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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Oxford definition for freelance is as follows:

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

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%.

The key to having time for personal side projects while freelancing full-time comes down to how we structure our work. We need to think in the way that our freelancing work funds our side projects. Simply put, we need to make enough money to work fewer hours on client projects, so we'll have time to work on our own.

Define that income, and break it down into smaller pieces.

I’m continually surprised at how quickly we can accomplish our goals by simply defining and committing to them. Our target income is no exception.