Working From Home: How To Go Freelance

If you want more flexibility in your working life and your day job is unwilling to compromise, you may be considering going freelance. Let’s face it: working from home sounds like a dream. You won’t have to commute, you can get snacks from your kitchen whenever you like, you can wear your PJs to work, and you won’t have to deal with smelling the person next to you eating a tuna sandwich every lunchtime. But the freelance life isn’t completely without its stresses: here are a few tips that will help you start your new career.

Find The Freelance Job That’s Right For You

First and foremost, you need to make sure that the skills you have are marketable. After all, not everything can be done from home. Consider what exactly you’re good at, and then consider how you can shape a freelance career around that. If you’re methodical but creative, you could teach yourself coding. If you’re good at focusing and paying attention to detail, document to document transcription may be something that you excel at. Finally, if you’ve always been a fast and accurate writer and you love working with language, copy writing and blog writing may be for you. 

Create A Personal Brand

When it comes to being freelance, you need to remember that what you’re really selling is yourself. Of course you have skills, but they aren’t what set you aside from other people. You need to make sure that you’re somebody that other people want to work with. Make a website that outlines your skills and experiences, and that makes it very easy for possible clients to contact you. You could also consider setting up social media profiles that you can use professionally – and if you have Instagram and Twitter pages with some risque content on there, consider deleting them or making them private so they aren’t the first thing people find when they google you.

Work Out Your Finances Carefully

Nobody goes freelance because they’re extremely excited about learning how to write an invoice and chase up their payments, but it’s an important and necessary part of the job. Creating an invoice is something that you can learn to do online, but making sure that you actually get paid is, in most part, about perseverance. A lot of companies have intricate, knotty inner systems that mean the person you’re dealing with may not be connected to the accounts and payroll departments, which means that sometimes there can be delays in payment. Keep following this up frequently, and make a note of what exactly you’re supposed to get. Ensure that you save some of that cash. Finally, when people suggest that you work for free, remind them that experience is great but it doesn’t pay your rent. You deserve to get paid for what you do.

Finally, it’s important that you make sure that you stay motivated. It’s so easy to procrastinate if you work from home, but nobody really wants to do a project that should have taken five days in one extremely stressful night. Plan out your time wisely and if you find it hard to focus, make sure that you time yourself working and then give yourself breaks.