Top skills to help you run freelance projects
You can hardly surprise someone by being a freelancer, unlike just a few years ago. Freelance is one of the most popular jobs nowadays. Some people leave their office careers and start their highest paying freelance jobs online.
It’s no wonder because working from home has tons of benefits. You do not even have to leave the comfort of your home and last but not least, you can earn much more than working full-time in some company. You can meet freelancers in almost any field nowadays.
However, becoming one of the best highly-paid freelancers is not that easy. It is not enough to just wish to work from home. People must possess a wide range of freelance skills to be successful in this area. Of course, those skills depend on the niche. However, some of them can be generalized and regardless of the field you pick for your freelancer career, you will hardly manage to succeed without possessing those skills and qualities.
If you want to run your freelance projects successfully and do it not just as a hobby but as the main source of your income, check this freelance skills list and make sure you have them all. If you don’t, work hard on yourself and gain them.
- Self-discipline
The first but one of the most crucial qualities for every freelancer is self-discipline. You may argue that this is not a skill and cannot be learned or acquired. However, if you are not self-disciplined, it will be very difficult to run freelance projects.
The truth is freelancers have no bosses and they are bosses themselves. No one is going to control you, the process, and whether you stick to deadlines. You must do it by yourself. And if you cannot control when exactly you must start the project, how much time to devote, you procrastinate, you risk missing the deadlines and just failing.
Although self-discipline is not a professional skill, you should not neglect to learn it and train yourself until you work according to a certain schedule. Otherwise, you can forget about the career of a freelancer.
- Time management
Everything seems to be very easy — everyone must manage his or her own time to run freelance projects successfully. In reality, not everyone is a perfect time manager. As a freelancer, you may get many offers from different people and companies (of course, not at once but after you gain some good reputation).
Naturally, you cannot accept all offers and take all projects on. You simply won’t be able to cope with them all. Moreover, you will have to manage your time very wisely. Freelancers rarely work on one single project at a time regardless of their niche. Therefore, apart from time management, you must be able to set your priorities very thoroughly.
For example, essay writers often work on several papers simultaneously. Quite often, the deadline is the same for more than one project. It means that you must cope with several projects successfully within the same time frame. It is not easy but possible. For that purpose, it is necessary to manage your time and set your priorities appropriately. If you don’t do this, you will simply fail one project after another and eventually, will have to look for another career path.
- Negotiation
No matter what field you are working in, you must have good negotiation and communication skills. If it is difficult for you to deal with people, understand their needs, and be stress-tolerant, you will have to acquire good communication skills first.
Let’s say, you decided to work for a well-known (or not really) paper writing service as an author. Most likely, you will be able to communicate with your clients directly. At least, most writing services practice this way of communication between their writers and customers. It means that you will have to be patient enough and know at least basic rules of etiquette.
If you cannot negotiate with your customer properly, he or she will most likely complain about you and thus, this will be your last order in this service. To avoid such unpleasant consequences, you should develop your negotiation skills very well. If you believe you do not possess enough communication skills, try to attend free webinars and masterclasses and improve your skills.
- SMM (social media management)
If you believe social media is just to communicate with your friends or post photos, you are wrong. Nowadays, they play a great role in your career. Social media is crucial not only for bloggers but also for business owners, as well as for freelancers.
Maintaining public relations is impossible without social media platforms today. They have become the best marketing tools. No matter whether you are the owner or CEO of a big or small company or just a freelancer looking for new projects, you must have a social media account and very often, more than one.
However, creating your profile is not enough. It is very important to lead your social media properly and it is a very time-consuming process. Your profile or account will show people who you are, what you are doing, and whether you are professional in your business.
Getting your new customers and projects through social media is the best way to develop your freelance career. To do this, you must have a deep knowledge of SEO and marketing. There are plenty of bloggers, SMM managers, and targetologists, and other professionals who give free masterclasses and webinars online. Do not neglect the opportunity to learn SMM skills and develop your social media account. It will help you build your own brand, get your “face” in the world of freelance, and get many new devoted customers.
- Content writing
Do not think that content writing is necessary only for bloggers or copywriters. We get back to skill number four now. If you run your social media account, you must have great content writing skills.
If your freelance job is somehow related to content creation, then you simply must improve these skills. What will you post on your social media? Of course, video content is great, as well as appropriate photos but good content is a must. Regardless of your field, you will have to work on content writing hard.
Conclusion
These are the top 5 skills each freelancer is obliged to possess. Do not forget that each of the areas brings more and more other qualities to learn and develop. Thus, you may need to learn web design or graphic design, data entry, accounting, and many other skills that are so crucial for someone working online. Pick your niche first and then, learn the required qualities.
Remember that the online market is developing really fast and you must really stand out from your competitors to become a successful freelancer. The main thing each freelancer must do is never stop learning and mastering new skills.
5 Tips for Becoming a Freelance Digital Marketer
Many people are starting their own freelance businesses. In today’s day and age, this can be a smart career move that gives you more control over your entire life. Marketing is one of the main areas where people are starting their own business, and there is potential for great success here because marketing is such an important industry and required by all businesses.
Despite this, it is also competitive, and it can be challenging to compete with large digital marketing agencies when you are a freelancer. With this in mind, here are a few tips which will hopefully help you find success and enjoy the perks of freelance work.
1 Create a Strong Online Presence
First, you need to use your expertise to create a strong online presence for yourself to get noticed. This can be your first project, and a chance to show your expertise, so you will need to create a high-quality website, use digital marketing to increase your visibility and be active across social media to stand out and attract clients.
