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.

Working as a freelance professional gives you great freedom over your own work and as such you can really excel if you put efforts. But before diving straight in, you should bear the following points in mind, which can really help you to have a smooth startup:

Do Not Stop Your Regular Job So Soon

It is always better to start off with a well calculated plan and expectation. Thus if you are really confident that leaving your 9-5 day job will not hurt your initial stagers of freelance career, you may chose to do so. However, if you have any doubt or uncertainty, it is better to continue working for couple of months. Then leave when you have really understood the mechanism of freelancing and started to generate good sustainable revenues.

Prepare Yourself to Work Hard

Freelance job gives you many amenities but it is also true that you really have to work hard and often more than then usual regular job. Thus don’t be taken a back when the workload is more than you expect and of varying category such as marketer, accountant, writer etc.

Time Management

Time management is something that is challenging to every freelancer. In the world of freelancing, time management is the single most crucial aspect. It is better that you plan everyday ahead of time and try to stick to that schedule as far as you can. However, there will be many distractions which can make thing harder, thus take necessary amount of free leisure too.

Avoid Procrastination

Do not get over confident and maintain a calmness and self-discipline in your work and everyday life. As in the end of the day, you still have to deal with Client’s project.

Spend Wisely

It is better that you be careful with money matters in the initial days of your freelance career. As you need to have money to invest in your business and to do marketing.

Networking

Having a strong network of clients and friends is the basis of getting continuous work. Thus you should really focus on building a strong and long term relationship with fellow freelancers, clients and blog readers. Try to make friendship with other freelancers, distribute your business card, send emails, read blogs and comment on blogs and do anything you deem will help you to spread words about your work and skills.

First Project

First project is always important and you should complete it with good effect and given project deadline. This will surely impress client and an admirable testimonial from him will surely help to get more clients in the future. Perhaps, the same client will give you more freelance jobs in the future.

Do Not Stress Yourself

This is vitally important to remember that you do not stress yourself buy working overtime in a continuous manner. As the saying goes, “Health is Wealth”, and thus you should never really compromise on your health issues as at the end it may cost you a lot in terms of money and reputation.

Enhance yourself

Always keep on enhancing your skill sets. This really opens up many other opportunities and helps you deliver quality product.

Forget Useless Stuffs

As you progress along, you will see many things are different than what you have though. So be prepared to unlearn those stuffs and move along with the ones that benefit you the most.

Thus before taking off, every freelancer should have a thought about these points and make decision accordingly.

This post is summarized from 10 Things To Keep In Mind When Starting Out As A Freelancer.

Photo by FreshPeel.com.

Freelancing business has many forms and shapes. Each has its own dimension and each individual freelancer find different issues to be their main obstacle in their way of success. This article will illustrate some of the common challenges that the freelance designers of these days have to tackle with:-

Looking for Client

Initially, it is a challenge for many freelancers as they are new and naive in this field. The effective way to tackle this problem is an aggressive self-promotion.

Networking

To get a really good client base, the freelancers often has to have a strong network of people who can both be taken as client and people who can hire clients. This network of people will grow steadily as the freelancer goes through his job with success. Always keep your portfolio shine.

Marketing

Marketing is another big hurdle for newbies. The knowledge of marketing is as essential as the ability in doing the work. Without effective marketing, no one will figure out your service and you will not be able to grow your client base.

Managing Clients

It is really challenging to manage all types of clients in design projects as clients will ask for basically anything that comes into their mind regarding project at any point of time. But for the freelancer, it may become very difficult to effectively handle all the requests. Failing to do so brings the profit margin down and also offends the clients.

Pricing

Pricing is of great confusion to many freelancers. How to evaluate the project or how to set the price standard are something that puts many freelancers into a state of total ambivalence. However, the best to set the price according to your skill level.

Maintaining Workload

Sometimes the pressure of work can be too much to handle and easily the freelancers can lose their time track, which may affect their other jobs in hand and personal affairs. The effective solution is to draw a plan of time-frame and stick to that plan at any cost. Read more about How to Balance Your Freelance Life?

These are some of the obstacles that a freelance designers have to face in a consistence basis. But it differs person to person which one is their biggest nemesis for them. For example, one designer can find the ‘Pricing’ to be the foremost problem, but for a newbie designer, ‘Getting the clients’ can be the hardest challenge. All in all, with effective plan and execution, all these can be neutralized.

