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five things for freelancing job

It’s been two years now since I left my job as a marketing director to start my independent design company, and I haven’t looked back. Owning my own design business has been an amazing, challenging and fulfilling experience. Are you thinking about starting out on your own? Here’s five things everyone should know when they’re getting ready to quit their job and become a full-time freelancer.

Live frugally, have clients in hand and have a Plan B

Ready to quit your job? Be prepared. The day I quit my job was one of the more nerve-wracking days I’ve ever had, but I went into it knowing two things:

1. I had a couple of semi-regular clients I’d picked up through freelancing after my day job
2. Even if I made nothing I had saved enough to support myself for six months and also made a deal with myself to start applying for work after that time if things didn’t work out

Make sure you have some contacts, even if they’re not spending much with you every month. Many times just knowing that you have more available hours can increase their commitment to working with you!

And get ready to be frugal. My first six months had a few lucky breaks and a couple of consistent clients, but even so I found I was taking a pay cut for that startup period as I worked to find new clients. My advice is to try to be in as flexible a financial position as possible when you start. Live frugally, and cut your monthly expenses as much as possible before you start – it’s definitely not the time to buy a new car or start an expensive hobby!

As much as you want to think positively when you make this change, you should also consider the worst. Write your exit strategy as a contract with yourself, and what conditions will trigger this Plan B. It might be dipping below a certain amount in your savings, or having a certain number of billable hours per month by a particular date. Whatever it is, make that deal with yourself, tuck it away, and don’t dwell on it – just be ready to use it if and when the time comes.

Work even when you don’t have to

Ever seen a “be your own boss” ad, where people work four hours a week and are vacationing in paradise the rest of the time? Don’t believe the hype. Being your own boss is a lot of work, especially when you just start out, and it’s probably a different kind of work than you’re used to. Not only do you have to handle production, but a large portion of your work week will be spend sending out bids, writing proposals, following up on leads and projects that are out for client review, tracking your invoicing and expenses, and supporting past work you’ve published.

To make a living independently you need to be able to work for yourself if you’re not working for someone else. Spend time not spent on client work or bidding for your own marketing and network building. This unpaid time can be some of the most valuable time you spend in terms of growing your client base and perceived authority in your field. Of my first several months of working independently, I often worked 50+ hour weeks, and only about 15-20 hours a week was spent on billable client work. The rest of my “job” was networking, updating my website and marketing materials, writing proposals, and making an effort to get my name out there.

If you want to succeed as a freelancer or start-up firm, be able to make work for yourself that furthers your interests, and work hard at it, even if you’re not 100% sure what the payoff will be. If you want to go independent, go with the mindset that the times that you have nothing to do are actually the times where you have everything else to do.

Price yourself fairly

One of the biggest mistakes I see with freelancers are those who don’t consider market value when pricing their projects. If you really want to make a living as a designer, you have to sell your services at a realistic rate. It’s not the same as having a day job – now you have business expenses, health insurance costs, and non-billable administrative hours to consider.

What’s the right market value for your time or service? It depends on your area and the going rates. It’s likely you can find out either by having worked for a business that provides similar services in your area, or by doing some simple research to find out what others are billing. Price yourself too low and you face problems from potential customers who don’t take you seriously – or the inability to get enough hours to cover your expenses and still make a reasonable living. Price yourself too high and you won’t get work. Find a good starting rate you’re comfortable selling and stick with it for a while – eventually you may need to raise or lower your pricing, but with enough advance notice most of your clients will understand and continue to work with you.

Collaborate

Make the most of your time by doing what you specialize in and working with other freelancers for the rest. If you’re following the advice above and spending time networking with others, you’ll find there are people who do the things you don’t like to do, but are necessary to complete projects. By working with others you can focus your time on what you enjoy and are efficient at doing to improve your ability to deliver projects.

Collaboration can improve your client base and portfolio quickly, and you’ll tap into markets you may not anticipate when you initially go independent. For example, I serve many companies directly as a designer and consultant, but over time I developed relationships with companies who focus almost exclusively on marketing strategy. Now in addition to my direct clients, I collaborate with these companies on behalf of their clients. This benefits both my company and theirs – it reduces the time I spend selling instead of producing, augments what their company can offer to their customers, and improves their bottom line through reselling my services at a small markup.

One of the great benefits to being an independent designer is discovering unexpected opportunity to grow your client base and your ability to make a living through networking with other professionals in related but non-competitive fields.

Register your business

Set yourself up as an actual business. Acting as a sole proprietorship isn’t the way to go – there are far better options out there. Set up an LLC or other business entity. Find a local accountant who can advise you on taxes and help you deduct your expenses. And finally set up a business bank account to use for business income and expenses. Not only will having an LLC give you the added benefit of separation from your personal funds, but prospects and clients will take you more seriously knowing that they are working with a business rather than a fly-by-night individual.

Good Luck!

