So you want to start freelancing? Well, you're not alone! People across all age ranges and industries are getting tired of their bosses and choosing to pursue their happiness and financial independence on their own terms.
According to available estimates, there are over 70 million freelancers active in the US today, and that number is expected to grow to 90 million by 2028. But the question is, how do you become one of them?
Well, that's precisely what we'll be answering in this article. Join us as we explore what it means to be a freelancer, some of the most common jobs you may try, and all the necessary steps and skills you'll need to get started.
What Is Freelancing?
Freelancing is a form of self-employment in which an individual provides services to various companies, similar to managing a dropshipping business model without being part of a stable workforce. Freelancers typically earn money per job or task. Often, they work concurrently for multiple businesses on a short-term basis, though this is not always the case.
As we'll discuss in the next section, freelancers usually work remotely, providing high-knowledge or creative services. However, this is not true for gig workers. Also known as contractors, these are a specific subtype of freelancers specializing in on-site manual labor.
What Are the Most Common Jobs for Freelancers?
As we mentioned above, freelancers most often supplement high-knowledge or creative services. They're primarily sought out by companies that don't engage in projects requiring these skills often enough to necessitate a specialized full-time employee.
The 19 most common (and highest-paying) freelance jobs include:
- Public Relations Manager
- Code debugger
- Business Consultant
- Media Buyer
- Photographer
- AI Specialist
- Data Analyst
- Copywriter
- Project Manager
- Digital Marketing Consultant
- Editor
- Mobile App Developer
- Social Media Manager
- Web Designer
- Web Developer
- Programmer
- Videographer
- Podcast Host
- Virtual Assistant
How to Start Freelancing?
One of the best and most exciting things about freelancing is that anyone can do it. Well, at least anyone who's driven and patient enough to set their business up properly, hunt for clients, and push through to the end of every project.
With the advent of remote work, it’s now even easier to find work as a freelancer, too. Employer of record (EOR) services are more popular (and affordable) than ever before, making it simple for freelancer-seeking businesses to begin hiring remotely in Colorado, Cambodia, or Canada! To ensure compliance, any EOR used in Canada must be a local employment expert.
But that's a topic for another section. For now, let's go over the nitty-gritty details of what you'll have to do to get your freelancing career up and running. Without further ado, here are the 10 steps to start your freelance journey!
Step 1: Identify Your Business Goals
The very first thing aspiring freelancers need to answer for themselves is what they want to achieve with their business. Are you looking to supplement your existing income, or do you want to make freelancing your full-time occupation?
This is important because your answer will dictate many things about your business, most importantly, how much time and effort you spend on it. Whether you plan on running an online coaching business or becoming a freelance social media manager, it's essential to clearly set the goals you want to achieve.
However, if you plan on working on the side, we urge you to check in with your employer first and ask about their policies on freelancing. If you try to go behind the company's back and get found out, you might discover the money you made wasn't worth the price. Having a solid business plan will help you navigate these decisions and ensure your goals are aligned with your actions.
Step 2: Choose Your Niche
Some freelancers are proficient enough to run multiple businesses focused on different fields and services. Unfortunately, that’s probably not you if you're just starting out. So instead, you should do the next best thing, find an area you excel in, and devote yourself to it fully (for now).
If you have little to no prior experience in your chosen field, you won't be able to be very picky about the jobs you take. But as you grow your portfolio and expertise, you'll be able to specialize. This will not only make you more desirable compared to your more inexperienced “colleagues”, but also allow you to ask for more money. Also, If you're thinking about going into education as an online A-level physics tutor, focus on developing your teaching skills and passion for the subject to set a solid foundation for your tutoring career.
Therefore, we implore you – to do a little soul-searching, find what you're passionate about, and devote yourself to becoming an expert. It'll pay off in the end, we promise!
