Road To Becoming A Freelancer

Greetings,

I thought starting a newsletter would be something fun, so I'm going to do it this year and see how it goes.

Because this is the first entry, I will do some introductions about this newsletter.

It's a little bit boring, but throughout the past few years as a freelancer, who had more bad experiences than good ones :), I wanted to share all those experiences and give people who either haven't started or haven't found the right footing some advice and share a little bit of my journey.

As a first entry to this new newsletter I wanted to make it as useful as possible so for the last few days, I've been re-writing and refining this article so that it can include as much detail as possible.

We will divide each element into steps to take, and hopefully, if you have been stuck at a specific step you can now get a little bit of insight on how to get out of it.

Step 0 - Preparations

Why is this a step with a number 0? Because it's a requirement, making your preparations before you start something gives you an advantage over other people who jump right in without consideration.

Environment :

1. It's important to have a good working environment
2. Prepare a room for you to work in, if not available, at least some space in a room where you can have ...
3. A Desk, A Laptop, and a good chair
4. If a lot of noise reaches this room I recommend you get noise-cancelling headphones or anything that can block noise while you work.

• Personal Experience: I started freelancing in the dorm room, we luckily had the biggest room in the dorm(technically), so we had a lot of space to build a "Working Space".
• if you can't find room to work on any of the previous recommendations, it would be beneficial to look at it from another POV, instead of space, making some time for focusing on your work would be the best alternative, ex. from 6 pm to 8 pm is time for learning or from 8 am to 12 am is time for work and so on, and make sure when this time comes you train your mind that it's time to focus and get things done.

Skills :

1. Skills are what you provide to the market, it's your added value, something that makes you a freelancer that all clients in your niche want to hire.
2. It's also important to learn new concepts/tools related to your niche as being a little late to any changes means you getting left behind.
3. If you don't know what to learn yet, well it's a big advantage because you can take a look at what's trending and learn it, also be careful to learn tech/tools that seem like a scam (ex. Crypto) even if it's a great technology.
4. And even if you know a lot, always be open to learning new things, it's an ever-changing market and you have to follow the current.

• Personal Experience: I started first by learning Python and Flask, though I wasn't the most skilled I still tried to get a job, sadly compared to other experienced developers for the first year I didn't get a single job, so I decided to learn new technologies meanwhile.

A Niche :

Even if you have great skills, choosing a niche is quite an important point. especially in these last few years.

Everyone now can do general tasks, for example, CRUD web applications, Logos, and others...

You have to choose a niche inside the general topic of your expertise where you must be the most proficient, this will give you a bigger chance to get jobs and gain more reputation in that specific niche which in turn more jobs.

What you should do to choose a niche is :

1. Look carefully at what jobs exist in the general skill
2. Search for the highest-paid jobs
3. Take a look at what skills do they require
4. Check if they are looking for a specific niche
5. Collect a list of skills and niches
6. Choose!

Experience :

1. After learning any skill/tool, the first and most important thing is that you should apply what you have learned.
2. There are two main ways of doing so if you are a total beginner :

• Free / Super Cheap Work: this is the one I recommend because this will give you as close of an experience to the real work as possible.
• Personal Projects: this can be the result of a course or even some personal project ideas you have.

• Personal Experience: as a web developer I did two projects, a simple e-commerce store and a real-estate agency website, both were personal projects you can find on Github, though you are not allowed to judge the code quality :) (it was written 4 years ago).

I know these may seem like a lot of things to get started but they are all necessary to have the best of headstarts over other people.

Step 1 - Work On Your Profile

First impressions are important, and your profile whether on a freelancing site or in your portfolio/profile will be the first thing a client sees, which means working on them is more than just a requirement.

Here are some tips :

1. Use a professional profile picture (change it every year or so)
2. Make your description short but concise with only the most important points, everything else should be either in your project descriptions or in a detailed description about yourself.
3. List your skills, and please don't use progress bars ( ex. 75% HTML, has no meaning in real-world terms) use terms like Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.
4. Projects: select the 3 projects with your biggest achievements, and display them first while focusing on showing those achievements, or the projects you have done so far if you don't have many, but make sure you focus on what they achieved.
5. Extra Work Experience: Show the list of your previous work experience if any or display the rest of the projects but in a manner that makes them seem less important than the 3 main ones.

Step 2 - Work on your project proposals

Your project proposals to clients are what will get you a job, here are a couple of tips to prepare good project proposals:

• Write short proposals: if you are confident enough in your skills and your profile is good enough you can go directly to the topic
• Ask for a meet: this is a tested method that will get you jobs, ask for a meet instantly, clients will be more interested and will most likely choose you rather than any other freelancer.
• Break things down: if the client asks for a detailed proposal/scope of work, break things down into simple sections, each section discussing an important aspect of the project (ex. Timeline, Budget, Communication ... etc)

Get your first Job

If you are struggling to get your first job make sure to take a look at the following items:

• Skills: Learn new skills and improve your current ones
• Profile: improve it with a better photo, projects, and description
• Proposals: Shorter, Better, Concise, and always ask for video meets instantly.

PS: This a topic I want to discuss on its own, so I have summarized the points.

Step 3 - Work on your relations with clients

Having long-term clients is better than having them for a single project, so always make sure to have a great relationship with the clients, and always do a little more work than the agreed-upon.

This will keep clients coming back to you for future work and may even pay more to have you work with them if your quality is higher than the market.

Step 4 - Always Update Your Profile With Your Latest And Greatest Achievements

Don't forget to update your profile after every project you do.

If the project has more important achievements, exchange it with one of the three you have on your profile/portfolio.

Updating your profile shows your potential clients that you are always working on new projects and can pique their interest.

Step 5 - What's next?

Well. Now this is up to you to decide.

The road to freelancing/self-employment is not an easy one, so you have to take it step by step, start it as a side job, and see things starting to flourish I guess you know what to do next.

Hope you find this newsletter entry useful, if you have any interesting topics or questions about this entry, you can always comment and I will make sure to respond as soon as possible.

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