How to become a successful freelancer in 2020

Going on the freelancing journey liberates you from the traditional job routine and schedule, but becoming a successful freelancer goes farther than what you see. When you see freelancers making a lot of money off freelancing, it might give you the illusion that freelancing is simple and a straight way to wealth. Attaining success in the freelancing market comes with a lot of strategizing and intuition. Some of these are:

Patience 

No one achieves success overnight, every good thing takes time, and the same goes for freelancing. When you start remote freelancing jobs, you join a platform, after joining the platform, it takes time for your page to grow and attract big clients. You start from little paychecks until you grow in the ranks.    

Intuitive Cognition

Being a freelancer requires a lot of mental exercises, discipline, planning, and time. As a freelancer, you are your boss; you are the receptionist, the secretary, the accountant, and the intern. You have to be an excellent thinker to pull off being a freelancer. Part of ethical thinking is knowing the tools you will need to make work less stressful and more organized.

Freelancing management tools

To become successful, you need to take freelancing serious as you would take your business. There is a lot of freelance management software that helps you manage yourself and your clients efficiently, so you always stay in communication and well organized. Softwares like Trello, Slack, Dropbox, etc. There are also tools to help you automate freelance accounting processes, like, Quickbooks Self-employed (web, iOS, Android).  

Freelance Contract 

A lot of freelance writers, especially new ones, want to go straight into doing gigs rather than going through a freelance contract template with their clients first. To be successful in the long run, you need to embrace the formalities and make due signatures with your clients before proceeding to work, especially big clients. Your freelance contract template should include

• Introductory statement
• Terms and conditions
• Scope of the project
• Changes and revisions
• Legal
• Copyright
• Payment
• Termination
• Signature 

Timeliness 

Successful people are always timely, as we would agree, punctuality is the soul of business. You should be able to meet up with deadlines and deliver projects in a timely fashion. There are now time tracking apps that will help monitor your activities and boost productivity. Apps like calendar, due time tracking, harvest, etc. would come in handy in making the best use of your time.

Interpersonal Relationship Skills

You need to be a people-person, not necessarily a people-pleaser, but you need to showcase excellent human skills. It is easier to keep stable clients than looking for new clients. When you treat your clients well and communicate with them as at when due, they are satisfied and will want to work with you even more. 

Priority 

Your projects should be placed in order of priority, to do that more efficiently, you will need a Gnatt or kanban chart. These charts will help you plan your projects accordingly, and you can place priorities as you see fit.