Robert Janelle, a successful freelancer, has his own experience about how to go about cementing one’s position in this field of freelance working. This article will discuss about some tips that he thinks are invaluable when dealing with the growth of freelance career for past 2 years.

Working Over Weekends

Though it might seems awkward to work in weekends, this is what many start-up entrepreneurs do to keep their business alive. They take up other jobs for the time being and majority if them ends up some weekend jobs. Thus any freelancers thinking he has to work on weekends to pull his freelance career, and it may feel boring and listless. They should think that that’s the way to go if required.

Do Not Overlook the Job Opportunities

The motto is, do not throw away any job opportunity listings, be it on the web or on the old college board. You never know, your dream freelancing assignment can show up anywhere and you may well profit from that. In fact you may end up having a permanent source of assignments if your performance is good enough. Thus always keep looking and be through.

Do Not Hesitate

If you feel like something you can contribute to the growth of some freelance web portal or freelance corners, then do not hesitate and just contact with them with your ideas and propositions. You have nothing to loose. If your idea really hits the jackpot, you will surely be valued and will be given a greater opportunity in the future to work with them. Thus you must try otherwise nothing will happen.

An Important Thing to End Off

If you do not find a 9-5 regular job even after spoiling your entire shoe-sole, do not be disgusted. Market yourself directly to the client, you will be benefited. In fact at least it is better to rely on never ending strings of interviews that leads to nowhere.

Thus being courageous and passionate enough will lead you to a successful avenue.

It is true that though freelancing is really a lucrative proposition, but it is not really for everyone. In fact, many freelancers happen to start it, then either fail to cope up with it or just find himself just perfectly suited for it. However, there are few in the market who will suggest that freelancing is really a safe option as even when you come to realize that you will not be able to meet the standards, you can always return to a 9-5 regular job. However, from my point of view, it is not always the easiest as the following points will tell you why:

Lack of freedom

With freelance work comes an unbounded amount of freedom. In fact this is one of the major reasons for which people goes for freelance. However, when you revert back to a regular work, it is hard to concentrate back again. You may not feel at home with your work and thus your overall performance can go down drastically.

Sincerity

Well this actually can vary from one employer to another, but the general idea is that the employers may find it difficult to entrust you with responsibility as you really were out of regular work for quite some time. They may think that you will again fall for it when you will have enough work contacts.

Ill Feeling

Some people will not want to be back in salaried work because they themselves wanted to be a freelancer but couldn’t do so for the lack of courage. They will try their best to hamper your effort to come back.

Skill Evaluation

May be you are really disappointed over freelance work faster than you should. Because you may never know, your skill set probably best suited for freelance environment. And you can profit really good from this field. So before throwing the possibilities out, make sure that you have tried enough and you are just not suited for it.

Thus once you have passed some good number of months in this field, it is not always so straightforward to revert back to your old 9-5 regular job. It will be a good idea to consider the above point before making any decision a final step.

Photo by PN.ORG.

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 :-

Adobe Fireworks CS3

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.

Skype

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.

Thunderbird/FireFox

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.

Pymo

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.

Wordpress

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.

In freelance business, invoicing is requires a great and meticulous treatment in a regular basis. One mistake in this regard can cause significant damage as far as loosing the client. Invoicing means the tasks related to financial aspects of your business. Such as record keeping of your earnings, expenses and profit. Then comes the part of billings, in fact all these are grouped together to be termed as invoicing in a freelance work.

The steps regarding a sound processing of invoicing should encompass easiness in invoicing, securing important data, having effective backup policies etc. This article will illustrate a tool to fulfill these objectives.

The tool is a web portal naming Freshbooks.com. This site has been launched to effectively address the drudgery of billing and many other shortcomings regarding creating invoices in few other softwares. The objective is to save your time, user friendliness, offering a secure and encrypted environment to store the data and accessibility for 24/7.

There are several advantages for which this service has gained popularity in more than 100 countries worldwide:-

• Creating and managing invoices with extreme ease and enjoyable manner.
• Time tracking for expenses.
• Propagating invoices through both snail mail and email.
• Secure acceptance of your payment through Authorize.NET, PayPal, etc.
• Auto-Send capability regarding forwarding invoices and late payment notices.
• Preparing robust reports through an effective report generation module and exporting/importing securely and reliably.

The portal is actually not limited to freelancers only, any other work that requires time management and invoicing can use this product. In the blog section, you can find plenty of useful articles such as Digital Security Practices and Programming Issues.

All in all, it is a great tool. An effective use of it can reap great benefit for individuals and company as a whole.

Last week, we received a request from Siddhartha as below:

"I want to know about the organisation called GoFreelance.com which is earlier known as freelanceworkexchange.com.Is it a fraud or genuine
organisation?" from Siddhartha.

We sent our fraud Investigation Team to review it. Here is the Report:

GoFreelance.com (Previously known as "Freelance Work Exchange") - Launched in 1998, it’s a freelance job search portal for freelancers. It is running by an effective group of freelancers by themselves. Companies requiring work done in the area of graphic design, programming, data entry, web development, article writing, copywriting or other freelance areas can easily find the right person for their work with great ease and in a very cost-effective way.

To start off, you need to be a member of the site. Membership fee is $2.95 and you end up getting a bunch of other free stuffs as well. To get an instant feel, you can go through the Job Search Page and can find out how many job postings are there on your chosen area of expertise. It has a whole section dedicated to writers about the immediate writing prospects and also postings from other clients.

Besides the regular contents, the web portal has good articles and some job pointers on how to initiate a home business, work at home trends, telecommuting, photography, videos and engineering.

For people who want to post jobs, it is free for them. What needed is few minutes to post a job and wait for the freelancers to pick up the offer. However, the client can always cancel the project if she/he is not satisfied with the freelancers proposed criteria.

Normally the freelancer’s base is extremely huge and extends to all form of freelance works. The client can easily go through the list of freelancers available and check out their particulars such as experience, expertise, minimum rate of payment etc.

It has quite a detailed section dedicated to customer queries and questions. In fact the common customer problems have already been discussed quite nicely in its Help section. You have to gain a ticket to get the full customer support.

Overall this web resource is a fantastic one-stop shop for clients looking to get their work done and a great platform for freelancers all over to find the project of his choice in a great number. Up to this point, this site is as genuine as AsiaPartTime. You should give a try.