My first year freelancing. I’ve always wanted to work for myself. Last year I starting doing just that. This is what I’ve learned so far: Charge more Working out what to charge is probably the hardest part of working for yourself. When I first started out I was undercharging. It quickly became apparent that freelancing wasn’t a viable career choice if I wanted to maintain or better my standard of living. My advice for others now would be to follow a formula similar to as follows: Take the salary you’d want to earn as a full time employee. If your thought process is anything like mine once was, you’ll think this figure is ridiculously high, it’s not. Not only does charging more help you realise your financial ambitions, increasing your rate also attracts you to better projects, and once working on those projects helps with the amount of influence you can impose.
Be cautious choosing clients A lot of freelancing is being able to understand who a good client is and a bad client. Focus on selling to companies Financially. The State of the Freelance Economy. Is freelancing worth it? Should you trade the security of a nine-to-five for the turbulent seas of self-employment? The answer is yes. According to a survey, 90% of freelancers are happy with their chosen career. You won’t find those numbers in many so-called real jobs. Freelancers were once like ninjas. But that’s all starting to change. The hard numbers No-one knows how many freelancers there are. "Beware of using any statistic as definitive,” says Dan Lavoie of the Freelancer Union, a New York-based advocacy group.
The top jobs Over half of all freelancers are designers or writers. Taken as a whole, at 39% writing and editing is by far the most popular freelance profession. The freelancer demographic So who exactly is the typical freelancer? But Elance attracts a younger crowd. Part-timers and full-timers The Freelance Industry Report found that 65% of freelancers were full-timers with no other source of income. And plenty of freelancers are providing for their families. SachaGreif.com. Le blog d'Agou | BD, photos et autres grabouilles. Freelance Programmer Survival Manual. Since I am in the process of “retiring” from freelancing, I think it might fun to share some of the things I learn from freelancing. The best thing of being a freelancer for me is that I get to do what I love (programming), and able to make an honest living out of it. Besides, I get to work from home (no traffic), and don’t get to blame the bosses and company, though I still need to deal with challenging customers.
There are a few painstaking sides of being a freelancer: dealing with customers who didn’t understand or honored the scope of work, some people just like endless meeting and those who refuse to pay up. Define the Contract At the very minimum, you MUST have some kind of documentation to record the scope of work in black and white.
The purpose of the documentation is just to cover our ass when something goes wrong (change of contact person, misunderstanding, dealing with an asshole, etc.). It’s all about the Customer Small is Good Collecting Money Middle-man are the worst. Follow Up. Growing One's Consulting Business. Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time A few years ago, I was a much-put-upon grunt programmer at a large Japanese megacorp. I go home every Christmas to Chicago, so I was going to be in Chicago during December 2009. I have an Internet buddy in Chicago named Thomas Ptacek. We met on Hacker News. He's the #1 poster by karma and I'm #2.
Thomas runs a very successful webapp security consultancy, Matasano. Anyhow, after we got our coffee, Thomas invited me into their conference room. (The actual contents of the conversion are not 100% germane to the story, but I blogged a bit about it and Thomas posted his thoughts on HN. At the end of the conversation, Thomas said something which, no exaggeration, changed my life. Thomas: Some food for thought: If this hadn't been a coffee date, but rather a consulting engagement, I'd be writing you a check right now.Me: Three hours at $100 an hour or whatever an intermediate programmer is worth would only be $300. Here's a bad testimonial: "Patrick is smart. Twago finds digital marketing experts most sought after in Europe. Berlin-based, freelance platform and cloud working expert Twago has a unique insight into which careers are hot at the moment Europe. Having grown by 40% in 2012 and now boasting of 180 000 freelancers offer their services on their platform, they now have the scale to be able to offer a view on how the job market is trending across Europe.
In what seems like a perpetual down-economy in Europe, it’s extremely useful to know if one is starting in their career or looking to make a big career change, which career areas look to be the most promising. Twago has just released a ranking of the most sought after professional profiles on their platform and their growth over the last year, which are: Search Engine Advertising + 141%App Developers + 99%Social Commerce Managers + 98%SEO Experts + 86%Social media experts + 59%