Step 3: Do Your Due Diligence
Okay, so now you know what sort of work you'd like to do. Now here comes the hard part. It's time to put pen to paper and analyze the market, competition, and potential clients. You should consider the following:
- Clients:
a) Company Size
b) Industry
c) Budget
2. Client Audience:
a) Age
b) Gender
c) Education
d) Location
e) Income
f) Expertise
3. Competitors:
a) Niche
b) Client Focus
c) Education
d) Portfolio
Taking the time to find this information early gives you a great advantage right off the bat. More specifically, it allows you to identify an appropriate wage (hourly/project) to meet both your own and the client's needs, create engaging pitches that speak directly to your prospect’s pain points, and deliver excellent work that fits their use case.
Step 4: Find Your Price
First-time freelancers often struggle with finding the “right” price for their work. You might get stuck working for pennies if you ask for too little. On the other hand, if you ask for too much, you might have difficulty landing a job or stain your reputation by overpromising and underdelivering (the opposite of what you're supposed to do).
There's also the consideration of whether you charge per hour or per project. The prior is more common for freelancers early on in their careers because it's easier to negotiate. However, if you're efficient, it means you get paid less for better work.
On the other hand, project-based pay is usually more difficult to negotiate and can cause you to get a lower per-hour conversion if the task takes longer to complete than anticipated.
Different options fit different types of work better, but the choice is ultimately up to you. Take your contemporaries' “asks” as a baseline, consider your practical experience, formal education, and location, and find the right price for you.
Step 5: Register Your Freelance Business
If you've made it this far, it's time to go official. But before you register your freelance business, there's one more thing to consider – the type of company you want to create. Let's look at the options available, their benefits, and their limitations.
You can register your freelance business as a:
a) Self-Employment / Sole Proprietorship
Both terms relate to an arrangement where you, a private person, are registered as a public entity. In this case, your business' revenue passes through your private income, meaning you only have to worry about paying your personal taxes.
This type of business is quick, easy, and cheap to create. However, it comes with the caveat of full liability. In other words, you guarantee your business with your entire wealth (e.g., real estate, cars, etc.), so if you get sued for any reason, including for divorce settlement when you’re a sole trader, you risk losing a lot more than you've probably made from your company.
b) LLC, S-Corp. & C-Corp.
While LLCs (Limited Liability Companies) and corporations are very different, discussing all their unique aspects would warrant an entire article, so we decided to roll them all into one instead.
As implied by the name, such companies provide limited liability, indicating that in the event of a lawsuit, the court can only access the assets of the company, not yours. While forming an LLC is relatively simpler in comparison, note that they are significantly more expensive to establish and require a lengthy registration process.
However, setting up a business in the U.S. can be more expensive and time-consuming. For example, forming an LLC in Florida costs $125 and typically takes around 5 days for approval, while registering your business in Hong Kong a streamlined process, lower setup costs, and favorable tax conditions.
For convenience, you can use a business formation service like LegalZoom, reviewed in this GovDocFiling article, to take care of all the paperwork and formalities involved.
Step 6: Become a Brand
As a freelancer, you're both the face and the business itself, so it's only natural to conduct yourself accordingly. And the first few things you should look at are your online presence, communication, and visual identity.
Your online presence is the most complex. Consisting of social media profiles, website creation, and your portfolio, it shows off your skills, shares your story, and helps build relationships. If you're thinking about starting an app, using a white label app builder can further enhance your digital footprint, allowing you to create customized mobile applications seamlessly.
Communication and visual identity serve to reinforce the benefits of your online presence. Ideally, you'll want to find an authentic tone of voice, get professional headshots, follow a logo designing guide, and choose colors that represent your values and will be instantly recognizable to your customers. Building a brand requires more than making connections, it is about building an online community. You have to start building a network for you to improve your online presence and visibility.
Step 7: Build a Network
While getting involved with the people you directly compete with for work seems counterintuitive, it can be incredibly helpful. You never know when you might need help with a difficult project. Plus, if you help someone land a job, they will likely return the favor.
So don't be shy. Create accounts for LinkedIn and Facebook, and start networking. It's almost certain to pay off in the end, whether through career growth or by discovering useful practices like meeting recording to capture important discussions.
