Advertising Yourself

For any freelancer it is of paramount importance to advertise your services or else you simply wont have any work no matter how good your skills are. There are two main ways you can go about this:

Papers: An ad can be taken out in the newspaper, magazines or yellow pages etc, as a lot of people read through these everyday, however the drawback to this is if you limit your advertising to a few papers then the work you can get will only be local and could be very limiting.

Internet: various websites can be used such as ifreelance mentioned in the previous post, where people competetively bid for projects uploaded by potential customers outlining what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it.

Getting the job

One of the ways to gain a job as a freelancer is to sign into one of the freelance websites that allows clients to upload a brief for a project and you can bid on a place for that job by uploading your CV.

www.ifreelance.com for example has these features.

Freelance research

This section is research devoted to writing on the web

"I love my current clients - this isn’t about them. But in the past, mainly when I was a freelance journalist, I have had to deal with a few clients that were very difficult:

• Asking for more work without paying more
• Paying very late
• Insisting on changes even when I had strongly recommended against them
• Being uncommunicative or hard to reach
• Epic delays in giving feedback
• Feedback that was difficult to implement or (sometimes) understand
• Insist on impossible deadlines, even while delaying their own part in the process until the last possible moment
• Getting me involved in their office politics

Usually, bad clients and bad projects involve a combination of these problems. They cause me a lot of stress.

In a couple of cases, I’ve walked away from clients or projects, even at the risk of a big cut in my income, because the profit : pain ratio was too bad. I made these decisions based on emotion - the pain side of the equation - and I only came up with the idea of this ratio the other day.

Certainly, I can tolerate a lot more stress and inconvenience when I’m being well paid. I’ve heard this described as an ‘arsehole premium’. Ultimately, though, even the best-paid projects become too much if they affect your personal life or threaten your professional integrity."

This piece of text taken from badlanguage.net, shows that being a freelancer has its drawbacks in that people can be an annoyance when it comes to maintaining a smooth workflow.