How to work as a freelancer: features, necessary skills, tips

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

A lot of people are thinking about how to work as a freelancer if you don’t know how, especially feeling the unstable situation in the country regarding pensions and social guarantees, which are one of the significant advantages of working in an office. The modern world offers everyone the opportunity to choose: to go on a free voyage, looking for orders on their own and selling their services personally, or to leave this task to the employer? Bear the risks yourself or leave it on the shoulders of your boss, the owner of the company? Recognizing what awaits a person who wants to work as a freelancer is not difficult in advance.

Upgrade specialization

Before you go free swimming, you need to prepare the ground. In particular, it is worth the first time to earn extra money in freelancing, while remaining at your current job. This will allow you to upgrade your specialization, as well as experience all the delights of such work. You will need to get used to organizing your work yourself, to pump self-discipline.

Before you start working as a freelancer from scratch, it is better to gain experience in courses, exchanges. Luckily there are a lot of them now. The forums of those who already make money on the Internet will be useful.

Specialization

If a person plans to engage in advertising on the Web, a training course will be needed for sure. Although there are those who independently receive a Google AdWords certificate if they wish. If you plan to do design, you should pay attention to the lessons of Lynda.com. If you want to edit, you should look at, for example, the lessons of Gorbunov's school of editors. Yet nothing teaches you how to freelance without experience better than practice.

Start

In order to gain experience, you only need to register on the freelance exchange - since there are a lot of them on the Internet now.

After registering, you need to take the first orders and complete them. Do not despair if the first amounts earned are small - wages grow quite quickly with experience. It is easier for a specialist with a portfolio, rating and reviews to get the best orders at the highest prices. With practice, the habit will gradually develop, and work, search and selection of orders will go much faster and easier. It will be possible to predict your approximate monthly earnings at such a pace of work. And after that, you should think about leaving the main place of employment. It is likely that those who previously thought about whether it is possible to work as a freelancer will decide that this format does not suit them and change their minds about doing it. And someone realizes that this path is ideal for him.

By the way, it helps many in this processmaintaining your blog. An audience for a resource on such topics can always be found with proper management. After all, many are interested in how to start working on the Internet as a freelancer, and the information presented through the eyes of a beginner will be very useful for them - it will be easier to figure out what's what in this field. For some, blogging later helps attract new customers.

Make Connections

A useful experience for those who are considering how to work as a freelancer on the Internet can be visiting all kinds of conferences on the topic, reading thematic communities, getting to know interesting projects. You should read the book "First Say No" by Jim Kemp. Acquaintance may turn into orders in the future.

Learn tools

It is worth familiarizing yourself with the principles of Skype, Google Drive and getting into the habit of contacting the customer in case of any contradictions. It is best to discuss issues in person, rather than in lengthy correspondence. It is better to leave documents in the cloud storage - this reduces the risk of losing work, and it also allows you to provide access to them to any project participant.

IP registration

The next step to consider for those who are thinking about how to start working as a freelancer is registering yourself as an individual entrepreneur. If the clients are large, it is simply inconvenient for them to cooperate with an individual - because of this, taxation becomes more complicated, and this entails legal risk.

IP is convenient to transfer payment, no need to worry about taxes. But ohtaxation will need thinking for those who are thinking about how to start working as a freelancer. To do this, in the future you will need to get acquainted with the systems "My Business" or "Kontur. Elba". They allow you to calculate taxes, track income.

In addition, these systems provide an opportunity to present an invoice to customers in a simplified manner, to monitor payment. When starting an individual entrepreneur, you must choose a simplified taxation system.

Drawing up a contract

Those who have overcome all these steps and continue to think how to work as a freelancer on the Internet competently should pay attention to drawing up their own contract with customers.

It should include a clause that states that letters with electronic signatures are equivalent to paper documents with signatures. The easiest way is to draw up your own contract, taking as a basis a model from the Internet and editing it, making your own additions, and writing some points in your own words.

Good habits

Those who, having roughly understood how to work as a freelancer, begin such work, it will be useful to familiarize themselves with a number of habits of more experienced people.

So, it's better not to start your duties in a place that is not intended for this - there will be many distractions in bed or in the kitchen, and the mood is not at all the one that is needed for productive activity. As a result, a task that takes 15 minutes can take up to an hour. It is best to equip yourself with a suitable place - a comfortable chair, a table with a lamp. Periodically hereworth tidying up. Then the work will go much faster. Sometimes those who think about how to work as a freelancer start to complete the first orders in an inappropriate environment and, doing them for too long, being distracted, eventually become disappointed, because a beginner does not earn much for a small amount of work, it is most often a penny. For this reason, it is worth thinking about efficiency in advance, having arranged a suitable place and realizing that wages in this area grow in proportion to experience quite quickly.

It is recommended to choose the boundaries for the working day, for example, from 9 am to 6 pm. It is worth notifying customers and colleagues about this. And then there will be no situations with urgent requests to fix something at 12 at night.

Productivity increases if you break the day into parts by type of activity. For example, in the morning to deal with routine, during the day - the most difficult tasks, in the afternoon to call customers, colleagues.

