Talking Shop With Fellow Freelancers
I found one of my long-term clients in my area through a freelancer I know. I chose my CPA based on advice from another freelancer who lives near by. Having a solid network of connections with other freelancers in your area can make a big difference in a freelance career — even simply getting together every few weeks and talking shop can make help you make the connections you need.
9 Steps Towards Genuine & Effective Networking
Early in my career I overlooked the value of networking and keeping in contact with people. A few years after my first job change I had lost the contact information and even forgotten the names of many of my peers that I didn’t work with on a daily basis.
After starting my own company I became acutely aware of the power of keeping in contact with people when I got a call out of the blue from a past co-worker that turned into over $200,000 of business for my company.
Here are some of the techniques I use to keep in contact with people:
14 Golden Tips for Beating the Freelancer Blues
Freelancers, like their artist and writer predecessors, such as Vincent Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf, may be prone to depression, starving, and self-obsessing. To combat the freelancer blues, you need to schedule some sunshine into your calendar.
Here is a list to save your mind, body and soul from the snake pit.
How to Effectively Tackle A $50,000 Freelance Project
Effectively taking on a huge freelance project can be daunting if you don’t know where to begin. This article shows that by breaking the project down into bite-sized deliverables, combined with leveraging the experience of outsourced, professional specialists, can yield positive results in terms of both quality of output and freelancer happiness.
The most treasured of all freelance consulting gigs are the ones that offer huge pay and high prominence. Successfully implementing one or two of these types of projects can be a huge boon to your portfolio and can help garner you even bigger and better contracts in the future.
10 Tips for Getting More Personal Interaction as a Freelancer
Having the ability to work from home rather than in a traditional office setting was probably one of the major attractions to freelancing for most of us. However, working solo from home can be a real challenge due to the lack of personal interaction. Although the peace and quiet of working alone is a great benefit, there are times when most of us would prefer to be around more people. If this is ever the case with you, here are ten things you can do to get more interaction as a freelancer.
Why You’re Already Multilingual, and How It Can Help Your Business
No matter what our background, most of us can speak a foreign language. One that’s completely opaque to anyone who might be listening in. It’s the language of your industry.
So what’s your second language? Is it ‘web dev’? (Take this quick quiz – have you ever used the words ‘CSS’, ‘XHTML’, ‘sFIR3′ or ‘Javascript’ face-to-face with a client?). Or do you lapse into ‘designer’ or ‘blogger’ when you get excited?
Whatever your second language is, chances are either you or your clients are losing something vital in the translation. Every industry creates jargon, acronyms and product-words that aren’t in any dictionary, and mean nothing to outsiders. And then individual companies have their own variations on the dialect.
4 Simple Guidelines to Becoming More Social While Maintaining Your Success
Most of us have heard the cliché about the single freelancer who works around the clock from their home, devoid of any social life and consequently a sense of real purpose and meaning. The nature of freelancing lends itself to late nights and long hours, and we tend to shut out the world around us. We focus all of our energy on clients and deadlines, but we lose focus on one of the essential pieces in the pie of life: social interaction.
I was that cliché freelancer. All I was concerned with was becoming successful in my freelance career. My time and energy was completely consumed by my projects. When I finished one project, my focus quickly moved on to the next. I felt empty. I had everything I could have asked for from a freelance career, but in the process I had left my social life in the dust. It came to a point that I couldn’t even remember the last time I had a meaningful conversation with someone who wasn’t paying me!
I wanted to keep my success, but I knew changes had to be made to live a more social lifestyle. One night I sat down in my office and came up with 4 simple guidelines that would improve my social life, while also maintaining my freelance success.
Best Friends and Working From Home
After placing the last plate in the dishwasher yesterday, I poured in the detergent, set the dial, and burst in to tears. It was not the chemicals or the hormones. Okay, probably a little bit of the hormones. Okay, probably mostly the hormones. But it was also because it’s been almost a full year since I made the freelance switch, and I was ready to admit to the kitchen sink that I am, in fact, lonely.
Look, I don’t get lonely. I clutch jealously at control of my life and my time like the One Ring. Days and days will go by and I’ll happily not leave my office except to go to Mass, at which point I’ll pile my purse and jacket in the pew next to me and daaaaare you with my eyes to sit on the other side. And if you do plop yourself there, you keep your sticky paw to yourself. I will genially wish you peace from my five-foot bubble of personal space, my brother. And also with you.
Nonetheless, yesterday I realized that I cannot remember the last time I have been shopping with another woman, and surfaced in tears because of it.
“But,” said my husband as I wept on him over this, “you don’t like to shop. We couldn’t afford to shop even if you did.”
“I knoooooow.” I covered my face with my arm.
“Aren’t I your friend?”
“You don’t understand about shoes.” Continue Reading
Turning Clients Into Friends: Why It’s Worth Doing
I spent last week freelancing for a client of mine, but for a change, I didn’t work remotely. Nor did I work from the client’s office. Instead, I invited my client to spent the week working from my apartment near the beach in Sydney, Australia.
Despite the fact that my apartment is far from equipped as a home office, the week was a roaring success and concluded with a message from the client the following weekend saying how enjoyable the week was, and that it was “probably the most fun and best quality work” he’d been exposed to.
Like any professional relationship, relationships between freelancers and clients are built on trust. Even more trust exists between a freelancer and their friends. How much time do you spend working on those small, unpaid ‘favors’ for your friends? Probably more than you should. But they’re your friends, and you want to get it right. Imagine a friend who also paid you well — you treat every project like it’s your own and obsess over the smallest of details to make sure it’s perfect, then get paid what you deserve. It’s a best-case scenario for everyone. Continue Reading
