Freelance Weekly

As a freelancer, I’m sure that it’s your desire to serve your clients to the best of your ability and keep them so happy that they come back to you for more work . (If that’s not your desire then you might want to rethink what you do).

For the most part, people come to you with normal requests and you do them.

If you’re a freelance graphic designer, people come to you looking for graphic design.

If you’re a freelance writer, people come to you looking for content.

Makes sense.

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One of the great privileges that come with the freelancing lifestyle is the ability to travel whenever and wherever you want. One day you could be in Thailand, and the next you’re in Costa Rica.

And your customers don’t care where you are, because you do all of your work over the Internet. Life is good.

But with this privilege, also comes risk. Carrying a laptop makes you a prime target for theft. And, because laptops tend to get thrown around a lot, they also stand a greater risk of damage than a desktop PC would.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll give you some basic freelancer-specific advice for picking an online backup solution that will help protect the data on your laptop while you travel.

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All seems to be going well. Your client seems happy. You’ve been delivering work. But then they disappear. No word from them. In fact, it’s so quiet you think you just saw a tumbleweed drift by. 

Where did they go? What did they do? Was it something you said?

I’ve faced this problem a number of times in my career and I still face it from time to time today. If you have been freelancing for a while, you’ll likely have faced it too. Click here to read more »

I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me early in my freelancing career:

I had several clients, most of them were short term gigs (less than a month’s worth of work) and only one or two were longer than six months’ worth of work. And then I got a call. A friend of a friend of a friend worked at a big company (read: HUGE company) and needed me to do some work. I dropped almost everything to take on that new client. We had a successful run for 3 years and I made a lot of money.

But times change. Needs change. And, after a while, the company’s needs changed and they no longer needed my services to the same degree that they did. Before long I found myself without that one client, but since they were about 90% of my income, I found myself with barely any work!

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photo credit: skryche

You provide your freelancing service with the hope of getting paid. And for the most part, that happens at some point. But the longer you’re in business, the more payment situations you’ll encounter: There’s the client who pays on time. There’s the client who pays late. There’s the client who doesn’t pay at all. And everything in between. So how should you manage your payment?

I’ll give you some options and share my thoughts with you on these options:
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photo credit: JOE M500

Although a lot of business is won by who you know, I find that many freelancers gain the majority of their business by writing queries or proposals and submitting them to the right people. Some use freelancing sites like Guru.com or Elance.com. Some just mail out unsolicited proposals to target companies or magazines. There are different techniques like this that work for different people. But generally speaking, unless you’re networking first, your business is acquired through a written proposal. Click here to read more »

You may have heard of this rule of thumb in business: “Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick Two.” It is as relevant for freelancers as it is for any other business.

As a freelancer, you can only be two of these things:

• Good and fast, but not cheap.
• Good and cheap, but not fast.
• Fast and cheap, but not good. Click here to read more »

photo credit: Adeline Yaw

I had a freelancer contact me in the fall and was expressing frustration over not getting any clients. His work was fairly specialized and we bantered back and forth about some ways that he could write for a broader audience about his specialized topic. Click here to read more »