How to freelance like a pro

Freelancing is rapidly gaining popularity. Every year millions are opting to forego traditional careers and start a freelance business. Freelancing gives them more flexibility to create a lifestyle they like.

Hiring freelancers is now not only more acceptable, but more attractive for many businesses. This creates an incredible opportunity for people with skills to start a freelance business on the side, and eventually grow that into a sustainable self-employed career.

A recent study by the University of Phoenix, polling 1,600 adults under the age of 30, found that 63% of people in their 20’s either own their own business or want to in the near future. Of those who are not already entrepreneurs, 55% identified as wanting to be, one day.

So how do all these new freelance entrepreneurs manage all. Choosing to become an entrepreneur comes with great responsibility.

Time is an important factor and when you are an entrepreneur. You can not afford to waste it on mundane work. To avoid spammers and connect with genuine clients is a challenge. In this guide I will try to explain my strategy and new age technologies which will help you freelance like a pro.

I recommend reading this post all the way through from top to bottom. So let's get started.

Define your goals

When I started freelancing, I had one very clear goal defined that I want to learn and earn. Learning comes first and later on I will earn. I followed that and paid off my home mortgage from that earning within 3 years.

No matter what your goals are, but you need to make it absolutely clear to yourself. Write it down, read it many times to let your subconscious digest and accept it.

Without clearly defined, easily measurable goals, you’re going to have a very difficult time getting to where you want to go.

Find a profitable Niche

I had no saleable freelancing skills when I started. I researched and found that website development is one of the in-demand skill with which I can achieve my goals. Hence, I learned it and earned from it.

You could be a graphic designer by profession. But, it could be a high competition and low paying skills when you start. Also, it may not help you achieve your goal if your goal is to earn loads of money.

So, you need to find and learn the profitable niche and start from there.

Create your portfolio

You now need to create portfolio which can be shown to clients to give them an idea about what you could do. Choose a good freelancing website like Upwork, Toogit or Guru.

Be as descriptive and clear as you can in your profile and portfolio. Include all relevant information and if you have some explanatory videos, don't forget to put it's link in your profile description.

Help others

When you help others you leave a trail behind which not only brings good wishes for you but also earns you some reputation. Clients see it and may decide to hire you solely on that basis. You can start by answering tech queries on Stackoverflow or on Toogit.

Avoid Spammers and save time

The biggest concern in freelancing right now is spam projects and clients. All freelancing platforms are struggling to fight it but none of them can stop it completely.

This also costs you your very important time. You spend time to find the right job and then go through it. Spend hours to understand it and then carefully draft a proposal for it. Based on studies a good proposal costs around 60 minutes of your day.

Here is my 1 tip which works and can help you as well.

Use Toogit's AI based service which automatically matches you with the best jobs based on your skills set and your desired income goals. All you have to do is define your skills and your minimum hourly and fixed budgets for the jobs. You can define proposal templates for each skill which will be submitted to the job which matches with your profile and your goals.

Client's pays to accept proposals using this AI service and hence chances of spam here are 0.0001%.

This also saves your time, as you do not need to login on website in every hour to check new jobs, identify the right fit for you and then submit the proposal. With this service you get an email once a job matching your profile is posted. Client is also sent a notification with your proposal template. You can now login and go through the client's requirement and customize your proposal.

This all happens while client was still online and chances are your conversation with the client will start within next few minutes.

Technology is improving and Toogit's AI based Auto-Proposal service is revolutionary. It doesn't cost much and you may want to give it a try.

These are my tried and tested tips. Me and my friends have benefitted from these and I hope these will help you freelance like most of successful freelancers do.