Step 8: Market Yourself
We've touched on this in a previous section, but we can't stress enough how important it is to create a professional identity and market yourself efficiently. Jobs don't just fall from the sky for most freelancers – you have to fight for them and earn them. And so, here are a few tips that'll help you do just that.
- Create a Portfolio: First, you'll need to choose an appropriate format. Depending on your field, you can experiment with case studies, snippets, screenshots, results, testimonials, full samples of your work, or a combination of all.
Make sure to pick the experiences that best represent your value and update your portfolio regularly. And if you've done no professional work in the past, don't worry – even personal and school projects can work if you present them the right way. You might also want to create a resume that highlights all your relevant experience along with the actual work you've done to come across as trustworthy and reliable. - Create a Social Media Strategy: We've discussed the importance of networking, but SM is valuable in your freelancing career for another reason too. It allows you to turn your work experiences into content that can amuse, engage, and ultimately, get you more work.
For example, short, blog-type posts are a perfect fit for Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter users are sure to enjoy a witty anecdote or succinct truth. And everyone, including Instagram, always loves a pretty infographic. - Request Reviews: Social proof is a valuable thing indeed. Most people tend to trust reviews and recommendations from people like them. So, why not use that to your advantage, and ask for a review after finishing a project?
Step 9: Choose the Right Tools for Your Business
Now, we don't mean your actual work tools and software here – that'll largely depend on your field of work. However, there are several solutions each freelancer should have in their tech stack to ensure their operations run smoothly. Starting from document management software in case there is not enough space in your employees' laptops to communication tools and project management platforms to efficiently manage tasks and deadlines.
We recommend you look into:
- Invoicing Software: To get paid, freelancers have to invoice their clients. And if you want to avoid the headache of designing and creating them yourself, it's best you consider using invoicing software. It allows you to create invoices (and other documents in seconds), send payment reminders, access income reports, and more.
- Document Management Software: Contracts and work-related documents are very important for freelancers as well. Good document management software will allow you to edit PDFs, and e-sign contracts, as well as save and convert documents for future use.
- All-In-One Photo Editor Tool: Even if you are not an image editing expert, you need to get to grips with a good editing tool as part of realizing your freelance business ambitions. The great news is that modern software in this space is geared towards empowering amateurs, with AI-enhanced abilities letting you create exceptional visual content or even make use of royalty free AI images to market your services and build your brand without having to hire anyone else.
- Otto AI Accounting Software: Managing finances efficiently is crucial for freelancers, and AI-powered accounting software can simplify bookkeeping, expense tracking, and tax calculations. With automation handling repetitive financial tasks, you can focus more on growing your freelance business while ensuring accuracy in your financial records. Consider using AI accounting software to streamline your invoicing, expense management, and financial reporting effortlessly.
Continue Improving Your Skills
Last but not least, you must remember to never get too comfortable. Things move fast in this digital age, and you have to be quick on your feet to keep up. Incorporating tools like Interview AI can help freelancers refine their client interaction skills, ensuring they stay competitive in a rapidly changing job market. So, don't settle for what you know just because it's working for you right now.
Constantly seek to better yourself, watch training videos, add new skills, build on the old ones, expand your portfolio, and grow your community. If you do that, you'll soon earn a name for yourself and, hopefully, plenty of money to go with it.
What Skills Do I Need for Freelancing?
And speaking of skills, let's discuss a few every good freelancer should have. Because you see, freelancing is actually quite demanding in terms of everything you need to be able to do. Work skills are not enough, you also need to know how to run a business, organize your time, communicate with prospects…
The skills every freelancer should have include:
- Time Management
- Self-Motivation
- Client Communication
- Networking
- Negotiation
- Financial Management
- Marketing / Self-Promotion
- Organization
- Digital Literacy
- Legal Knowledge
Final Word
And that's it, dear reader, that's everything you need to know about starting your freelance journey. If nothing else, we hope this article helped you find out just how much there was that you knew/didn't know about your potential career change.
Remember, going freelance isn't a choice to be made lightly. Give every question discussed in this article its due consideration, be methodical in your preparation, and then you'll be able to succeed. We wish you the best of luck!