Want to be your own boss? Planning to start your own freelance web business? Not a bad idea; but you must be aware of the challenges involved with freelancing. While managing everything on your own you may lose productivity, no holidays can damage your efficiency and less managerial skill can stop you to take the business to next level.
But a little bit of preparation and proper strategies can help you overcome the challenges and become a successful freelance web business owner. Here we will discuss ten ways that will help you make your web based freelance business a success.
1. Take Care of Invoicing
Manually creating invoices and sending them to clients can be a tedious job and quite a time consuming task. This is principally right if you have plenty of clients on regular maintenance contracts, and they are paying you every month.
Also, you should have a professional template ready so that you do not need to prepare an invoice every time you send payment request to a client. There are various formats available out there; for these tasks, you can use online invoicing and billing solutions too.
2. Outsource Whenever Required
If you feel that there is a task that can be outsourced then do it. You can outsource the entire project or a part of the project in case you are overworked. Or if you feel that there is someone who can better handle the job, then assign the task to them. It will help you better serve your clients.
3. Fix a Specific Time of the Day for Meeting
Meetings are important; you have to do meeting with fellow workers and clients but make sure that it does not eat up your productive hours. Set a specific time of the day for all meetings. Post-lunch hours are best for discussion.
4. Plan for the Next Day
Never start a day with no plan in your head. Make sure you know what to do today; plan for the next day or next few days in advance.
5. Define a ‘No Email’ Period in the Day
It is absolutely not required to check mails every 2 seconds. Define few hours of the day when you will check and reply to the mails. When someone sends you an email they do not expect instant response. Check mails twice or thrice in a day – that should be sufficient.
6. Set Realistic Goals
As you are the boss, it is your responsibility to set practical goals for yourself. Be realistic while setting your goals. Set short term and long term goals so that you can evaluate your performance and rectify in case you find yourself heading towards a wrong direction.
7. Specify your Twitter and Facebook Hours
Social networking is good provided it does not kill your working hours. Be careful while networking with others on twitter, facebook and linkedin so that you do not develop an addiction.
8. Set Deadlines and Stick to it
Set deadlines for all tasks you are involved with. Again, be realistic with the deadlines. Once you have set a time limit, try not to violate it. Deadlines are not set to be broken.
9. Be Selective with Phone Calls
Again, you may decide not to pick up all the phone calls when you are working unless you are the customer support rep! Set your priorities – you will pick up calls from few selective persons only. Let the others leave you a voicemail; you can call them later.
10. Check What You did Today
Evaluate your performance everyday – back check what you decided to do and what you did; how much time you spent extra on which task. You can use applications like Rescue Time for this.
By simply following these above tips, you can handle your freelance online business properly and can earn huge profits as well.
