Are you a thriving freelancer? Or a freelancer looking for more ways to be successful? Are you looking for ways that are brilliant, effective, and super easy to follow? Maintaining a steady work-style is nearly impossible as a gigster, but that’s the beauty of it! And freelancing also leaves you with a supremely vast area for growth and several remarkable options that you can use for success. Here’s a short list of some non-standard ways that may help you become even more successful.
1. Educate Yourself Regularly
In today’s fast-paced world, you can easily learn anything, anywhere. While it would be ideal to physically attend a school, university, or any other educational institute, an online learning program would do just fine too.
Continuing your education will not only help you learn new things about your field and improve your expertise in it, but will also keep you updated on the newest trends, designs, and updates in your niche.
The world is constantly changing, advancing, and moving forward. What you must do is make sure you don’t fall behind in this fast-paced era. Continuing your education will ensure you are up-to-date on new trends and help you grow and be successful with new knowledge.
2. Join Your Competition
While interacting with competitors in your field can get quite stressful and risky at times, it can also prove to be worth it. There are a lot of other freelancers out there who would be happy to help out another fellow freelancer.
Get in touch with them however you can, (e.g., through social media), and talk to them about their strategies to succeed and getting new clients, and maintaining old ones. This may help you gain irreplaceable tips and might even help you find new clients right away!
You may even be able to work on projects jointly, complementing each other’s skills.
3. Perfect Services Other Than Your Niche
To give off a professional and more experienced outlook to your clients or potential client, add some other services to your profile that you might be willing to offer. They can be services that are related to your niche or they can be services that are unrelated, but where you can deliver projects related to it.
And if you have no more than two skills to show or services to provide, think about learning a new one. Depending on the skill and expertise needed, you could easily teach it to yourself, or consider taking online classes.
This approach can let you grow your skills incrementally breadthwise or depth-wise. Each new skill you learn provides a new opportunity to expand your skills offering and be more successful.
4. Understand the benefits of creating a Contract
One of the biggest areas that can gear you up for success in your freelancing career is to understand the benefits of having a solid contract. Among other things, a contract can help to set expectations with your clients. A contract can also help protect you and your work.
A contract should contain certain key information that is very clear. It does not have to be a large tedious document but should at least contain details of the project, when will the project be considered “DONE”, what needs to be delivered, milestones if there are any (especially if you are being paid incrementally), copyright information, confidentiality, clauses for termination, and terms for receiving and processing payments.
A well-structured contract will save you many hours downstream, as it not only provides a professional image but also sets the tone for setting and managing expectations with your clients.
5. Get an Accountant or An Accounting System
To maintain your monthly budget, expenses, successfully manage your taxes, and keep a good record of your payments and invoices, having a solid accounting system is going to make things so much easier for you. Or better still, hire an accountant to take care of your financials.
If finances and taxes give you nightmares, hiring an accountant to oversee the finances related to your business can really lighten your workload. Besides taking care of mundane tasks like tracking expenses and filing taxes, an accountant can advise on specific tax strategies, an issue that becomes more important as your income grows. A competent accountant can also connect you to other experts in related areas such as wealth management and estate planning.
Of course, if you would rather prefer doing it yourself, this can work too. Just remember to stay on top of all tax laws, policies, and processes. Most countries have a dedicated tax web site that you can subscribe to and be apprised of new changes that may affect your business.
Freelancing can be a very successful path towards individual independence. Executing on some or all of the above points may help get you setup for even more success.
