Freelancers enjoy the independence that the nature of their job provides. Using this independence judiciously is however not a walk in the park. Too often, freelancers do things that take too much of their time but earn them only a little or deprive them of attending to equally important things such as family life and relationships.
Against the foregoing, this article will reveal some 6 things that might be slowing you down regularly, and how you can avoid them in order to become a better freelancer and person.
1. Relying too Much on Freelance Bidding Sites:
This may come off as controversial, but relying too much on freelance bidding sites is probably tantamount to wasting so much time for only little gains (except you’re a super-freelancer on any such sites).
Many freelance sites are compounded by stiff competition; demand is most times way lower than supply, and this situation degrades the price of labor. One of the topmost freelance sites, for example, is said to host 14 million freelancers, whereas only 3 million jobs are published annually.
Many such sites usually come off as somewhat exploitative as gigs abound that offer freelancers quite ridiculous pay.
You can do better than sitting all day, waiting for yet another gig to be published on your favorite job bidding site. You need to be independent and take freelancing more seriously. This can be done by standing out from the crowd, even if you’re a moonlighter. To achieve this, you’ll probably need to privately pitch your services to businesses, contribute to top sites within your focus industry and become an authority.
The foregoing will most likely earn you more higher-paying gigs than scrambling on freelance bidding sites.
2. Spending Time on Outsource-able Jobs Despite Having a Heavy Workload:
Every freelancer’s dream is to be widely sought after as that would translate to higher earnings. But then, there’s a limit to which you can go while performing a task. More so, time itself is a limited resource and you have a personal life to take care of; thus, accepting to work beyond your limit isn’t always a smart thing to do.
If you’ve got more work than you can handle, outsourcing some is a good way to increase profit while making better use of time to focus on the quality of select jobs and on other equally important things. In fact, you can go from being a solo freelancer to building an agency and becoming more renowned.
3. Pitching Services to the Wrong People.
You hear it often: cold-pitching is a veritable way to grow your client base. However, just because you’re pitching doesn’t mean you are doing it the right way.
A wrong way to cold-pitch is by not carefully choosing your recipients. Every organization has a hierarchical flow of authority. And each department specializes in handling specific issues. So, you’re responsible for finding out where your service would be needed, as this would help in determining the most appropriate quarters to send your pitch.
For example, if you’re a content marketer, it would make little sense to pitch your services to a CTO. At least when the contact details of the marketing and recruiting managers are readily available.
In other words, you need to be strategic about choosing who you pitch.
Always pitch a senior staff in an appropriate department who can make recruitment decisions. Do your research well to get the right people’s contact information instead of hastily pitching the wrong people because you’re desperate.
In conclusion, pitching the wrong people is usually an outright waste of time. Try your best to not make this mistake.
4. Not Knowing Your Most Productive Hours.
Research suggests that the average worker is only productive for about 3hours a day. And it turns out that we all have different hours when we’re most productive.
Working during an inconvenient period makes you stand a chance of marring the quality of your work and even wasting time. But working when you’re most productive may certify the production of good quality works at a relatively shorter period of time.
Many suggestions have been posted on how one’s most productive hours can be discovered. For one, I believe this could come naturally; you may happen to know the time of the day when you concentrate better.
I haven’t an idea, you probably could use monitoring your time while performing work-related activities, during the day. Making this a routine will increase your chances of finding a pattern that would lead you the right way.
5. Searching on Google in The Most Trivial Ways (Being a “Normal User”):
Google is a treasure trove from which we source information. Daily, freelancers make use of Google to facilitate their work. It particularly comes in handy while spying on the competition, sourcing for clients and gigs, searching for guest-posting opportunities, researching a topic, and so on.
However, from experience, many freelancers don’t know there’s more to searching on Google than meets the eye; features abound to give you fine-grained control over your search results. The word ‘normal user’, as used in this context, therefore, is for describing people who don’t know about these features or who don’t use them, at all.
You can easily become a ‘power user’ by taking this free Google-sponsored course. That will basically teach you how to use Google’s advanced search features and might reduce the occurrence of fruitless searching. You’ll also learn fun things like how to narrow search results to include only web pages that show exactly the words used in your queries.
6. Spending Too Much Time on Your Blog When You’ve Got a Small Audience.
Except you have a huge audience-base, paying attention to your blog only may not be a good game plan.
We all need to step away from our comfort zones, and, fortunately, contributing to other blogs is a way to go about this.
Regardless of your blog’s content, you’re probably wasting so much time achieving little, if many people aren’t viewing them. You need to win people over by contributing to other sites as well.
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