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Top 4 Reasons Why People Become Freelancers

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:41:56 +0000

I don’t know about you, but for all the talk about freelancers not having steady paychecks, the risk is all worth it. That is, if you know how to market yourself well, because marketing ensures you have a steady stream of work.

But I’m not going to talk about marketing your services today. Let me talk about the reasons why freelancers choose to become, well, freelancers.

Here are the top 4 reasons for this.

1. You Are Your Own Boss

This may be the most classic reason that a freelancer will have in choosing this way of life, if I may put it that way. But clichéd as it may sound, it still remains true today.

Nothing beats working for yourself and without a boss hovering around your desk several times every day.

And it’s also a big responsibility. Since you’re your own boss, you decide your own fate, whether you’ll succeed or fail. That’s where the exciting part lies.

2. Your Time is Flexible

One of the things that burned me out after almost two years in my 9-5 job was the predictability of things.

I leave the house at 7am, commute to work, then clock in at around 8:30. I have lunch at 12, and then go home at 6. Imagine doing that everyday for two years and you’ll see what I mean.

But when you’re a freelancer, you are in control of your time. If you want to free up your schedule for tomorrow, you can just do an all-nighter and do all your work today. Then you can do whatever you want tomorrow.

And since your time is flexible, you can even have the time for a quick nap after lunch. I do that, and it never fails to keep me recharged so I can work again in the afternoon.

3. Your Work is Varied

I handled a variety of work in my day job. I began as a junior writer, became a news editor and then an editor in chief for one of the company’s websites.

But things were still somehow predictable because I only worked on the company’s websites. And though it helped me worked a bit faster the longer I worked on them, I also eventually got bored with it.

Now as a freelancer, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients in different industries. The research part is fantastic especially if you’re not really familiar with the topic yet. I worked with clients in the web development, fashion, medical and insurance industries to name a few. It’s diverse and it’s interesting.

I know I will have to focus on a certain niche eventually. But even if I focus on a niche, different clients will always have different needs and expectations, so it’s still going to be exciting that way.

4. It Pays Well

Freelancing pays a lot better than my day job, that’s for sure. And it can also happen to you if you know where to find the right clients, and know where to let your target clients find you.

How about you, what do you think are the top reasons why people become freelancers? Feel free to share them on the comment box below!

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I was Featured at Entrepreneur Digital

Cedric Solidon — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:13:53 +0000

Just thought I’d share with you an interview of yours truly at Entrepreneur Magazine Philippines’ website.

That’s where I discuss a few things about becoming a freelance copywriter in the Philippines. Some of the topics include learning how to market your services, how to stop getting scammed by online clients, and being always at the top of the freelancing game.

So if you want to find out how you can get started working at home, and earning money without getting stuck in a 9-5 job, I suggest you read this article.

By the way, thanks to Karmina de Ungria for featuring me on the site.

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Bo Sanchez of Kerygma: What You can Learn from Him about Writing

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:19:37 +0000

First, an introduction. For those of you who do not know Bo Sanchez, he is a Filipino preacher, founder of several organizations, and an author of several books on religion and business. If you want to know more about him, I suggest you check out Bo Sanchez’ online bio first.

That out of the way, let’s talk about what you can learn about writing from Bo Sanchez.

I first recognized Bo as a preacher because my mother’s a subscriber of Kerygma magazine, which he founded. But as I went on reading his pieces on the magazine and getting forwarded emails of his blog posts, I couldn’t help but notice how well he wrote. I became a fan boy of sorts soon enough.

And because I believe in becoming a better writer by reading works of good writers, let me show you what you can learn from Bo Sanchez about writing:

He’s a natural story-teller. This quality is a must for any preacher, so that’s not so surprising that he’s a natural story-teller too. Good story-telling hooks the audience to what the preacher or speaker is saying. Without it, the whole session would be utterly boring.But more than keeping the audience from sleeping, good story-telling makes whatever the speaker is saying easier to remember. Don’t you think it’s easier to remember Aesop’s fable of the dog and his bone than the concept of being contented with what you have?And good writers must be good story-tellers too. And by story-telling I mean these things: your pieces should be easy to remember, well-structured, easy to digest and it flows smoothly.
He has a sense of humor. Take a look at most of the blogs out there. They’re overly serious and they tend to bore you to death. While there are some topics that need to written with a certain degree of seriousness, you shouldn’t be too serious if you’re writing blog posts or feature articles. Your readers would appreciate a dose of humor from time to time.And that’s another thing that makes Bo an engaging writer, even if he’s writing about religion, something that’s heavy stuff for most people. His humor gets you hooked even further to what he’s saying. Combine humor with a good story and you can be pretty sure it will spread virally better than overly-serious pieces.Why? Because people love sharing good stories and funny stories. You don’t need to look further for proof for that. Just look into your email’s inbox or your text messages. What type of messages do you tend to keep and share? I’m pretty sure they’re the funny ones.
He has a clear and solid call to action. First, let me tell what a call to action is. In direct-response copywriting, it’s the part where you tell your customers to take the action that you want them to take. Do you want them to buy your product? Do you want them to call you for a free consultation? Your command for them to act is what’s called a call to action.How does it fit into your writing? You can use call to action in your writing in different ways, depending on what action you want your readers to take. You could tell them to subscribe to your RSS feed, or post a comment, or send you an email for your feedback.Bo Sanchez uses this method effectively. Look at the end of most, if not all, of his posts in his blog or his articles in Kerygma. He tells you to subscribe to his blog, say a prayer, etc. And sure enough, you’ll do as he says, if he’s provided you with something useful or inspiring to read.
If you want your readers to take a certain action, all you have to do is ask. And that’s what a call to action does.

