
- Offer some most-wanted tool or information for free
- Call out a scammer
- Write a tutorial spanning over several series
- A catchy expression on a celebrity
- A well thought out teasing of amusing title
A BOLD CONTENT
Do not be afraid of being bold and shocking at your writings. People want to read something that is different, something that has spice in it. Write with confidence and take a different approach towards audacity at times, and you will never be short of readers.
THE TONE OF WRITING
The voice of your writing should be such that it immediately gives the impression of being friendly and personal with the audience. The reader should feel they are just in the same track as the writer was at that moment of writing. The reader should feel like he is not having to read the words, instead, the words are talking to him.
EMOTION
Emotion has to be there in article to make it enliven. Depending on the discussion topic, the reader should feel inspired, funny, scared or even angry at times. If this feat can be achieved, then you have truly done a great job, and surely the audience will keep coming back to have a feeling from your writing.
PROOFREADING
The article should be free of grammatical and spelling mistake as far as possible. If the readers is consistently faced with some abnormality, he will lose focus and thereby killing the zeal that he had at the beginning. Thus, meticulously proofread few times before publishing.
Thus by practicing more and more the aforementioned points, soon you can be one of the most sought after content writer for web sites.
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