Wherever You’re At Is the Place to Be: 10 tips for creating a freelance career through the internet
photo by Dave Weatherall via Unsplash.com
By Alex Hutchi
Alex Hutchi has forged a strong career path as a freelance consultant in the worlds of gaming, esports, web design, and fashion. They have traveled throughout many different cities and built a robust professional network throughout the world. Today, Alex shares ten tips for people who may want to create their own freelance careers using the internet as a main tool for communication, connection, work, and personal branding.
So you want to break into the freelance world. Maybe you want to make your own schedule, or find more flexibility to travel, or perhaps your dream career just needs to be built on its own terms. I wanted all of these things when I began to develop my own consulting career. In a world where everyone is increasingly online, and professional development goes hand-in-hand with internet networking, there are a few things I learned about using the internet as a tool in my career journey. Here are a few tips I’ve discovered for freelancers building their businesses online:
1. Assess how you’re spending your time now to learn what you want to change
Audit your time. Ask yourself: what am I spending time doing and what am I talking to people about? Figure out from here what you enjoy and then develop goals that allow you to grow in those areas.
When you know what matters most to you, you can use that self-knowledge as a guide.
2. The Power of Online Courses
Take them!
Online courses are great ways to invest in yourself. Not only do you build valuable skills that can help you better do the jobs you want to do, but you meet other people with similar interests.
Don’t shy away from investing in your own skills and making sure you are up to date on the latest methods and trends in your field. If you were a painter, you wouldn’t scoff at investing in good paint for your art. Courses are like pricey watercolors that give you accountability and focus.
That said, it’s not always about price alone. When choosing which courses to take, I often think about them as choosing networks. We live in an age where you don’t have to travel in order to meet a lot of people. Imagine each course is a plane ticket. Think about it: You buy a course for an industry that you can service. Now you have a dedicated group of people with a budget who believe in investing in their business, and you have a common topic to relate.
Create them!
Build a course or an online community before you are ready. Having a smaller stage to share ideas, thoughts, and projects could be the uplifting momentum you need as you figure out what you’re amazing at.
3. Clubhouse: The podcast that never ends!
Audio-only events have been an amazing place to meet people, have some laughs, and learn.
If you’re not on Clubhouse yet, Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app where many people are having real-time conversations about a wide variety of topics. Twitter Spaces is the audio-based experience that Twitter created. You can listen in, raise your hand to speak up, and even start a “space” yourself to host conversations with people all over the world from wherever you are with a strong signal or wifi connection.
It may be intimidating at first to put yourself out there in an app that is so voice-focused, but I’ve found the best introvert hack on Clubhouse is to be the speaker. Through active listening and responding to what other brilliant people are saying, I take the pressure off myself to come up with every single new idea, and I make a lot of great new connections in the process.
4. The land of LinkedIn
Linkedin is a great place to find a mentor, new projects, and be a thought leader. Here is a breakdown of a few ways to use it to your advantage:
Building out your profile: Take the time to fill out your Linkedin Profile and create a video. Post content. To get started you can try posting on places like Twitter and then testing the post on Linkedin. Place an emoji in the front of your name on Linkedin to know when you receive automated messages. I have a lightning bolt emoji in my name on Linkedin because when I send a message to the connections that I have, it helps me to show I’m a real person who wants to connect.
Linkedin Events: Did you know that the attendees lists on LinkedIn Events are your secret weapon to expanding your community? If you indicate that you’re interested in an event on LinkedIn, you can see a full list of other attendees who are involved and interested in the area you are pursuing. From there you have a whole new list of potential connections for your own network.
Cold DM connections. Remember those important people you may be intimidated to approach are people just like you. Be genuinely curious about connecting with someone. People want to connect with people.
5. Build your brand on social media.
The more you post across platforms, the better.
My marketing crash course: post a lot, figure it out later. Social media is all about being social, if talking is not your thing - try drawing, infographics, and making collages.
Your content strategy could focus on who you would like to meet and giving them a reason to follow you. Pick one social media channel and talk about a few topics.
My Instagram is mostly photos, Twitter is about making connections, and Linkedin is just being Linkedin at the moment (see point 4). I have met most of my gaming connections from Twitter and LinkedIn.
Let me tell you about the time my Instagram account got shut down. That was the only network I was on at the time. I was devastated! (I got my Instagram account back after 2 years, with a reset password) The missed opportunity to grow and continue to meet people still bothers me to this day.
What I learned from this experience was that sometimes my message worked better on another platform anyway. Since then, I have made it a priority to post across social media because it’s the fastest way to talk to more people.
6. Upwork: You can use it for more than just freelancing.
Along with being a place to find someone for a specific project, Upwork is also a a great place to hire a professional to ask them questions. Let’s face it, $100 an hour is worth you not going 40 hours plus in the wrong direction. Upwork is a platform of professionals from other job titles, jobs you might want to apply for, or an industry that you want to know more about that you can hire just to pick their brains. By using Upwork this way, I have gotten the cheat codes for how to research and sell better by talking to people with more experience than me. Get creative, use Upwork to speak with other professionals.
7. How to determine your rates
Please take the time to figure out what your rates could be and charge them. Do the math: There are 52 weeks in a year. Do you want a fully automated business that brings in hundreds of clients, or would you prefer 10 clients a year? How much do you need to make to pay for the life you want? The workflow is up to you, yet don’t be a terrible boss to yourself and overwork yourself.
All the courses you’ve taken and the years of experience you build will make you better and sometimes faster at your trade, so don’t sell yourself short when it comes to what you charge hourly. If you can do four times as much work in an hour as a beginner, you can and should charge more for that efficiency.
8. Process your progress
Get a therapist. This is not a sponsored post, but I’ll give therapy a free ad. There are cost-efficient options out there in most areas and online. Find some local program to talk to someone even when things are going well. I started off with once a quarter speaking to a professional and just letting myself accept the accomplishments and the failures. I find it’s best to love both my lessons and hardships the same, one would not exist if I did not go through it. There are so many opportunities out there to get to know yourself better.
9. Practice saying no
Remind yourself of how you want to spend your time. There’s a freelancer for everyone. When you say no, you can focus on what you want. Remember there are 52 weeks in the year, if the next project is not going to make another amazing week then say no and keep going.
Alex Hutchi, photo courtesy of the author
10. Still thinking over becoming a freelancer? Maybe this will help…
“A dream is a goal with a plan.”
The TIME part is what trips everyone up unless you train yourself to have laser-like focus. The most effective way to overcome not reaching your goal is to create fewer distractions.
Today only: start decluttering all the “not going to happen” projects and hobbies, and use that cash and space to stick to your new amazing idea. Make it a priority to reach your personal goals, and that could start making the professional goals work too.
Start with reminding yourself to not talk yourself out of your dreams. The one thing that I would never do again is believe that I don’t have enough time. You wouldn’t wake up at 5am and miss a flight…would you? Make your morning routine just as important as that one-time experience of taking flight.
Go make it happen.
Connect with Alex:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-hutchi/
Twitter: @a13xhutchi
Instagram: @a13xhutchi
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