Starting Freelancing – learnings and challenges

mossman — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:28:06 +0000

As most of you know, I started freelancing late last year as a Marketing Consultant, and also started my own photography business. It’s been 6 months now, which seem to have gone by in an instant, and I have learnt a huge amount. Learning can be fun, but you tend to learn the biggest and most important things the hard way.

Going from the corporate world to the freelance world has some huge benefits as I am sure you can imagine, but it does present many new, and different challenges. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, and I hope I can pass on some of my top tips and also the things to watch out for, as well as the challenges.

Top Tips

Have a very, very clear idea what you are going to do and what you are going to offer your clients. For me, with theappleofmyi, I help all sizes of businesses with their marketing to improve their results, focusing specifically with online marketing, customer engagement and leveraging their web-presence.
Have a good name for your company and make sure you own the domain – it needs to be easily typed and also memorable.
Own your own name online, for example, www.jonnymoss.com
Embrace social media, so people can find you easily, and you can tell people about what you do. For example, my Linkedin profile here.
Spend some money on getting a good brand identity – believe me, there is no excuse to look shoddy and unprofessional. Make sure your identity is consistent across all your materials.
Get a website up immediately telling the world what you do – I need a right good slap for this one, as mine is still in development (my fault to be honest), but not far off. However, I have had this blog running for over 2 years which has provided somewhere for people to read about me and what I do.
Use your friends – word of mouth is the BEST form of advertising – people trust the opinions of friends and this form of advertising is free!
Always have your business cards handy, and make sure they are of good quality. Don’t be caught out without one (I did, and it was not pretty).
Plan your expenses and make sure you have some money in reserve to cover the vital bills and mortgage. I would really watch out with spending on things that you don’t need.
Make sure you are using a Mac – you will save time and money in the long run!
Make sure you backup any client work – burn DVDs of client’s work, store it online and if you want to be really careful, dump files to an external hard drive and give it to a friend to look after – you can get it back and add files when you want.
Use every means possible to get people to check out your website – url car stickers, Google ads, blogging, sending out press releases, and get a decent e newsletter set up, where you can give tips and help.
Above all, underpromise and over deliver.

Challenges

Making sure you meet your client’s expectations – be very, very clear what you are going to do for them.
Make sure you get clients to sign off on stages of work – you will then both be on the same page and have no reason for confusion.
Keeping to deadlines – get things in writing, when things are going to be done, even when working with people you know well
Working at home – you will likely be working from home and a HUGE challenge is being able to focus on your work, and not on all the small household chores which always need doing. I am hoping to have a garden office at some point, but this is a long way off!
Finding new clients – make sure you have lots of ideas to get your name in front of people who may be in need of your services. I have a wealth of ideas ready to go, but I need my website up and running first!
Keeping track of all the info and communication you get from clients and also possible new clients. If you want something simple, that works, try 37 Signals’ online offerings, Highrise, for contact management and also Basecamp (project management). They are superb, great value and the feedback I have had for Basecamp from clients, has been really good. They love having everything to do with the project online, in one place and available at all times.

I hope this post will be of use to anyone who is starting out on their own. The rewards are huge, but there are also many new challenges to overcome. I am sure I have left off quite a few things I had planned to write about, so I will be writing some more posts in the future – there is still a lot for me to learn!

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Starting Freelancing – learnings and challenges