Those who started working as a freelancer without experience sometimes have the feeling that life has become a continuous time spent in front of the monitor. To avoid this, it is worth setting a clear mode. For example, work starts at 10 am. There will be temptations to sit down for her at 9, but do not give in to this temptation. It is better to do exercises, have breakfast. Then in the brain there will be a feeling of a day in which there is a place for both work and other activities.

Don't forget that pauses in work are necessary. You need to get out to the store, for walks. Nothing terrible will happen if a person does not respond to letters instantly. Thanks to"Reboot" the brain will recover. And it is often during pauses that solutions to the most difficult problems come to mind.

Better to go out. When choosing where you can work as a freelancer, you should pay attention to cafes and coworking spaces. If a person is in the same room day and night, it is not surprising that he will soon become sad. Going to work, the park or the library will be a great dilution of the routine.

Don't skip meals. It is best to go to a cafe where business lunches are available. Interaction with people will dilute the working day.

Remarkably, clothing also has an impact on productivity. Pajamas will relax. But if you clean yourself up, it will draw a certain line between work and leisure.

Where to work

Before you work as a freelancer, you will need to decide on a specialization - what kind of services to sell on the Internet. There are about three dozen professions in demand in the Network, and there are many areas of employment. It is better to give preference to the area that is most interesting.

The area where a freelancer works can be design, journalism, word processing, website building, tutoring, engineering, contextual advertising, social networks and so on.

In the field of journalism, copywriters stand out - they are specialists in working with text, but the scope of their activities is quite extensible. Salaries and complexity vary depending on tasks.

As a rule, novice freelancers become rewriters. This is within the power of even a schoolboy, in generalanyone.

The task is to rewrite the finished texts in your own words and edit them. The salary in this case will not be big, but it will be a great experience at the start.

Professional copywriting requires experience: this includes headlines and text design, and writing “selling texts” is often required. Naming tasks also require professional skills. The payment in this case is already higher.

Those who speak foreign languages should pay attention to the work of a translator. The need for them on the web is huge.

The next demanded speci alty is a designer. This is where education can come in handy, but it's not required. It is enough to take courses, during which they mastered graphic editors. There are many free courses on the Internet. By going through them before working as a freelancer, you will easily find customers.

Programmers can also easily find customers on the Internet. And here also no special education is required - practical skills are needed. And the need for such masters is huge, because every site needs technical support. Layout designers, WEB-masters, front-end developers are in demand in this area. You can learn the skills necessary for these professions in just a month.

Another freelance activity is advertising and marketing on the Internet. The main professions are contextual advertising specialist, SEO-optimizer, website promotion specialist. You can learn them by gaining your own experience duringsite creation. But in this case, there is hardly any desire to work for someone instead of developing your own promising project. The second way is to take special courses or work in a company that promotes on the Web.

Specialists in setting up advertising campaigns are always in demand, because any project presented on the Internet needs to constantly attract customers. And if everyone is capable of “draining” all the money from the advertising budget, then far from everyone is capable of spending it in such a way as to bring customers. And a craftsman who is able to choose an attractive design and correctly launch it on the Web will always be valuable.

Another answer to the question of how to work as a freelancer would be a recommendation to administer communities on social networks. There are a great many of them today, and every day there is a need to publish content that someone needs to follow. All that is needed to master such a profession is to learn how to design posts on your own, rewrite articles, and master a graphic editor.

Where to get clients

One of the ways to find the first customers is to inform everyone you know about your services. It is worth telling everyone about your new profession. Probably someone will be interested in these services. But the main source of clients is freelance exchanges.

It is enough to register for them, it is better to choose the largest ones. There you should fill in the data about yourself, telling about your advantages, and then take the first orders. When building a portfolio, it is worth taking on even the smallest orders. Let at first the payment be a penny, then positive reviews will become part of the portfolio, which will allow you to take larger and more interesting orders. In addition, this will allow you to fill your hand, figure out what's what.

It should be borne in mind that at this stage it is not necessary to linger for a long time. It is best to look for where to work as a freelancer, further. Indeed, in this area it is quite possible to build a career. To grow professionally, you need to constantly learn new things, experiment and take on more and more complex tasks. Someone develops their own unique style of writing texts and begins to unwind on this. The services of extra-class specialists are really expensive.

Another option is to create your own team, take on large-scale projects. As a result, it develops into a studio, a separate business. This path is suitable for those who like to communicate with clients and manage.

Tips for beginners

Typically, the first year of freelancing is the hardest. And don't forget about it. Probably, for those who want to work as a freelancer, it will be difficult at first to work at home, make your own schedule, and search for clients. Sometimes there will be difficulties, and income will fluctuate from the ceiling to the baseboard. This is fine! Freedom is responsibility.

It is best to focus on finding repeat customers, as they are the most valuable customers. Thanks to them will be createdstable salary. Do not be afraid of the first modest fees. If the customer notices that the freelancer is doing a good job, it will be possible to discuss a rate increase. It is also recommended to train your negotiation skills.

Don't worry when one of the clients refuses to cooperate. A situation is considered normal when out of 15 potential customers, only two place an order. And for a professional freelancer, the indicator will be the same. It is best to allocate time for rest - an hour or two.