2 Upskill
Digital marketing is a very large industry with many different areas and industry changes. In order to stand out and secure work, you will want to have a range of skills and remain competitive which will require upskilling in any areas where you need improvement.
3 Use an SEO Reseller
SEO is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing as this is how you increase visibility and reputation while directing more traffic to the company website. But it is also one of the hardest and most time-consuming digital marketing tasks. An SEO reseller like Click Intelligence can help with this as they can complete the SEO work for you under your own name, ensuring that you can provide results for your clients and free up time for you to focus on other areas.
4 Build Your Portfolio
It is hard to find success in a competitive industry like this without a portfolio to demonstrate your abilities. Of course, it is hard to have a portfolio when you first start out which is why you need to use your own business as an example. You will also need to secure any work you can, whether this is with short internships, helping out a local business, or charity for free, and so on. You should also obtain client testimonials after every project and use these to promote your brand.
5 Run an Efficient Business Operation
It is also important to remember that now you are freelance, it is down to you to have an efficient business operation in place. You will want to spend time focusing on marketing, but you must also make sure that you keep your finances in order, manage your own calendar and maintain relationships. Crucially, you must also make sure you do not overwork and take time off for relaxing, recharging your batteries and enjoying your personal life.
There are many perks to starting a freelance marketing company, but it can also be challenging. These tips should help you overcome these issues and hopefully find some success.
Good Traits And Habits To Develop To Become A Successful SEO Freelancer
The job of a freelancer, irrespective of the field of work, is not at all easy. There are some specific traits that you need to possess as well as a few good habits that you need to develop to make a mark as a successful freelancer in your specific field.
The first important thing that you should possess in you is the passion to write on any given topic. This must be ingrained in you and you must master it with practice over the days, weeks and years.
- The good thing about writing every day is that it will inspire you. Therefore, make it a point that you spend about the same amount of time every day to write, and write, and write.
- Another good thing about writing every day is that it will inculcate a habit of writing in you, and as you may know habits influence the actions and behaviours.
Therefore, if you build positive work habits in you, as a freelancer it will give you more freedom to perform your work without feeling it like your job that you need to be doing.
Habits will make you a perfect person in every aspect of your life. For example, if you have a good spending habit, you will be able to stay within your means and not have to take on too much of debt so much so that you spend most of the time of your day looking for best ways to manage your monthly bills on sites like DebtReviews. It is the same for an SEO freelancer job.
Road to success
If you are an SEO freelancer, your work habits will surely affect the bottom line and pave the path of your success. Being an SEO freelancer, your day will not be spent just on creating backlinks or curating content. On the contrary, you will not have a kick-ass schedule to follow as most of the SEO professionals have to. You will be your own boss and have enough time and freedom to daytime TV as well!
In a time where outsourcing is the big thing, being an SEO freelancer can surely be a career to look for. There is no better time or thing to do to make your own rules for your 9-to-5 work routine.
However, you will have to learn new habits to make it big in freelance SEO. These habits will typically go way beyond the basics of performing SEO such as keyword research and managing client meetings.
Importance to hire a good SEO freelancer
There are different surveys and researches conducted that reflects different facts and figures related to online marketing and search engines.
- According to research, it is found that Google gets over 100 billion searches worldwide in a month.
- According to another Online Marketing Trends survey conducted by HubSpot it was found that approximately67% of all small to medium businesses cited SEO as the most in-demand marketing service.
- It is also found in a different survey report that Google releases a new algorithm every year, or every month to be more precise.
- A report of Harvard Business Review it is seen that an increase in customer retention by only 5% will help a business to make overall profits by 25%.
- A survey has also found that search is the number one driver of traffic to any content site as compared to social media beating it by more than 300%.
- More than 66% of all best-in-class companies involve search in their content creation process right from the beginning, another research says.
All these facts and figures indicate one specific thing: the need of an SEO manager today is immense to make sure the sites reach to the right audience and that too to a large number of it.
The skills required
The field of SEO has incredible growth potential s it is seen over the past couple of years. As per the report of Conductor, there is double-digit growth in the salaries of SEO professionals in the top US cities. There is a lot of job opportunities both for in-house SEO Managers as well as the SEO freelancers. However, it is important that you evolve your skill keeping the changing role of SEO in mind. This will help you to maintain a high status as an SEO freelancer. The specific set of skills that you need to possess is:
- Building and managing an editorial calendar to attract a specific audience
- Growing new leads with carefully designed landing pages and by creating lead-generating content
- Managing technical on-page SEO collaboration with the developers
- Creating easy goals for click-through rates, traffic, and conversions
- Connecting with influential bloggers, users, and journalists to build brand awareness
- Running different tests and experiments to optimize the website and much more.
These skills will surely help you to get ahead in your field but in reality, in SEO there is no specific way in which you can be taught the ABCs of it. It is you who will have to learn more continually and develop your skillset. This will enable you to work out the and through the real-life website problems.
The habits to develop
The specific habits that you need to grow to become a more efficient SEO freelancer include:
- Dress properly while at work. This may sound like a silly habit that you need to develop but researchers say that if you wear formal clothing while working will improve intellectual cognitive processing.
- Stalk data every day before you shut off your computer for the day. Login into Google Analytics for each of your clients and then take note of any specific events that may have happened during the day. This will keep you updated with the day-by-day marketing events.
- Audit weekly and share the reports every month with your clients. This will help you to know the overall health status of the website.
Also, look beyond your obvious competitors and keep an open mind. Know your worth and work accordingly to be a champion freelancer SEO over the years.
Author Bio
Walter Moore is a notable management consultant and digital marketing expert. He is an experienced digital marketer and has helped e-commerce businesses in all niches gain with his effective marketing strategies and guidance.