A lot of people think about how to work as a freelancer, if you can’t do anything, especially feeling the unstable situation in the country regarding pensions and social guarantees, which are one of the significant advantages of working in the office. The modern world gives everyone the opportunity to choose: go on a free voyage, looking for orders on their own and selling their services in person, or is it left to the employer to solve this problem? Bear the risks yourself or leave it on the shoulders of your boss, the owner of the company? Recognizing what awaits a person who wants to work as a freelancer is not difficult in advance.
Boost Specialization
Before you go into free swimming, you need to prepare the ground. In particular, it is worth the first time to earn extra money in freelance, remaining at his current job. This will allow you to pump specialization, as well as experience all the delights of such work. It will take you to get used to organizing your work yourself, pumping self-discipline.
Before you start working as a freelancer from scratch, it is better to gain experience on courses, exchanges. Fortunately, there are now a great many. The forums of those who already make money on the Internet will be useful.
Specialization
If a person plans to engage in advertising on the Web, a training course will be needed for sure. Although there are those who independently receive a Google AdWords certificate if they wish. If you plan to do design, you should pay attention to the lessons of Lynda.com. If you want to edit, you should look, for example, the lessons of the school of editors Gorbunov. And yet, nothing will teach you how to work as a freelancer without experience, better than practice.
Start
In order to gain experience, you only need to register freelance on the stock exchange - since there are a lot of them on the Internet right now.
After registering, you need to take the first orders and complete them. Do not despair if the first earned amounts are small - wages grow quickly enough with experience. It is easier for a specialist with a portfolio, rating and reviews to get the best orders at the highest prices. With practice, a habit will gradually develop, and work, search and selection of orders will go much faster and easier. It will become possible to predict your approximate earnings for the month at such a pace of work. And after this it is worth thinking about leaving the main place of employment. It is likely that those who previously thought about whether it is possible to work as a freelancer will decide that this format does not suit them, and change their mind to do it. And someone realizes that this path is ideal for him.
By the way, maintaining a blog helps a lot in this process. An audience for a resource on such topics can always be found with its competent conduct. Indeed, many are interested in how to start working on the Internet as a freelancer, and the information provided by the eyes of a beginner will be very useful for them - it will be easier to figure out what's what, in this field. Blogging someone later helps attract new customers.
Make connections
A useful experience for those who are considering how to work as a freelancer on the Internet can be attending all kinds of conferences on the topic, reading themed communities, getting to know interesting projects. It is worth reading the book “First Say No” by Jim Kemp. Acquaintance may go into orders in the future.
Learn tools
It is worth familiarizing yourself with the working principles of Skype, Google Drive and taking it as a habit to contact the customer in case of any contradictions. It is best to discuss issues in person, and not during long correspondence. It is better to leave documents in the cloud storage - this reduces the risk of losing your job, and this also allows you to provide access to them for any project participant.
IP design
The next stage, which should be taken into account by those who think how to start working as a freelancer, is to register themselves as an individual entrepreneur. If the clients are large, it is simply inconvenient for them to cooperate with an individual - because of this, taxation becomes more complicated, and this entails legal risk.
It’s convenient for an individual to transfer payments; there is no need to worry about taxes. But those who think how to start working as a freelancer will need to think about taxation. To do this, in the future you will need to get acquainted with the systems "My business" or "Kontur.Elba." They allow you to calculate taxes, track income.
In addition, these systems provide an opportunity in a facilitated manner to present an invoice to customers, to monitor payment. Starting an IP, it is necessary to choose a simplified tax system.
Preparation of contract
Anyone who has overcome all these steps and continues to think how to work competently on the Internet should pay attention to drawing up his own contract with customers.
It should indicate the clause determining that letters with electronic signatures are equivalent to paper documentation with signatures. The easiest way is to draw up your contract, taking as a basis a model from the Internet and editing it, making your own additions, and writing some paragraphs in your own words.
Good habits
For someone who, having roughly understood how to work as a freelancer, starts such work, it will be useful to get acquainted with a number of habits of more experienced people.
So, it is better not to take up your duties in a place that is not intended for this - there will be many distracting factors in the bed or in the kitchen, and the mood is not at all the one that is needed for productive activities. As a result, the task, which is completed in 15 minutes, can last for an hour. It is best to equip yourself with a suitable place - a comfortable chair, a table with a lamp. Periodically, it’s worth putting things in order. Then the work will go much faster. Sometimes those who think how to work as a freelancer begin to fulfill their first orders in an inappropriate environment and, after fulfilling them for too long, are distracted, they are eventually disappointed, because a beginner does not earn a lot for a small amount of work, this is most often a penny. For this reason, it is worth thinking about efficiency in advance, arranging a suitable place and realizing that wages in this area are growing in proportion to experience fairly quickly.
It is recommended to choose the boundaries for the working day, for example, from 9 to 18 hours. It is worth notifying customers and colleagues about this. And then there will not be situations with requests to urgently fix something at 12 at night.
Productivity increases if you break the day into parts by type of activity. For example, in the morning hours to engage in routine, in the afternoon - the most difficult tasks, in the afternoon to call up with customers, colleagues.
