FreelanceM.ag

Once a freelancer, always a freelancer?

Right?

Not necessarily. There are actually many different career paths you can take from freelancing. Yet many freelancers fail to think about their future. Some haven’t even begun to think about retirement yet.

Freelancing provides you with valuable marketable skills–skills you can use on a wide variety of career paths. In this post, I’ll share some post-freelancing career paths with you. If you’ve ever thought about moving from freelancing into something else, this post is for you.

Being really good at what you do may not be enough to insure your success. Having training or a freelancing specialty may not be enough. Even having years of experience may not be enough.

To stay in business as a freelancer, you need to find clients to survive. And finding clients is getting harder and harder to do in today’s crowded freelance marketplace.

There are many freelancers out there. According to a recent estimate from Whitney Johnson in an article published in Harvard Business Review, as many as one third of the current workforce is now freelancing.

The truth is, no one really knows exactly how many freelancers there are because people move in and out of freelancing–sometimes rather rapidly. Plus, some freelancers are not full-time freelancers. They hold down a full-time job and freelance part-time–so they get counted twice in some studies.

With so many freelancers out there, it’s easy for even talented freelancers to become so buried in the crowd that potential clients never find them.

The bottom line is this: if you want to survive as a freelancer, you need to figure out how to make your freelancing business stand out in the crowded freelance marketplace. In this post, we’ll describe five ways for you to do just that.

Are you about to burn out as a freelancer?

Many freelancers burn out. They try freelancing for a while, run into some problems, and quit.

Even experienced freelancers are at risk for freelancer burnout. Often burnout sneaks up on an otherwise productive freelancer. Suddenly, he or she doesn’t feel much like freelancing any more.

Freelancing burnout can destroy your freelancing business.

Fortunately, freelancer burnout can be avoided if it’s detected early. That’s what this post is about. In this post, I share ten indications that you might be about to burnout.

If you liked this post, you may also like 14+ Ways to Escape Freelance Burnout.

Are you in a hurry today?

Chances are good that you answered “yes” to that question. We live in a frantic, hurried culture where speed is prized and today’s gig is due yesterday.

It’s no different for freelancers.

For a freelancer, the hurry-up culture often translates to a special category of work known as rush work.

Rush work is work done in less than your normal turn-around time. Often rush work is due the same day or the next day.

The decision whether or not to accept rush work is an individual one, but many freelancers do choose to accept rush assignments.

In this post, I explain exactly what you need to know about rush work. If you like this post, you may also like 9 Factors that Add Value to Your Freelancing Services.

Not everyone who appears to be a client actually is a client.

As a freelancer, your time is valuable. You can’t afford to waste it.

Unfortunately, there are those out there who would take up all of your free time and not pay you a cent for it. They’ll ask you questions, talk to you on the phone, they may even request a proposal. But they aren’t buying.

They’re fake clients, also known as tire kickers. And if you’re not careful, they can eat up a lot of your time and drain a lot of your energy.

In this post, I’ll explain who the fake clients are and how you can avoid them.