The Secret of Successful Freelancing

Photography: Ninja M.

It looks like the ideal way to work. There’s no commute, no boss, no schedule and no Friday evening assignments ready to ruin a planned weekend. As a freelancer, you’re in control of your own fate and your hours are your own. That’s also true of the unemployed though, and for many freelancers, the difference is little more than a change in the title and the numbers on the unemployment check. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to be a freelancer – even a freelance writer – and make enough to pay the mortgage, feed the family and have a little cash left over to enjoy your Saturdays.

It all comes down to a mixture of professionalism and contacts – and it’s the professionalism that’s hardest to acquire.

When you work for a company, your success depends entirely on your position in the hierarchy. Whether you rise, stick or leave relies on your relationship with your boss – and on his or her relationship with your colleagues. Being an employee might mean being part of a team but when only one of the team is heading for a promotion, it also means a dog-eat-dog environment in which your prime concern is you. As a freelancer though, it’s never about you.

It’s always about the client.

The Freelance Customer Is Always Right

Whether you’re writing content for the Web, producing code for websites or designing graphics for ads, as a freelancer you’ll soon find that the customer really is always right. Even when he’s wrong about the project, he’s right when he says that if he doesn’t get what he wants, he won’t pay. The result is that successful freelancers quickly learn to lose their ego and focus on the client’s demands. You get to voice your opinion, but the decision is always down to the person who holds the purse strings. That relationship between pay and performance really does bring out a different kind of professionalism, one in which you genuinely try to put yourself in the client’s shoes and deliver the product he didn’t even know he wanted.

That professionalism should grow naturally, with experience, and with the pleasure of receiving freelance pay. Contacts will come the same way. Freelance careers often start with nothing but an Elance profile and a dream of a better way of working. Sometimes, they’ll come with a client or two in the form of a former colleague who’s moved on to a different company. But eventually, they build up to a point at which you’re serving a handful of clients most of your time and contributing to a number of others some of the time. The trick is to make sure that your biggest clients are kept happy while you keep your eye out for new clients to replace them should they decide to pull the plug.

It’s not an ideal way to work – it means not one boss but lots of small bosses, and urgent work still comes in on Friday afternoon – but it is still a great way to earn a living.

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