Those who started working as a freelancer without experience sometimes have the feeling that life has become a continuous time spent behind the monitor. To avoid this, it is worth setting a clear mode. For example, the beginning of work - at 10 in the morning. There will be temptations to sit down for her at 9, but do not give in to this temptation. It is better to do exercises, have breakfast. Then in the brain there will be a sensation of the day, in which there is a place for work and for other activity.
Do not forget that pauses in work are necessary. You need to get to the store for a walk. Nothing terrible will happen if a person does not respond to letters instantly. Thanks to the "reboots" the brain will recover. And often it is during pauses that solutions to complex problems come to mind.
Better to leave home. When choosing where you can work as a freelancer, you should pay attention to cafes and coworking. If a person is in the same room day and night, it is not surprising that he will soon become sad. Exits to work, to a park or library will be an excellent dilution of routine.
Do not skip meals. It is best to go to a cafe where there are business lunches. Interaction with people will dilute the working day.
It is noteworthy that clothing also affects productivity. Pajamas will relax. But if you put yourself in order, this will draw a certain line between work and rest.
Where to work
Before working as a freelancer, you will need to decide on a specialization - which services to sell on the Internet. There are about three dozen professions demanded by the Network, there are many areas of employment. It is better to give preference to the area that is most interesting.
The area where the freelancer works can be design, journalism, text, site building, tutoring, engineering, contextual advertising, social networks and so on.
In the field of journalism, copywriters stand out - these are specialists in working with text, but the scope of their activity is quite extensible. Both salaries and complexity vary depending on tasks.
As a rule, beginning freelancers become rewriters. Even a schoolchild, even anyone, can do it.
The task is to rewrite the finished texts in your own words and edit them. The salary in this case will not be large, but it will be a great experience at the start.
Professional copywriting requires experience: this is the compilation of headings, and the design of the text, often writing "selling texts" is required. Naming tasks also require professional skills. Payment in this case is already higher.
Those who speak foreign languages should pay attention to the work of a translator. The need for them on the Web is huge.
The next popular specialty is the designer. Education may come in handy here, but it is not necessary at all. It is enough to take courses, during which they have mastered graphic editors. There are many free courses available online. Having passed them before working as a freelancer, you can easily find customers.
Programmers can also easily find customers on the Internet. And here, special education is also not required — practical skills are needed. And the need for such masters is huge, because every site needs technical support. Layouts, WEB-masters, front-end developers are in demand in this area. You can master the skills necessary for these professions in just a month.
Another area of activity of a freelancer is advertising and marketing on the Internet. The main professions are contextual advertising specialist, SEO-optimizer, website promotion specialist. You can master them by gaining your own experience in the process of creating sites. But in this case, there is hardly a desire to work for someone instead of developing your own promising project. The second way is to take special courses or work in a company that promotes online promotion.
Specialists in setting up advertising campaigns are always in demand, because any project presented on the Internet must constantly attract customers. And if everyone is capable of "draining" all the money from the advertising budget, then by no means everyone can spend it in such a way as to bring customers. And a craftsman who can choose an attractive design and competently launch it on the Web will always be valuable.
Another answer to the question of how to work as a freelancer will be the recommendation to do community administration on social networks. There are a great many of them today, and every day there you need to publish content that someone should follow. All you need to master such a profession is to learn how to design posts yourself, rewrite articles, and master a graphic editor.
Where to get customers
One of the ways to find the first customers is to inform everyone you know about their services. It is worth telling everyone about your new profession. Someone will probably be interested in these services. But the main source of customers is exchanges for freelancers.
It is enough to register for them, it is better to choose the largest. There you should fill in the data about yourself, telling about your advantages, and then take the first orders. Developing a portfolio, it is worth taking even the smallest orders. Let the pennies be the first payment, then the positive reviews will become part of the portfolio, which will allow you to take larger and more interesting orders. In addition, this will allow you to fill your hand, figure out what's what.
It should be borne in mind that at this stage it is not necessary to linger for a long time. It is best to look for where to work freelancer, further. Indeed, in this area it is quite possible to build a career. To grow professionally, you need to constantly learn new things, experiment and take on increasingly complex tasks. Someone develops their own unique style of writing texts and begins to unwind on this. The services of extra-class specialists are really expensive.
Another option is to create your own team, take on large-scale projects. As a result, it grows into a studio, a separate business. This way is suitable for those who like to communicate with customers, manage.
Beginner Tips
As a rule, the most difficult is the first year of freelancing. And do not forget about it. It is likely that for those who want to work as a freelancer, at first it will be difficult to work at home, to draw up their own schedules, to engage in customer search. Sometimes difficulties will arise, and income will range from the ceiling to the baseboard. This is normal! Freedom is a responsibility.
It is best to focus on finding regular customers, as they are the most valuable customers. Thanks to them, stable wages will be created. Do not be afraid of the first modest fees. If the customer notices that the freelancer is doing a good job, it will be possible to discuss raising rates. It is also recommended to train negotiation skills.
Do not worry at times when one of the customers refuses to cooperate. A situation is considered normal when only two out of 15 potential customers carry out an order. And a professional freelancer will have the same rate. It’s best to set aside time for rest - an hour or two.