There you have it, the things you can learn from Bo Sanchez about writing. I’ll stop here before I get accused of being overly patronizing.

If you like this post, why don’t you place a comment on the box below? Better yet, why don’t you subscribe to my blog and get more tips on writing, freelancing and more?

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Why Outline Writing is Important

Cedric Solidon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:06:20 +0000

While I was still in University, most of my professors told me and my classmates to write an outline before actually writing our piece, especially for opinion pieces and features.

Of course, the lazy ass that I was refused to follow their advice. After all, it’s much easier to just sit down, write and print. Especially if your deadline’s almost up!

The results? Let’s just say that it’s the opposite of spectacular. Good thing my professors weren’t evil enough to flunk me. And good thing there’s a time to revise your work.

But if you really want to save time on your writing, if you want to make it tight and the structure clear right from the first draft, then I would strongly recommend you to write an outline first.

Why?

Let me count the ways.

An Outline Helps Your Piece Flow Smoothly

If you have an outline, you can structure your piece in a way that will make it flow smoothly. An outline will show you where to put important elements of your writing before you actually sit down and write the entire piece.

And once you’ve figured out where to place particular elements of your piece, you prevent it from meandering from one thought to the next. What you get is a tight piece that your readers would easily understand.

An Outline Helps Prevent Mental Indigestion

Having an outline for your piece also makes it easier to write by separating it into several sections especially if you’re writing one that’s several pages long.

Do that just as novelists separate their books into chapters, musicians structure their songs into separate pieces and engineers create tiny components to make humongous buildings or machines.

If you can separate your piece into several smaller elements, it would be less daunting to write. Also, your readers would understand it much easier because you don’t try to feed them with tons of information all at once.

So whether you’re a high school or college student looking to write a great essay for your class, or a blogger who simply wants to write better, or some random person who doesn’t know why you’re reading this in the first place, I’ll once again recommend outline writing to you before you write your piece.

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Looking for Freelance Jobs

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:41:12 +0000

So how do you look for work if you don’t have clients yet? There are several ways to do it. For one, spread the word about what you do to your friends, former employers and colleagues. Tell them that you are already in the freelancing business and that you’re ready to help them if they need your expertise. Email that to them or whatever available avenue you have. Just don’t spam them, meaning, don’t bombard them with the same message in the same avenue like email, mobile phones, etc.

Another thing you should try is cold contacting. This is where you contact businesses and offer them your services. But more than just sending emails to businesses at random, you must take a careful look at each business that you want to contact. Find if there’s something in their business where they can use your area of expertise.

For example, look at their website and see if there’s something there that you can improve upon. If you’re a designer, see if you can improve the navigation of the site, for example. If you’re a writer, see if you can still improve the site’s copy or ask if you can write their newsletters if they don’t have one yet.

Also try the classifieds section of your local newspaper. I haven’t personally tried this, but it may work for you. The only downside of this among the options I’ve mentioned so far is that you need to shell out money to do this.

Join online forums or job-bidding sites. If you’re looking for work on the web, you could try job-bidding sites or online forums where jobs are normally posted. Examples of job-bidding sites include www.eLance.com and www.oDesk.com.

But there are a number of difficulties you might have to face with these kinds of sites: the risk of getting scammed (in the case of online forums), the tough competition, and low rates.

Finally, you can also have your own website. The advantage of having a website is that you can direct people to your site if they need to know something about your services. Want to show them your portfolio? You can just upload your files to your site and give your clients a link to those files.

There are free options where you can set up your website such as www.WordPress.com and www.Multiply.com. However, I would recommend that you invest on your own web hosting and domain name to give your site a more professional feel (yoursite.com looks more professional than yoursite.multiply.com), and to provide you with more control over your website (some sites do no allow you to upload certain file types, for example).

The only downside to setting up your own website is that it costs money. Even if there are already cheap domain names and web hosts out there (take www.GoDaddy.com and www.HostGator.com for example), some people may not be to carry the additional expenses at the beginning. But I strongly recommend you invest on your own site and host if you’re really serious about it.

Once you’ve found a freelance job of your choice, you’d naturally want to know how to price your projects. And that’s what we’ll be talking about next time.

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Marketing Your Freelancing Business

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:35:34 +0000

Marketing deals with everything about selling your services. Whether you’re a freelance writer or graphic artist, you need to market your services in order to get clients.

So how do you sell your services? You can simply say that you are a writer or a graphic artist, but not a lot of people would care about that. After all, there are already a lot of other freelance writers and graphic artists out there. So you should tell them why they should choose you.