After talked about freelance jobs tips, it is time to share the winning tips on bidding freelance jobs. This article is extracting the juice from Thanks to Top 5 Tips When Bidding For Freelance Work by DailyWirtingTips.

Freelance work can be of great boon to those who are eager to free themselves from the confinement of regular office work and are willing to accept some unheard of challenge initially. So how you merge yourself into this world of freelance jobs? The most practical answer would be through Freelance Jobsites such as GetAFreelancer.com, AsiaPartTime.com or Elance.com.

Clients first post what exactly is their requirement in terms of budget scale, timescale and description of the work. By reviewing all these details, you will bid on and from multiple bidders, client will choose one as he sees fit. So as you can realize this system is heavily reliant on mutual trust, thus having various loopholes for agreement breach. This article is aimed to admonish those unsuspecting freelancers who may become a prey of many perilous setups:

KNOW THE CLIENT

Get to know the client first, look for their profile in the web site, look for their company web site, and have other freelancers put favorable comments against their ID? Go through all these, besides check if the posted job description seems coherent and detailed. After you finish studying the client, if any of these is missing or sounds unethical or unprofessional, then I guess you better sidestep the offer.

DO NOT DOWNGRADE YOURSELF

Do not lower your bid rate just for the sake of getting more and more work, eventually this trend will make you look unprofessional and cheap target, and you’ll not be able progress forward in the industry, so demand according to the current trade.

BE CONSISTENT

Sometimes you may find that after the deal has been official, the client banked in a payment little less that the agreed upon, from this point you can either choose to accept it, showing a type of kindness or you can vehemently reject it. My advice will be not to bend down with this curtailed payment, instead write a concise but articulate email to the client saying your inconvenience about the payment scale. If the client seem unsure, help him to attain a satisfactory height, making you both content.

JUDGING SAMPLE WORK

Sometimes clients will want some samples (Often free of Charge) of your work, which will effectively express a black & white proof of your potentiality. However, be careful as the fraudulent client will later try to play you away and thus keeping the sample to him, so that he can use it for his own purpose. So in this scenario best you can do is to demand a copyright on the samples, so the client will not be able to make use of it without your consent. If the client happily agrees, then you know that it is for real and the client is actually serious about continuing with the offer.

DO NOT ASPIRE AFTER ILLICIT INVOLVEMENT

By any means do not get into something that is illegal. Such as advertising for something that does not exist, build up reports based completely on falsehood, or directly stealing contents from somewhere without giving credit etc; because if you are indeed targeted for infringement of cyber laws, then it will not take that much effort for the cops (with the aid of networking gurus) to trace you back even if you were under disguise.

Thus by adopting the practices outlined above, you will most certainly manage to skirt unnecessary blows. All the best for your freelance career.

The one and only pillar to captivate client interest and intrigue them to such a scale that they continue to keep coming back with new projects, is to entertain all those previous assignments with all your aces. This is a market strategy that will not fail and doesn’t fail. However, you are not a programmed machine, as a soul with flesh and blood, your desires in exchange of your work must commensurate with proper rewards, or in simple declaration.

The client also must reflect generously, so that your inner-self becomes suffonsified, sharpening and streamlining your talent to deal with more and more projects with constant proficiency. Below are a catalogue of 28 (25 from FreelanceSwitch + 3 from AsiaPartTime) genre of repayments you should ask from your client:

Asks from AsiaPartTime

1. KNOW THE CHAIN: Ask the client how did they came to know you, from where they’ve heard about you and your work, this helps to select more marketing options and fortifying the ones you’ve now.
2. ARRANGE THE PAPERS PROPERLY: You should write a formal contract paper where it must be stated that if they retreat from payment then what should be done, make it signed and stamped.
3. EXPORT THE EXPERIENCE WITH YOU: Ask the client to share the experience working with you to his friends and other contacts, they will remember and when they will need, they’ll contact you.

Asks from FreelanceSwitch.com:

ASK FOR A DOWN PAYMENT: No paucity of fraudulent clients in the venture of haunting down freelance figures and their privation. So, be smart, arrange a down payment and refund papers in case you fail to comply. This way, you save yourself from a probable debacle, and in any case, genuine clients will not voice any grievance. Normally, we request 50% of the total project cost as down payment.

