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 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.

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.

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.