Laiba Shahzad
Being your own boss entails many mundane tasks that require a good understanding of how you go about things. Sometimes, frightened by your freelance niche you get attracted to the tons of gospel advice that are available online. Freelancers mainly start their careers with research and get to know many freelancers in this process. In this process, they get a lot of advice from fairly a large number of people but unfortunately not all of the advice work. No matter how useful the advice sounds, do not apply these tips to your freelancing career.
There are some examples that are available online and my recommendations of what you should do instead of relying on those useless tips.
Bad Tip #1: Communicate only with clients who have already spent X number of dollars
All the clients start at zero and even some of the best clients do not even care about having a work history. It is not necessary that all clients start with huge projects in the beginning, sometimes people start off slowly while strengthening their business to reach big goals. A client’s history is none of your business, your career is not at all linked with their past.
When you find a job that interests you then ask yourself a question, “Am I capable enough to add value to this project?” if your answer is “yes” then start communicating with the client to see whether you can proceed.
Bad Tip #2: Offer free work for New Clients
While starting your freelancing business, most of the advice on building a client list seems horrible. Working for free for clients cannot get you anywhere. It might have helped freelancers in the past, but with the ever-growing business of freelancing all around the globe, this is no more applicable. Get paid for your work and attract clients with the quality of your work.
Bad Tip # 3: Search for jobs using keywords and Filters
Searching for jobs with the help of keywords and filters can deprive you of tons of good job opportunities. It’s better to spend time studying each and every job because it might lead you to your potential long-term client. You do not need to read each and every word of the job that has been posted, just go through the headlines and you will have an idea of whether it is a job of your interest or not.
Finding clients may be difficult but not impossible. Spend time looking at all the online jobs that interest you and you will find clients that might be invisible to common freelancers.
Bad Tip #4: Avoiding Hourly Jobs and only doing jobs that are fixed priced
There is another dilemma that prevails in the list of useful online suggestions for newbies, the hurdle of opting for only fixed-priced projects. According to them, fixed-price projects are good because you earn a lump sum amount by working on a single project instead of getting paid by the hour.
But that is not true, sometimes the “per hour jobs” turn out very profitable. You can charge according to your work and then see what happens next, it might be the start of a long-term client relationship. You can be successful by doing both fixed and hourly paid jobs.