ASK FOR EXTENSION OF DEADLINE IF REQUIRED: Sometimes you can get overboard with the assignments, thus declining your performance. If that happens, then take a break, do something fun, but do not lax too much, least you miss the deadline, but in any case if you do, then do not hesitate to ask for an extension, keeping yourself perked up is as important as dong the work itself.

CLARIFY THE REQUIREMENTS: You must be able to glean the exact expectations from the client. Client may not always be able to express it clearly, but aid him, assist him by asking things that may not seem obvious to him at first the place. This is a vital step of basically any project.

ASK FOR REGULAR EXPECTATION: To client, the product may seem ground-breaking some day and average the other day. But if you believe your work is consistent, then ask your client to have a consistent expectation. But ensure that you have some kind of quality measurement installment installed in place.

ASK FOR RECOGNITION : When the client is really over the moon with your performance, ask for some kind of recommendation letter, this will indeed help you in the future to get more assignments.

SEEK FOR REFERRALS: Ask your clients if they know anyone who could utilize your service, and ask if you are permitted to contact with them and introduce yourself.

SEEK FOR TESTIMONIALS: If you have a black and white proof of your work, from your satisfied client, then it boost your chances of getting more work, some good words written in a mere paper do hold a lot of strength. Please you like our community, please do give us a testimonial as well.

ASK FOR ANY SUGGESION: Develop a friendly relation with the client, feel free to ask for if anything he deems worth changing or enhancing.

CHURN OUT EXCLUSIVE TIME ZONE: If the client is always sticking like glue, then you may feel constrained and thus may not perform optimally, do not lay back, tell your client that you too need some time alone.

UTILIZE CLIENT’S BUSINESS: You can do freelance works in exchange of not only money, but also you can trade your skills with their own business or service they provide.

FEEDBACK IN THE FORM OF SURVEY: One great way to get feedback from client about your work is to prepare a survey and get it completed, and you also preserve it for later comparison. Here is some online survey templates you may try out.

CLEAR PAYMENT ISSUES: Do not keep those important payments for your work pending for too long. The client may have been forgotten, in that case it is your duty to remind him in an amicable manner.

SOCIAL NETWORKING: This is as important as normal life networking, create a profile in few popular social networking sites, and send its link to your clients who already have this kind of profile, then you’ll get to know people in a much quicker rate and vice versa. This is a much cogent way to get and manage contract outside your current country.

ASK FOR BONUS: Ask for a bonus of your work which you think you can do it in a very very professional diction with splendid offshoot. And obviously in a tactical manner.

TRY TO TIE UP A CONCRETE CONTACT: If your work is grand, client is satisfied to the brim, ask if you can also be taken as the permanent choice for that specific skill.

KNOW CLIENT’S EMAIL: Always good to have a way to communicate other than phone, and in modern days, any professional person do hold an email address. I would recommend you to use a CRM tools to keep track all your customer information. One of the best CRM tool are Zoho-CRM. It is a free CRM tool and it is comparable to SalesForce.com.

ASK FOR REFERENCES: Before hitting a deal with client, ask them if they’ve worked with other freelancers before or not. If you see a long list and most of them unhappy ending, then you better think twice before running into any paperwork.

ASK FOR A SHOUT-OUT: If the client already have any kind of blog site or ezine article, then ask them to put a shout-out on behalf of you.

LOOK FOR TIPS: If your client runs a successful business ask for tips from them, try to get more knowledge about how things flow.

ARRANGE A PROPER DEADLINE: Fix the deadline with enough time on hand, do not pressurize yourself, that may hamper work quality.

ASK FOR BUSINESS CARD : Don’t hesitate to ask for their business card, it’ll project what is the actual occupation of the client and will also show professionalism.

GET PHONE NUMBER: It is important that you hold on to client’s both office and personal contact number.

ASK FOR RECONSIDERATION: If the requirements look to gaudy and convoluted and the final objective can be achieved through a much simpler form of design of requirement, then approach the customer with your idea.

CLARIFY THE REQUIREMENTS: How much obfuscate may be the client’s idea seem, clear first.

LOOK FOR COMMENTS: If you run a blog or participate in social networking sites, ask the clients to leave a positive comment about your work if they are satisfied.

Following these steps can bring the best of performances out of you, and out of your client too.