You must set yourself apart from other freelancers if you want to market your services effectively. You could do that by highlighting special skills that you have or your areas of expertise. If you’re a copywriter, for example, highlight your field of expertise. If you’re a graphic artist specializing on designing corporate logos, state that too.

But you can only say too much about what you can do. You should also show them what you could actually do. How? Build your portfolio. A portfolio is simply a collection of your best works to show to potential clients. Again, if you’re a graphic artist who’s doing logos, place in your portfolio some fantastic examples of logos you have designed.

If you’re just starting out as a freelancer, you might not have a significant body of work yet to put in your portfolio. If that’s the case, then you should create speculative (simply known as ‘spec’) pieces first. If you’re a copywriter, you can create a ‘spec’ brochure first to showcase how well you write brochures and how familiar you are with the concepts involved in writing brochures.

When you have an identity and a portfolio, you must now look for freelance jobs.

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Running a Freelancing Business

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:22:54 +0000

Wait, freelancing is a business? Yes, freelancing is pretty much a business because you have to market it and you have to deal with the pricing of your services and other stuff that other businesses do.

But to keep things simple, I’ll be focusing on the marketing, finding work, and pricing your services in this series.

Here’s an outline that discusses this topic:

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How do You become a Freelancer?

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:45:40 +0000

There are no hard and fast rules to becoming a freelancer. Every freelancer had his/her own way of making the jump into the world of freelancing.

But there are some considerations all freelancers had to make before becoming what they are now. A number of the items on the list below may apply to you:

1. Do you have enough money to survive the first several months of your freelancing career?

This is one important consideration you have to make if you’re going to decide to become a full-time freelancer from scratch. Because you see, your first few months as a freelancer are the hardest because this is the point where you’re struggling to get clients (lucky for you if you already have potential clients before you make the jump) and establish your freelancing career.

So make sure you have enough money to help you get through these lean months. Financial experts advise you to have at least 6 months’ worth of your monthly expenses in the bank just to be safe.

2. Do you have the sufficient skills to be a freelancer in your chosen field?

If you want to be a freelancer in your chosen field, you must have at least a working idea of how to do your job. For example, if you want to be a freelance writer, you must at least know the basic concepts of grammar, spelling, etc. Or if you’re going to be a freelance graphic designer, you must know how to work with graphics software, be familiar with concepts and terms used in the business, etc.

3. Do you have the tools of the trade?

It’s also important that you have even the most basic tools that you need to become a freelancer. These basic tools include a phone, computer, decent internet connection, and the software that you need to get your job done. These tools will help you do your job faster and more efficiently. Imagine hand drawing a study of a logo and faxing it to your client who’s based in another country. See what I mean?

I know these things involve a significant amount of money and time. But I hope these things won’t discourage you in pursuing your quest to become a freelancer.

Remember, freelancers don’t have the steady pay checks that office employees have. They may also have to work longer hours than people with day jobs. But if you persist and succeed in this business, I’m pretty sure you won’t miss your old day job.

If you’re unsure about becoming a full-time freelancer right now, I suggest you do it on the side first and see if that’s something you like to do full-time.

If you want to learn more about becoming a freelancer let’s talk about, “Running a Freelancing Business”.

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What’s a Freelancer?

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:38:21 +0000

Now let’s go to the meat of the series. Let’s begin by defining what a freelancer is. And I’ll do that by checking Google and telling you the first definition I’ll come across with. Here it is. According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu, a freelancer is,

“A writer or artist who sells services to different employers without a long-term contract with any of them.”

While that pretty much paints a basic picture of what freelancers are, let me give you a three-dimensional image of a freelancer by showing you some of the basic qualities they have:

1. They’re risk takers. Freelancers are those people crazy enough to risk having a lot of money this month and little or no money in the next.

2. They’re good at multi-tasking. Ever wondered how it feels to be your own boss, secretary and accountant all at the same time? Become a freelancer.

3. They understand that freelancing is also a business. Wait, freelancing is a business? Yep. Because you also have to market and price your services, talk to clients, find clients, etc. You get the picture.

4. They’re not afraid to talk to people. Now if you’re looking for clients, you won’t get very far if you’re afraid of talking to people. As a freelancer, you might need to do client presentations before you can sell your services to them.

5. They’re not lazy. Contrary to popular belief, freelancers are not lazy. In fact, they have to work twice as hard as office employees do because they manage everything that has to do with their work (refer to item #2).

Now we’ve got that covered, let’s now talk about, “How to become a Freelancer”.

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Freelancing 101

Cedric Solidon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:34:16 +0000

The idea for this series came from friends who were interested in becoming freelancers but didn’t know how. And since I’m probably the only freelancer friend they know, I’m the one they ask for tips on how to go about the freelancing business.

So I wrote this give them a quick guide on freelancing – and so that they’d stop bugging me with the same questions from now on.

I also wrote this for other Pinoy* freelancers (or those thinking of becoming freelancers and who aren’t necessarily Pinoy) who might not have the resources to buy books or read blogs about freelancing, or those who might not have the time to explore what freelancing is all about.

Let’s get started. Here’s what we’re going to talk about in this series:

* – slang term referring to Filipinos