Most people view freelance work as an unstable career. In some sense, it is true, given that you won’t have a steady stream of projects to do and clients to service. However, when you know which platforms to use to get clients and how to manage your time right, you’ll have more work on your plate, meaning an influx in your earnings. Like holding down a traditional office job, freelancing has benefits and drawbacks.
As mentioned earlier, one of the disadvantages is instability and lack of time to accomplish tasks. Still, these are all easily solved with the help of technology and by enhancing your capabilities and time management skills. Once you improve your work processes, you can unlock a wealth of advantages, including flexibility and possibly generating extra income.
Here are some programs and software you can rely on to start polishing your craft:
Draw More Customers
People tend to subscribe to companies who have established a name in the field, especially for tricky projects, giving small-scale hustlers no chance to appeal to clients. But, a large portion still prefers letting freelance workers handle the tasks, most likely for project-based ones.
Without clients, working freelance will not help you stay financially afloat, so you need to look for the best freelance site where your services are in demand. Upwork and 99designs are platforms that prioritize giving clients and freelancers a space to make deals and score projects. In a globalized world, you’ll surely find a project that will help you showcase your skills.
Make Payments Easy
Working alone means you’re your own HR, finance, and accounting. You don’t have the luxury of depending on a company’s admin to sort things out for you, but these are your finances on the line, making learning how to manage them easy and essential. With the help of bookkeeping mediums like QuickBooks, Authorize, and FreshBooks, you’ll know of incoming payments.
You can also send invoices, set automatic payments, and get paid using credit cards, making it flexible and ideal for your versatile processes. With these, you can monitor your funds and ensure you make your dues before making any big purchase.
Time Management Equals Money
You won’t have a concrete schedule once you get into this career. You have the leeway of budgeting your time according to your needs and grinding enough to earn for a week or a month’s worth of expenses. In this field, you’ll get just as much as you invest, meaning if you work extra hours a day for various companies, you can expect your name to be on multiple payrolls.
Still, you don’t want to take on too many tasks since it may compromise the quality of your work. To help you control your time better, you can use Asana, Trello, Calendly, or Calendar to schedule due dates and know which projects to prioritize. These programs allow you to arrange a dashboard of the tasks you need to get on top of at a glance, helping you work more efficiently.
Draft the Best Plans
Just because you’re in a platform where clients abound doesn’t mean you can get hired right away. Customers will still have to see your skills and check if you’re suitable for a task. But what else can you do to expedite the waiting game and make clients pursue you instead of the other way around? With software, such as Cushion and Bidsketch, you can create and upload proposals that people can see, and if what you’ve crafted is up to their liking, they can contact you and request to see more of your work.
For instance, if your current client is in the law and enforcement industry, you can help advertise their services by creating a website that you can show in your proposal. The website can feature its services and connections to relevant firms, including experienced auto accident attorneys, to make it more helpful for their potential visitors. Repeatedly refreshing a job-listing page and scrolling endlessly to find a firm you can send your CV to will help you find a job, but you also need to look for clever ways to get a gig without the long winding hours.
Communicate and Collaborate
Since you’re an outsourced third-party professional, you can think of working with your clients as a collaboration — your and their ideas merging to birth the best projects. Collaboration comes with the need to communicate constantly, which can be a challenge, considering that you’re working in your home office setup and your clients in their corporate offices. But, with apps like Zoom, Slack, and OneDrive, collaboration and communication are easy.
Communication apps that let your share files, talk to the key persons in various teams and make video calls right away help you get instant opinions on what you are currently working on, helping you save loads of time. On the other hand. Cloud storage apps make getting vital assets easy even when using multiple devices.
Plenty of challenges come with being your own boss, but so do the successes you can experience.