TEN WAYS TO BECOME ENTERPRENEUR

1. Eat to win. We really are what we eat. The “eat to win” mentality is fully understanding that what we put into our bodies greatly effects our focus, energy and well-being throughout the course of the day. A junk food diet will lead to a junk performance. When we start our day by consuming foods that increase our energy, focus and well-being, we instantly set ourselves up for a productive day.

2. Start your day with a green smoothie. There is no better way to feed our mind and bodies than consuming an alkalizing drink such as a green smoothie first thing in the morning. One of my favorite recipes is as follows: 8 ounces of water, 2 handfuls of organic spinach, 1 apple, 2 stalks of celery and a juiced lemon. This drink is high in fiber, which will help rid the body of toxins and provide us with the vitamins and minerals needed for world-class energy levels.

3. Plan your day the night before. Take 10 to 15 minutes to plan your day the night before. Adopting this habit yields phenomenal benefits. Lack of sleep mostly comes from thinking about all you have to do the next day. This makes the mind restless, and it becomes much more difficult to get a good night’s rest. Planning your day the night before should crush this problem right away. When we plan our day the night before, we wake up ready to hit the ground running knowing exactly what has to get done.

4. Write a productivity creed. This has been an absolute game changer for me. For example, my creed is written on a note card that reads, “I, Matt Mayberry, am the most productive person I know. I dominate my day and move quickly from task to task, accomplishing things that matter most.” This simple creed has worked wonders and I carry it around with me everywhere I go. When I catch myself in a funk, I glance down at my creed and get right back to work. I look at this creed at least 10 times throughout my day.

5. Jumpstart your day with a workout. I say it all the time. Fitness is the best productivity tool you can ever invest in. Find a routine that works best for you and work that routine into the ground every morning. By starting our day with a workout, we get the blood flowing and rid ourselves of the morning blues with the release of endorphins. Not only does a good workout release stress and increase energy, but you will feel super charged and ready to conquer the day.

6. Drink up! Instead of rushing to grab a cup of coffee every time you feel sluggish or tired, drink some water. Our bodies need proper hydration to perform at our absolute best. It’s a natural tendency to look for an instant “pick me up.” These methods of energy are very short lived. The human body is made up of over 70 percent water. More times than not, when you are feeling sluggish or tired, you are dehydrated. Water is a fundamental aspect of high performance.

7. Do not disturb. How many times throughout your day has someone come into your office and interrupted you just to talk about nonsense? Chances are you are getting interrupted via text, phone or email throughout your day. If you work in an office, set up a “Do Not Disturb” sign when it’s time to get important work done. If you work from home or outside of an office, set a policy so people know not to call or interrupt you during certain time blocks. If you are able, completely silence and stow your phone away so there is no distraction or urge to stray from the task at hand.

8. Take a walk or eat lunch away from the office.Instead of eating lunch at your office, find the nearest place where you can step away and enjoy yourself. A great way to rejuvenate and be prepared to attack the rest of the day is to take a lunchtime stroll. Eating lunch outside of your regular work place or going for a midday walk helps to clear your mind of clutter and distractions from earlier in the day. This should recharge you for an even more productive second half of the day.

9. Hour to greatness. This is one whole hour first thing in the morning that is dedicated to preparing my mind, body and spirit for the day ahead. This routine consists of reading an uplifting book for 15 to 20 minutes, rewriting my goals while visualizing the achievement of each one, meditating on my productivity creed while looking over my to-do list for the day, and finally, flooding my mind with positive and motivational messages via audio. This alone can drastically skyrocket productivity levels. Instead of watching all the negativity that’s on the news or in the newspaper, indulge in preparing your mind for a phenomenal day.

10. Decide. To actually become the most productive person around, you must first decide to do so. Don’t beat yourself up over how unproductive you’ve been or relish over how productive someone else is. This will never get you to where you need to go. Making the decision is half the battle. Once you’ve made up your mind, you will begin to challenge yourself to see just how much you can accomplish any given day.

List of Advanced Link Building Techniques

No matter how advanced you are in your link building career, there’s always room to take things to the next level.  So if you feel like you’re stuck in a blog commenting rut or you’ve hit an article submission wall, try out any of the following advanced link building techniques to improve your site’s performance:

On-Site Promotions

1.     Fix your internal links­ – If you aren’t yet maximizing your internal link structure, address these elements before seeking inbound links.  Clean up your own house first before you start inviting guests over!

2.     Host “best of” contests – People love to be recognized for their efforts, so creating your own “Best of the Web” competition should help you procure at least a handful of links back from your winners.

3.     Uncover your site’s 404 links­ – If inbound links pointing at your website result in 404 pages due to moved or deleted content, set up 301 redirects to point these links (and their corresponding link juice) to a current page on your site.

4.     Curate the web’s content – Becoming known for providing the best weekly link roundups in your industry is an easy way to generate both valuable web content and plenty of inbound links.

5.     Start a petition – If you feel strongly about a chosen issue within your field, starting a petition that’s linked to by others in your field can have a positive effect on your site’s SEO.

6.     Use the TYNT plugin – The TYNT plugin automatically appends a link back to your site onto content that’s been copied and pasted from your pages to another website.  It’s an easy way to secure links from those who would have otherwise stolen your content.

