The Art of Freelancing

Being a freelancer is a rewarding and often times frustrating way to run a business. My freelance business turns one year old this month, and I think I have gotten through the rough parts relatively unscathed. Freelancing has its ups and downs like any job does, but also holds many unique properties that you won’t find working at BigName Design Inc. If you don’t like taking orders from other people and enjoy working on several tasks at once, then freelancing may be for you.

Working at home: Possibly the worst and best thing about freelance work is that you get to work from home. If your freelance work lies solely in the digital world, such as web design, then you can work from just about anywhere you can plug in your laptop. This is great because you can take your business with you anywhere you desire without having to worry about relocation fees, offices leases, or losing a locally established market-niche. When you are working at home you can work in your pajamas, walk around half naked, listen to music, or do pretty much anything else your heart desires.

Being free to do whatever you want also happens to fall on the downside of freelance work. Being your own boss, there is no one to tell you to stop slacking off and start working except for yourself. There is no supervisor around the corner waiting to catch you surfing FARK.com. This, my friends, is freedom at a price. The price is your own productivity. The Unreal Tournament icon is so conveniently placed alongside the Adobe GoLive one, which one do I press? I can sneak in a quick game, I tell myself. Before I even realize that three hours has passed, I don’t feel like doing work anymore.

Working from home also has the consequence of blurring the lines between personal space and work space. Your time at home is no longer a separate retreat from the busy work day at the office. You’re hacking on your blog layout at 11pm when you really should be drinking tea and relaxing, your thoughts of work miles away. This invasion of time and space — which is usually voluntary I might add — can serve as a launching point for a stress filled prison of technology overload.

Building your own Brand: Building your own personal brand is incredibly fun to do. As a freelancer, the choice of self-representation is completely up to you. A website is part of building the aesthetic, but there are many other elements too. Personalized invoices with your logo on it, personalized mailing labels, and personalized contracts are all things you can do to add that personal touch to your business that keeps clients happy and referring you to their friends. Watching your brand grow is also quite fun, kind of like taking care of a Chia Pet.

Erratic work, Erratic pay: As a freelancer you will most likely alternate between empty periods of downtime followed by weeks of mind-wrecking contract work and deadlines which also happen to coincide with every other important date on your agenda. If you plan on being a freelancer, it is important that you don’t depend on a steady stream of income at first. You should probably have a “day-job” to make sure that you can still pay your rent and bills. Later on down the road, if your business acquires enough clients, you will most likely be able to make a decent living through this income.

The number one source of clients in a web design business is through client referrals. No amount of advertising, viral marketing, or pay-per-click ads will amount to the power of a client referral. This is important to note because as you obtain more clients, your chances of getting a referral increase exponentially. You can take advantage of this advertising model by offering special deals and discounts to current clients for referring new clients. This offer could be as simple as a gift certificate to Appleby’s or a couple free rentals at Blockbuster, get creative and make sure you’re prepared to handle an influx of new business.

If you’re considering getting into the freelance business, then I strongly encourage you do to so! Just be prepared for a deluge of unreasonable client requests, clients who don’t pay on time and doing the job of an entire web development team yourself. If you’re up to the challenge, then you will be rewarded equally with the experience and knowledge you will gain from running your own business and doing something you truly enjoy.