“Freelancers are living the dream life”, is a popularly used sentence these days. The freelancing life looks like a fantasy indeed, because who doesn’t want to work from home, right? You don’t even have to wake up early every morning, you don’t have to get dressed, and you don’t have to deal with traffic. Sounds fun and comfortable. Doesn’t it? However, it is not all shines and glitters. Being a freelancer is tougher than it seems.
It does earn you a good living and you can work in your comfort zone, but it comes with its cons. These days a lot of people are working from home and are self-employed. In American Labor statistics, it was revealed that 15.5 million American workers were freelancing or they are self-employed in some sort of way.
Working from home sounds comfortable but staying home all day gets frustrating as well. There is no difference left in work and home. It gets lonely too. Another thing is to let the world know who you are and what you are capable of doing is also a hassle. Especially now because the freelance world is getting bigger and bigger day by day. So, making a name for yourself as a freelancer and finding clients is getting difficult. The fact that there are hundreds of scams to trap freelancers is also a point of worry for freelancers. Some of these scams can do serious harm to you by stealing your identity.
Freelancers are also often frustrated because of dealing directly with different types of clients. Some clients try to tell the freelancers, how to do their job, and that makes the freelancers feel annoyed. As a freelancer, you are at the mercy of your client, most of the time. That itself is a huge burden. You have to directly deal with every client, all by yourself, unlike if you work in a company. Another major problem faced by tons of freelancers is that when they are doing business with clients in different countries, they have to deal with the difference in currencies and time. They receive their payments a lot later as well.
Given below are the solutions of the top 6 problems that are faced by freelancers;
Set Limits With Your Clients
It is normal for clients to give details about how they want to get their projects done. However, some clients micromanage the projects and tell freelancers, how to do the job that they have hired them for. It gets frustrating for the freelancer then, because no one wants someone else to tell them how they are supposed to do their work.
To minimize this problem, you should set limits with your client from the very first day. Do not answer calls or reply to emails, whenever the client sends you one. Set a specific time duration.
Work With a Diverse Array of Clients
One of the biggest problems faced by freelancers is unreliable clients. These unreliable clients are the ones who often pay late and interfere more than needed in the working style of the freelancer. They also sometimes don’t give you the amount of work that they promised. Some clients also give you projects very late and expect you to complete those projects on their due date. All of this gets annoying for a freelancer.
To solve this problem, you should work with a diverse array of clients. You should also try charging extra for rushed projects.
Know the Value Of Your Work
It happens often that companies or clients try to pay the freelancers much less than what their work is worth. This leads to companies getting inferior products. It is very exact to say that when you freelance, you get what you pay for!
As a freelancer, you should know the worth of your work and you should always be proud of your services/products. It happens a lot that companies try to pay freelancers less than the worth of their work. To avoid this problem, you should set your rates clearly and only reply to jobs that offer you the price that you want.
Manage Your Expectations And Responses
Poor communication is a major con of freelancing. Having to always communicate and discuss projects through calls is difficult. Sometimes the internet doesn’t work properly and sometimes there are bad signals. Also, discuss the payment before you start working on a project. If there is a client that has paid you late in the past, you should ask for the payment ( or at least half of it) in advance. It is not possible to control the behavior of your clients, but to minimize this from happening, set expectations and responses for the amount and type of feedback you want and stick with them.
Use a Business Analytics Tool
If you are a freelancer, you must have once faced a situation where you took a project and then you discovered a similar project with better rates. So, doing your research and knowing as much as possible about the most profitable projects is vital. You should know about your consecutive customers, and which projects are the most profitable for you. In order to do that you should use a small business analytics tool. It is a great way to find better opportunities and more profitable projects.
Auto-bidding
As a freelancer, one of the most difficult things is finding the ideal projects/jobs and applying for them. This process takes hours and sometimes even days. It also gets very tiring. In this case, auto-bidding is a lifesaver for freelancers. They basically apply for all the jobs that fit your criteria. It is a software program. It operates on the internet and performs repetitive tasks. Bots are automated, which means they run according to the instructions given to them. They do repetitive tasks at a much higher speed than humans can.
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