Top 5 Skills to Boost Your Freelance Career
Working remotely and having the flexibility to create your own schedule is a dream for many of us. While these roles aren't as common as they used to be in the corporate world, you can still gain this experience as a freelancer.
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| Top 5 Skills to Boost Your Freelance Career |
Most freelance projects do not adhere to the constraints of traditional employment relationships and have the freedom to choose their clients. This autonomy allows freelancers to diversify their income streams, choose the projects that interest them most, and enjoy a greater degree of flexibility in shaping their work life.
Thus, success as a freelancer requires a unique set of skills that take time, effort, and proactive action to develop. If you want to make it big as a freelancer, here are the best skills to help you grow your business and continue to grow personally and professionally.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is a popular job for freelancers. But even if you don't work in this specific niche, learning the basics can help you maintain a relatively stable freelance career.
With digital marketing, you can reach out to potential clients and target your marketing efforts to those who are most likely to engage with your services. The biggest advantage of digital marketing is the ability to target audiences based on metrics such as age, gender, location, and more.
If you have some way of harvesting data, making sense of it and knowing what to do with it, digital marketing will help you reach the people most likely to need and pay for your service.
Caring for sales
In short, nurturing is the process of developing and strengthening relationships with potential clients in hopes of securing business at a later date. It includes regular communication, follow-up and personalized attention that builds trust over the long term and establishes you as a reliable and knowledgeable professional in your field.
One thing to remember is that it's normal to go through hundreds of people before you get to five or ten people who will actually pay for your services. With up to 80% of leads never converting into sales, it's crucial for you to nurture your leads strategically.
Apply the famous Pareto principle here: focus on the 20% of your potential customers who will generate 80% of your profits. These 20% are the most likely to convert to paying customers, so try to find them and focus your cultivation efforts on them.
I'm not saying you should abandon the other 80% of your potential customers. Reach out to them once in a while by sending them an email or two to remind them of your services, just so they don't forget who you are.
Remember, just because they don't need your services now doesn't mean they won't need them in the future or that they don't know someone who could be your future client.
Organization of time
Owning your time as a freelancer means gaining the ability to schedule your own work hours, as long as you are able to deliver your deliveries on the day and time agreed upon with the client.
While it may seem easy and convenient on paper, developing excellent time management skills is harder than it looks. With no one dictating your work hours, you'll be in charge of setting realistic deadlines for yourself and maintaining open communication with clients about project schedules.
Many freelancers struggle with this, especially in the beginning. But since you're running your own business, you'll want to grow it quickly to keep booking clients and develop a reputation as a reliable freelancer. I suggest finding a project management tool to help you stay organized, like Trello, Airtable, or even Google Sheets. Whatever suits you and your style best, use it and perfect it.
Financial management
In addition to keeping track of your personal finances, you'll also want to know how to manage your business finances. Without an HR or accounting department to keep your books in order, the responsibility of ensuring your financial stability falls squarely on your shoulders as a freelancer.
You'll want to learn some basic accounting because it will come in handy when reporting income for taxes. Besides, how would you know if you're actually making money without a clear understanding of your finances?
However, financial management is not just about bookkeeping. The most important aspect is to make sure you get paid on time. If you have multiple clients, you need to keep track of invoicing, set clear payment terms and have a strategy for dealing with late payments.
All of this may seem overwhelming at first, but as a newbie to the industry, you shouldn't find it impossible to get your books in order on your own. This will change as your career progresses, but once you have enough clients it may make sense to hire specialist bookkeepers and accountants to help you with this side of the business.
Coaching
As a freelancer, it's tempting to treat projects and clients as mere transactions. Complete your deliveries, get paid on time and move on to the next project. But as some areas of freelancing become more saturated, it's freelancers who cross the line that stand out.
To really stand out in a sea of freelancers, I'd suggest diving deeper into the client's business goals and challenges. For example, instead of just offering to create social media content, you might suggest they explore email marketing and see if more direct forms of communication can help them achieve their sales goals.
In addition to potentially getting another contract on top of your original one, you also position yourself as an expert in multiple areas that work well together, allowing you to kill two birds with one stone.
Developing these five skills will help you improve your freelance career, but don't worry if you're not there yet. Start working on these skills as you go and you'll be a freelance professional in no time. Rooting for you!
