How to Start Working as Freelancer - How to Become a Successful Freelancer?

Everyone wants to work by their own now a days as it's difficult to work 9 to 5. Working as Freelance is great idea to peruse your career but it's not that easy to start freelancing. You should've enough knowledge to start working but how can you gain that enough knowledge? 

The first most important thing is, you'll have to first choose your interest and area of working such as digital marketing, web design, web development etc. First, choose your interest and then find the best institute or company where you can get training.

After completing training, you'll have to first start a job and working for a companies for few years to gaining experience. Where you will get a chance to work on live projects, communication with clients etc. Let's supposed you choose a digital marketing for your career then you should gain experience in overall digital marketing such as SEO, SEM, SMO, PPC, ORM, Email Marketing, Content Marketing etc. Once you spend few year such as 3-4 years, you can think about to move to the next step (Building your profile on Freelancing website along with your job).

Choose your suitable Freelancing website to build your professional profile as the UpWork is best Freelancing website in the world. You can also choose other Freelancing platforms such as Hubstaff talent, freelancer.com etc. But, UpWork is best recommend platform to choose. 

Once you create your profile, fill out all the details such as work experience, education, portfolio etc. and start bidding. You can do all these while working on a day job and once you've enough work to start as Freelancing then you can leave your job and start work as full time. This is the best way to start Freelancing as because you'll build your professional experience step by step as first start from the training, gain experience by working for a companies and then step into being as individual Freelancer.

Now, you'll reach on the point where can become a successful Freelancer but still you'll have to do a lot of things to grow your freelancing business. Here are the most important things to consider:

- Keep Bidding: its very important part of the freelancing business that you keep bidding for new projects because you don't know how many contracts you'll have in future. So, you'll have you to maintain a balance and keep working on maximum number of projects to make more money.

 - Keep Trying: It's quite normal that sometimes you don't get your first clients in a while as there are several reasons behind this such as because of your fresh profile, because you're not doing it into right way etc. In that case, you should keep trying to get your first clients and sometimes it takes much time to achieve but you'll get your first client.

- Provide Quality Work: Its always important that you provide real quality work to your clients as it takes only a minute to post a new job to find new Freelancer. That's why, if you want to stick with each of your clients for long term then you'll have to provide quality work. No matter if you've to spend some extra time on the each clients work.

- Look For, Not Just Long Term But Lifelong Business Relationship: its always recommend that you look for not just long tern but lifelong business relationship with your clients. Even, if you can able yo find about 3-4 long term clients then it'll be easy for you to maintain your business growth as because you don't need to find new clients and prove yourself.

- Build Your Profile on All the Freelance Platforms: When you started working on a one freelancing site then you should also build and grow your profile on another sites. So that you don't dependent on the one platform you see the site owners can update their policy etc. which can impact on your profile anytime. That's why, if you lose your main profile then you'll have another profile to work on.

- Get Your Portfolios Ready: You'll always need portfolio of your previous work as the new clients usually ask for the portfolio or work examples so that they can see your experience in details. You should also add some Portfolios to your Freelancing profile to showcase your expertise.

- Stay Updated: When you start working as freelancer, you separated with the people and professionalism that means you'll don't know what's going out there. That means, you'll have to stay updated with the industry trends, topics and important updates.

 - Build Your Own Business Website: When you become freelancer, it'll become your liability to bring in more clients and work no matter from where you get it. Probably, you'll first find clients on freelancer platforms then LinkedIn etc. So why not setting up and promoting your own website for offering services? You should also setup and run your own business website (Low cost) where you can offer your services. You can get your website ready with the best domain and hosting provider - NameCheap.

 - Maintain Your Freelance Profile: While working as freelancer, you'll get all kind of clients and employers some satisfy with your services and some not. No matter your provided 100% quality work but still there are people out there who'll will not be satisfy with your services and who'll give you bad feedback. So, it's also important to maintain that as you'll have to remove all of those bad feedback. Top freelancing websites such as UpWork gives option to remove 1 bad feedback from freelancer profile. This way, you'll have only good feedback on your profile which brings you more clients.

 - Choose Your Hourly Price Carefully: Every freelancer has their own hourly price which they choose according to their expertise in their working area. You should choose your hourly price very carefully as you shouldn't have too low or too high price. As because, if you offer too low price then client will think that you don't provide quality services and if you offer too high price then it can be budget issue for client etc. That's the reason, you should've a right hourly price to offer to your clients.

