Is Freelancing a Feasible Option For Me?
Many people have been thinking about ensuring they can always work remotely since falling in love with it during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. With so many jobs returning to the office, more and more people are looking at freelance work to determine if it is an option for them in their field of work or whether they can perhaps retrain and change fields to make it possible.
One of the best and worst things about being involved in freelance work is that you are your boss. The upside is that there is nobody to tell you to do, and the downside is that there is also nobody to tell you what to do. Freelance work can only really be successful if you are prepared to put in the hard yards to make it happen. Nobody builds a freelance business overnight, which may involve putting in more hours at first than you were doing with your 9-5 job.
This is because you have to build something from scratch, whereas your company already has an established reputation, so it doesn’t have to try quite as hard to find customers.
First Steps Into Freelancing
Identify Your Niche
The first thing that you have to do before starting up any kind of freelance business is to decide what it is that you want to specialise in. If you have been a software developer for years, you’re in luck, as this is one of the most popular professions for freelancers and is well-established in the freelance space.
Other professions can be more challenging to break through into freelance work. Website design is an excellent skill to have, as is graphic design. Both of these can help to land content creation roles for various clients in the freelance space, and it is just a case of being careful about the terms you accept from people and only working through reputable third-party websites for the first while.
Sign Up for Freelancing Portal Sites
It might seem a little counter-intuitive to sign up for the freelancing portal websites, as they can take anything up to 20% of the value of your contracts as their fee. They tend to work on a scaling basis. Upwork, for example, will charge a 20% fee until you reach $500 with a client. After that, they drop to 10% for that client. If you then get to $10,000 with that client, their fee drops further still to 5%. This is to encourage ongoing relationships, which means that if you land a long-term client, it is in your interests to keep working with them, as you will earn more for each contract with them than anyone new.
Upwork, Fiverr, People per Hour, and the like will all take a fee from you but also provide access to a portal of clients seeking to hire people active in your field. This makes them the kind of opportunity you shouldn’t ignore if you are serious about freelancing. They provide access to millions of job opportunities between them and allow you to create a profile to show off your skills and tell them why they should hire you.
Some fields are more complex than others to gain traction in. Because of the sites' international focus, you will often be outbid in a downward direction by people with far lower living costs than you.
On Upwork, for example, there are people engaged in a furious race to the bottom in each freelancer category. The best way to succeed is to avoid the race to the bottom and never do any work for free, not even a trial article. People never value work done for free, and it won't help you build your professional reputation.
You have to accept that some clients are determined to pay the bare minimum, which you should avoid. High-quality work costs money, and you should be looking to build a solid reputation for providing work that meets and exceeds client expectations. Once you have a few jobs and five-star ratings under your belt, it will slowly become easier to make more money as a freelancer.
You Don't Have to Go All-In
Many people start doing their freelance work in the evenings and weekends, outside their regular working hours, so they can continue with the “day job” and test the waters with freelancing. This is probably the optimum way of making sure you aren’t making a mistake financially and allowing freelancing to slowly blossom from a hobby that earned a few extra pounds to a job and then a career in its own right.
The best place to approach freelancing from is one where you are already paying your bills with your job so that you don’t feel pressured to take on clients offering far too little money for the amount of work involved in the jobs they would like done.
Vet Your Clients
If you are going to find success as a freelancer in whatever area of work you have decided to pursue, one of the most important things you will learn is that you should always vet your clients. This means that you should read their profiles and take heed of any feedback from other freelancers. You can check on most platforms if they have spent any money yet, and how many jobs they have advertised.
If they have been on the site for years but have no ratings yet and have spent no money, this can imply several things. One of these is that they may post and withdraw adverts regularly. One of the reasons to do something like this is to contact some freelancers in their field so that they can offer them below-market rates to do business “off-site”.
It should always be a red flag if someone asks you to take a deal “off-site” so you “save on the commission”. The big players like Upwork and Fiverr are trusted partners who hold money in escrow until you are paid. Getting money from some clients can be much harder without that kind of heavyweight middleman looking out for you.
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