Questions

TL:DR ~ Start with understanding your intentions, discover what you’ll offer, package it well, and promote your personal brand.

The Long Answer

When it comes to success as a freelancer there is no one secret to achieving it. The quicker you can embrace this reality head-on, that there are no silver bullets or magic wands for achieving success, the faster you can actually get there. When you've stopped looking for secrets and begin the hard work of moving forward in your freelance career, you'll also find it's much more fulfilling when you arrive. For those ready to do the hard work today, I've got some guiding principles to help you get there more effectively.

Yes, you can earn five-thousand dollars per month one dollar at a time. Now while it may seem impossible to make it happen, it's actually quite simple if you break it down into smaller pieces.

The Oxford definition of freelance is as follows:

“Working for different companies at different times rather than being permanently employed by one company.”

I’ve had multiple clients haggle my rates as a freelancer. When I first began, my capacity was not full. So in these cases, I preferred to have some work at a lower rate than no work at all. As a result, I was willing to compromise within guidelines. While my hourly rate at the time was seventy-five, I set a minimum cap at sixty-five dollars per hour. This prevented me from lowering my prices too much but gave me the flexibility to work with certain clients while I built up my business.

Yes. My suggestion is not to use an alternative system, and instead, find clients through relationship and authority building.

When I first started my marketing company years ago, I used a service called Guru, which was similar to Upwork. I landed several gigs and cultivated some client relationships, but it was difficult to build a book of business from this source alone.

Question: How do I clear out the background of my photo so I can place the chain on any background and the chain looks natural?

Type: Technical, Image Editing

There's a magic wand function with the free tool, Pixlr.  Photoshop also provides this function. The magic wand tool allows you to clear out the background of an image, but for it to work well, the photo needs to have a solid background color. The more complex and precise method requires some illustrators skills. If you know how to use Illustrator or the open source alternative, Inkscape, you can use the pen tool to cut out exactly what you want. This approach is akin to a surgeon with a knife, so it's harder but more precise.

Freelancing requires we operate it like a business (because it is!), and it requires a commitment. The responsibility that comes with this commitment includes activities and tasks we don’t want to do. So, while many leave traditional employment to escape doing the things they don't want to do, the reality is freelancers do more of these activities. While freelancing gets hard, there is a greater reward when we push through and arrive at a state of flourishing. If we don’t want (or are not skilled) to do certain activities and still freelance, we need to earn beyond our personal goal so we can pay vendors or other freelancers to fill those needs for us.

On the other hand, one way to differentiate ourselves from others is a willingness to do hard things. When we embrace this tension, we’ll do well as a freelancer and the longer we do good work, the easier it becomes to have a steady stream of paying clients.

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash

This blog post is part of our question and answers series on freelancing. Do you have questions about freelancing? Click here to submit them for future blog post consideration.

Short Answer To "How Do Freelancers Increase Their Capabilities?"

1. Have an opportunistic eye for seeing the potential to help a client and learn new skills.
2. Work on new capabilities with existing customers that we have an existing relationship.
3. Be upfront about our lack of experience and skill-set and leave the decision up to them about moving forward.

And If So, What Advice Do You Have For People Hoping To Pursue This Path?

Yes! It’s not only possible but many people actually do it!

In 2016, I logged 1,425 billable hours and generated $115k for the year. My average hourly rate was $81. For 2017, I'm on track for an increase of 10%.