 - Always Offer Plan/Proposal/Strategy: Whenever clients discuss their projects with the freelancers, they got confused with the several things as because they aren't the experienced person but we're. So, whenever you start project discussion with any of your new clients then you should always offer them that you can prepare and provide them the plan and proposal or the strategy to start work. Which will help them to understand what will you going to do for their projects.

 - Don't Accept the Pennies: While finding new clients, sometimes you get clients who're ready to hire you but they're offering you too low price where you get confuse that you should do it or not. You should be very careful in that situation because it can impact on your future jobs. For example: Previously, you were working on a project for $8 per hours and then you start working on a project for $5 per hours. So, your hourly price should be increase not decrease and all of the future clients will think that you can easily work in less then $8 per hours. That's the reason, you should be very careful when you get low price projects. The right solution is, first you can see if the price is too low then you shouldn't accept that but if the price is nearly fine then you should work on a fixed price contracts where no one will see how much per hours you charged to client.

 - Think Out of The Box: When you keep working on your clients projects you'll get several thoughts on improvements or you may have several suggestions for them. So, you should always provide suggestions and recommendations for your clients about their projects. Which makes your client think that you really care for their business and it'll improve your relationship with your client.

 - Keep Your Profile Up on LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service where you can connect with the professional people. This is the place where you can find not just clients but also freelancers who may help you or work with you in future.

 - Keep Saying You're Freelancer: As freelance platform isn't only place where you can get new clients, probably you also use more platforms such as social media sites Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. where you can also showcase your freelancer profile which may help you find more clients.

 - Spare Some Time For Your Reputation: As most of the freelancers spend all of their time to finding new clients and working on current projects which is good thing to do. But, you should also spend some of your time to maintain your reputation, update your profile, update portfolios, posting some updates about your experience on social media or blogging sites etc. 

 - Try More Skills: If you're a digital marketing expert then it doesn't mean that you can't work on web development related work. You should always expand your knowledge to more areas where you can work on new skills which may also beneficial for you in your future projects. For Example: You're discussing with a client about their project and the client is looking for a person who can promote their website in SEO and who can also post articles into their WordPress website. So, if you've knowledge in how to edit a WordPress website then you can post articles on client website along with the SEO work. That's the reason you should also build your experience in more areas such as website development related work, managing CMSs etc.

 - Keep Working on Passive Income Ideas: After being a freelancer with several years of experience, most freelancers think of many ideas where they can earn passive income. When you'll start as freelancer, probably you'll think that you need more income sources as because you aren't sure how many projects you'll have tomorrow. That means, you aren't sure of how much money you'll be making in next week, next month or next year. That's why, it's very important that you start work on passive income sources for yourself so that you can secure your future.

 - Avoid Account Suspensions: You'll have to carefully follow all the terms & conditions of the freelancing platform you're using as the websites like UpWork has some strict policies which may bring you in trouble by suspending your profile. UpWork is suspending dozens of freelance profiles no a days due to several reasons which you'll have to take care of. There are several reasons for the suspension of the accounts For example: If you're bidding on the projects but you aren't getting client response or project then UpWork may ask and give you timeline of one month to bring project or else your profile will be going down permanently or temporary. That's the reason, you should follow all of their terms and conditions very carefully and if still you get into trouble then you should have plan B.

 - Keep Thinking on Converting Your Freelancing Career into Business/Entrepreneurship: As per my expertise, most of the freelancers think after several years of working as freelance that they don't wanted to work as freelancer anymore and I do feel the same due to many reasons. The main challenging in freelancing career is, always finding new clients and working on them, you get a Email about your ended contract anytime which makes you little tense about how to get new one. That's why mostly people want to move to the better business plan. So whenever you got a business plan to move from freelancing to business, move it right away and don't wait.

These are the most important factors, considerations and details about becoming a successful freelancer. Basically, there's a great scope in any kind of freelancing work and there are a lot of benefits scubas as you don;t needed to work for a company or work 9 to 5 job. But, it's also true that there are several other things which are too hard to manage. If you're keep your mind straight and follow the above guidelines given in this blog post then you'll definitely be a successful freelancer.

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