25 Essential Tips for Maximizing Your Freelance Income - Part 2

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.