Is Online Freelancing a Right Career for You?

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Is Online Freelancing Good Career
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Freelancing might not be a Gen Y thing, but a full-time freelancing career, is. It takes a lot of courage to decide if one should make it a full-time online freelancer or work as a side-job for passive income. Freelancing comes with it’s taste of good and bad, but when it’s done right, it comes with great perks of freedom,  money and peace of mind. No boss, no rules, no fix timings, and work from anywhere.

You might have read a lot of success stories about freelancing, and it might tempt you enough to start a career in freelancing. But, before you take any such decision, let me also show you more side of freelancing. Have you ever thought? Despite having such a lucrative career option, very few make it to the top and carry out as a career option for long? Why not everyone gets success in freelancing career?

It’s because freelancing is not just getting online on freelancing sites, and start doing projects. It requires much more than your skills to reach the target and goals. Before living  a dream life, you need to pass lots of hurdles. Thus, if you are planning to choose freelancing career make sure that it is right for you or not?

Freelancing career choice
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Freedom never comes free and thus here are few factors worth considering before choosing a full-time freelancing career:

Should you make Online Freelancing as your career?

It doesn’t matter if you are a freelance writer, freelance blogger, freelance designer, freelance photographer or anything to do with freelancing; there are few traits that have to be in you to be successful, and to make it your career.

Self-discipline

Freelancing gives you freedom, and you become your boss. This sounds fascinating, but at the same time; you need to be self-disciplined. You have to be very sincere about your work. Especially if you are an online freelancer, you are bound to get distracted easily. You need to understand “Time is money“, and you need to keep your focus on your work.

The most important factor of freelancing is to finish the projects within deadlines thus if you are planning to start freelancing make sure you have good time management skills. Initially, it may sound like not a big deal kind of thing, but as soon as you move ahead in your career, you will face the biggest problem of getting stuck in multiple things. If you stay organized from day one, you are bound to get success.

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Self-motivation

When you are working with a company, there are many programs and factors to help in motivation. But, when you work alone from home there are lots of factors which demotivates you or at least you can feel the lack of constant motivation. Problems with friends/family, lack of productivity, not enough earning, the bad day with the client and lots more, these factors can easily drag you away from creativity and your work. Thus, If you are like me who needs a mentor to keep me motivated and help you to get best out of you then to freelance would be the tough job for you.

A good idea is to keep your freelancing desk surrounded with stuff that keeps you motivated. It could be anything related to your earlier work, photos, motivational posters, or motivational music in background. Once in a while, you should consider watching motivational movies, to keep pushing you for more.

Future Planning

No matter what field you choose, planning is the first step towards success. To get success in freelancing, you need to be an efficient planner to plan about all projects, their deadlines, which project to accept and which to reject. You need to be sure what’s next is in your “To-Do Lists”, instead of hopping from one project to another and finishing none.

You need to use the proper software’s to keep track of your work, income, to-do lists, client details, etc. so that you can make the right plans and stick to it. You don’t need a lot of tools and software’s, but you need to pick few, which works best for you.

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Dealing with clients

Apart from dealing with motivation, discipline, and planning, you also need to deal with your clients to get success in freelancing. The first job is to search for clients for the services you provide and for that you need to be innovative in your marketing skills.

Once you get a lead, you need to interact with him for pricing, job requirement and other information related to the project. Not every client are the same, and every time you will be dealing with different kind of clients. Few of them will be perfect to deal with, and few of them will be the biggest critics of your work and would hardly get satisfied with your work. Thus, if you can’t take criticism, then it’s going to be a tough way to be a successful freelancer. You have to keep your ego aside and learn to deal with different type of people when working online.

Money Matters

Maybe freelancing is your dream work, but you can’t ignore earning. Earning is always secondary when have passion in what you do but it do count. Thus, before leaving your full-time job make sure you have sufficient savings because it might take the time to start a good earning as a freelancer. Lack of money might discourage you.

Once you are fine to start with freelancing, you need to be confident about your work and charge for your services according. Analyze the market, clients and then decide how much you are going to charge. And do remember “never put all eggs in one basket.”

Build your portfolio

To get better clients, you need to work on building your freelancing portfolio. When you work with freelancing sites like Freelancer.com, upwork, it’s becoming easier to create a portfolio. At the same time, you should work on building your personal portfolio on your personal website. WordPress makes it easier for any freelancer, to get their portfolio website up and ready with few minutes of work. Not only you can showcase your work, you can also add a blog to it, to target more clients from search traffic.

Having your own website will help you to get more clients, and will also cut down the middle-man cost. Thus helping you in getting better clients with better incentives. This is highly recommended, as you can’t always rely on freelancing sites for new jobs, because couple of bad reviews on these freelancing sites, might become biggest hurdle of your freelancing career.

Above are few factors which you must consider before choosing a full-time. Sharing these factors doesn’t mean that you can never be a successful freelancer, I shared it so that you know what basic qualities a freelancer should have and if any of these qualities are missing then you can improve them and give a kick-start to your freelancing career.

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7 thoughts on “Is Online Freelancing a Right Career for You?”

  1. Ankeet Singh

    I think that freelancing is best only as a part time job, If anyone makes it as a full-time job then it is similar to other career option as it has its own ups and downs.

  2. Suman Gayen

    Hi Harsh
    Odesk is now upwork. So, chnage the name ‘Odesk’ to ‘upwork’.

    Regards,
    Suman

  3. Dhananjai

    Hi,
    I have been trying for 2 years to get online freelancing job like elance, freelance, odesk. I am unable to get work please suggest me.

    Regards,
    Dhananjai

  4. Edson Hale

    You can start your online freelancing career any time but it is not necessary you must succedd in it. So instead of taking the full benefit of easy entry into it first you must learn the basics related to the field which you want to do as freelancer. Secondly you must evaluate yourself check do you have self discipline and time management skills to complete your assignments without any bossy reminder.

  5. Jitendra

    I work as a freelancer on odesk. I have build good relationship with the customers by providing quality work and follow strict deadline. Yes its looks difficult when you have not done any job. But if you have strong portfolio, you get projects easily. Same client comes with new projects, as i have build a trust with them and they my quality work. So today is the case that i dont have to bid for project. Client directly contact me from odesk for doing their project for websites, flash banners etc.

    This is example and i am not expecting anything by showing this url 🙂

    https://www.odesk.com/o/profiles/users/Web-Flash-Graphic-Designer_~01754bdd61dbc1e028/

  6. Paul

    I worked for a company for three years and was always afraid of taking the freelancer dip. After some persuasion from my friends and family I started freelancing on the side note. After successfully completing a couple of projects I left my job and have worked as a freelancer for the past two years and have never looked back.

  7. Sumit

    Hey Whiztechy, Great article with full research. I am, agree with “its not fun n free” dam true thing in the freelancer world. Blogger thinks they will get projects if they will learn php and jave, but situation is different, extreme Self discipline is required and have patience.

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