Technical Link Building

1.     Conduct competitive research – If you’re running out of ideas for link prospects, take a look at your competitors’ link profiles using tools like Majestic SEO or the Open Site Explorer to identify more options.

2.     Monitor backlinking partners ­– Most link building tools give you the opportunity to monitor the sites that are linking in to your pages.  If you see changes in this list, contact former link partners to determine why your site was dropped and how to get the link reactivated.

3.     Build links to links ­– At Single Grain, we call this “Linkception.”  Basically, the idea is that by building second and third tier links to your primary backlinks, you’ll strengthen their impact on your site’s overall performance.

4.     Use blogroll lookups to find expired sites with link juice – Take a look at Jon Cooper’s tutorial on identifying link building opportunities from expired blogroll linking sites in his post on SEOBook titled, “Creative Broken Link Building Tips.”

5.     Offer to update content on external sites for links – Monitor the SERPs for your target keywords regularly, looking for high ranking results that contain out-of-date information.  In these instances, contact the webmasters attached to the sites and offer to update the content free of charge in exchange for a backlink.

6.     Offer to remove malware for links ­– Similarly, if you notice sites in your target SERPs that carry the message “This site may have been compromised,” contact the associated webmasters an offer to fix the infections in exchange for backlinks (assuming you have enough technical skill to do so).

7.     Build deep links – As you’re building links, look for opportunities to link directly to the deep pages on your website.  Doing so will increase the odds of having your more relevant internal pages (versus your generic home page) ranked well in the natural SERPs.

8.     Use advanced Google queries to find link partners – Expand your search for potential link building partners using any of the queries found in Single Grain’s blog article, “25 Search Queries to Help You Find Link Building Prospects.”

9.     Ask for backlinks on sites with link lists – As you’re surfing the web, make a note of websites in your industry that have lists of links, recommended partners or recommended resources.  Get in the habit of firing off a quick email asking for your site’s inclusion any time you encounter one of these lists.

Social Media

1.     Connect with power users on social networking websites – Building your social networks occurs much faster when you leverage the existing followings of power users by forming relationships with these authority figures.

2.     Use Twitter’s “Twitter Cards” – Twitter’s recently released “Twitter Cards” system allows you to attach media experiences to tweets that link back to your content, making them more appealing – and thus, more likely to be shared – compared to standard messages.

3.     Update wikis in your industry – Contributing to any group-managed wikis in your industry won’t just score you links.  They’ll help to enhance your perceived authority within your field as well.

4.     Ask readers to share your web content – Plenty of webmasters are afraid to “ask for the close” (in this case, asking for a social media share of your blog content), but this is a mistake.  Readers are often happy to help you out, but they often need the motivation of being asked before they’ll take action.

Content Marketing

1.     Experiment with instructographics – Infographics (that is, expanded image that visualize data in an interesting way) are hot right now, but the next big thing in the digital marketing world will be instructographics (which seek to teach, rather than simply inform).

2.     Reverse engineer viral content – If you see a content marketing piece that’s performing well, try to isolate the factors that have made it successful.  Applying these lessons to your own campaigns should help to increase the number of inbound links you receive.

3.     Secure regular guest author columns ­– Don’t just look for one-off guest posting opportunities.  Try to secure regular columns on top industry news sites that will increase the amount of inbound links and referral traffic you’re able to secure.

4.     Publish content pieces in multiple formats – If you write a great article, why not publish it as a PDF, audio interview and video as well?  The more formats you release, the wider the audience you’ll reach – and, consequently, the more links you’ll acquire.

5.     Publish Creative Commons photos – Bloggers these days are desperate for high quality, Creative Commons licensed images.  If you’re handy with a camera, publishing these files in exchange for links back to your site can significantly improve your off-site SEO.

6.     Try “ego baiting” – Writing posts that flatter leaders within your industry will help you to develop relationships with these potential mentors, while at the same time earning you backlinks from the leaders’ existing followers.

Expanding Your Web Presence

1.     Search the web for unlinked brand mentions – Every so often, run a Google search for your name, your company’s name, your branded keywords and your website URL.  If you come across brand mentions that aren’t linked back to your site, contact the webmasters in question to request a backlink.

2.     Use Google alerts to track unlinked brand mentions – At the same time, set up Google Alerts for these keyword phrases so that you’ll be notified whenever they’re used on other websites.

3.     Submit testimonials – If you’ve used products or services that are popular in your industry, offer to provide testimonials to their sales pages in exchange for a link back to your website.

4.     Submit your site for consideration in contests ­– Plenty of industries have their own existing “best of the web” type competitions.  If you know of any, submit your site for consideration as often as possible.

5.     Do something newsworthy – If you want to secure press attention, try actually doing something newsworthy!  Make a large donation to charity, set an audacious goal or undertake some other action that’s unusual enough to earn your interest and backlinks from your audience.

What techniques am I missing?  If you have any other unusual or advanced link building techniques that have made a difference in your site’s performance, share your recommendations in the comments section below: