By working less, you can make more money
While freelancing can be a fantastic approach to earn a living, it can also be a difficult one. With deadlines approaching, are you still trying to afford for your Caramel Macchiato Venti in the early hours?
If this is the case, don’t freak you might repair it. In reality, when you get clever about how you value and market your skills, you can double or even treble your freelancing revenue in the next few seasons.
Rather than working more, here are ten concepts you can put into practice right now to increase your income. These methods will help you earn a six-figure salary while allowing you to spend more time with your family.
1. The first step is to develop a compelling business case
In contrast, kids who work in fast-food restaurants can only hope to earn $10 an hour, while business tax lawyers command $1,000 an hour. This is all on the quality you provide in exchange for products or services you provide. When it comes to tax advice, even the most expensive burgers aren’t worth more than $1,000.
So, consider how you may set the standards by providing clients with more useful results. Those who write blog articles for a living will find it difficult to earn well because of the commodity status that such labour has among clients. Clients will only pay so much because there are so many cheap article writers willing to fill in the gaps.
In contrast, the earning potential of copywriters who create persuasive sales copy is virtually limitless. Many copywriters earn more than a huge amount of money a year in their profession. It’s no surprise that their clientele are willing to shell over such large sums since they produce massive amounts of money. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved.
So altering your value proposition can increase your income ability by a factor of 10. Your revenues would rise if you provide a solution that has a more transformative impact.
2. Market Your Value, But Your Time
Charging even by the clock is a bad idea for both you and your customers. What you accomplish is more important than the amount of effort put into a task.
To ensure that you’re paid fairly for the work you provide, billing by the contract is the best option. Read Alan Weiss’s book Million-Dollar Consulting for ideas on how this might boost your revenue.
3. Maintain a High Standard of Etiquette
To be successful as a freelancer, you must be more than just a competent worker. There’s no point in producing excellent work if it’s presented a day late. It’s just as vital to behave yourself professionally as it is to be proficient in your field when it comes to your job.
To meet their deadlines and stay on budget, clients require reliable freelancers. All talks, debates, and contracts must be conducted in a professional manner if people are to believe they can rely on you in any event of an emergency.
If you do this well, customers will be willing and able to pay you more because they understand you will fulfil on your promises.
4. Select More Reliable Customers
The most common blunder made by independent contractors is seeking for customers with small budgets. As a visual artist, that might appear like a smart thing to approach local companies like restaurants, boutiques, and hotels to inquire about possible employment.
As a result, your revenues are likely to be constrained by tiny marketing spend for small enterprises. Rather, focus on organisations with substantial advertising budgets that can actually afford you what you’re worth.
A great way to reach these high-level business clients is through LinkedIn. It’s considerably easy than you might imagine getting in touch with senior executives in these kinds of firms. So if you want to make more money, focus on attracting customers with large budgets.
5. Develop a Wider Network of Clients
Some other major blunder of independent contractors is becoming overly reliant on a single large customer. As long as the average ‘big fish’ keeps bringing in too many works, it’s easy to take whatever’s on offer and overlook other opportunities.
Suppose, if all of a sudden, no work comes in? Late payments could keep piling up even when you have no paid work on the schedule. Then you’ll have no choice but to accept whatever low-paying work comes your way.
Whenever you shed one customer, you won’t be driven to accept cheap work out of panic if you’ve had a diverse client base.
6. Promote Consistently
For contractors, promotion can be a frustrating task. If sales is slow, one might also want to put advertising on hold while you wait for more jobs to come in.
Because of this, you’re more likely to speak with potential employers only when you’re desperate for the job. Since you didn’t want to lose business, you have really no negotiating power.
Making promotion an essential part of your regular routine is the best strategy. Even better, you may employ a part-time virtual assistant (VA) for $50 a week and do periodic marketing to leads.
In this approach, you’ll still be able to bargain for the rates you need because you’ll constantly have customers in the marketing funnel. If a prospective customer rejects you, you realize that you also have alternative options open to you.
7. Remove Scope Creep
Whenever a customer alters the product backlog after costs have already been negotiated upon, this is known as “scope creep.” Just one job will turn to a two-week contract for that same fee, with more outputs required.
It really is a major source of loss for freelancers, and this must be addressed immediately. The obligations should be explicitly outlined before signing a contract. If indeed the customer’s workload grows, be sure to charge them more.
If you’re not careful, your hourly wage could drop to as little as a few cents… or even less.
8. It’s time to get rid of any worst customers!
Although few customers are a great pleasure working with, there are others who are less than ideal. Make the point of not working with clients who really are bothersome at all costs.
If you already have customers who are fussy about the smallest of details, place unreasonable demands on you, or paying you late, you’d be better off doing business with someone else. Getting rid of the poorest 10% of your customers each year and replacing them with good ones is a wonderful method to raise your total revenue.
Customers that are ready to pay higher for high-quality services, pay their debts on time, and also have acceptable demands should be targeted.
9. Ensure that your solutions are complete.
It is common for freelancers to conceive of their business solutions in the perspective of the abilities they have available. However, putting yourself in the shoes of your customers may be a superior approach. What can you do to alleviate their burdens?
As a freelancer, you might build a team with some other freelancers to provide entire solutions. It’s easier for advertising companies to move original content when an art director and a writer create a writing staff.
Keep it as simple as possible for customers to get in touch with you and handle their issues over the phone. In the end, a team is more valuable than just the sum of its individual pieces.
10. Make Yourself Easily Reachable for Last-Minute Tasks
Being available for rush work is a simple approach to increase your freelancing income. Customers are willing to pay extra if you can meet a hard deadline, which happens quite frequently.
There are a number of things to keep in mind while trying to land a new customer (for an extra rate). They have to understand that if a cope with the changes at 3.00 am on Sunday, they may call you. Next, make it simple for customers to reach you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Contact information, such as a phone number, should be readily accessible to consumers when needed.
