Top 5 Skills To Elevate Your Freelancing Career

As seen on Forbes.

Doing remote work and having the flexibility to create your own schedule is the dream for many of us. While those roles are not as common as they used to be in the corporate world, you can still get that experience as a freelancer. 

Most freelancing projects don’t follow the constraints of traditional employment relationships, and they are given the freedom to pick and choose their clients. This autonomy allows freelancers to diversify their income streams, choose the projects they find most interesting, and enjoy a higher degree of flexibility in shaping their work lives.

With that said, success in freelancing requires a unique skill set that takes time, effort, and proactive action to develop. If you want to make it as a freelancer, here are the top skills to help you elevate your business and continue to grow personally and professionally.

Digital Marketing 

Digital marketing is a popular job for freelancers. But even if you aren’t working in this specific niche, learning the basics of it can help you maintain a relatively stable career in freelancing. 

With digital marketing, you can reach out to potential clients and target your marketing efforts toward those most likely to engage with your services. The biggest advantage of digital marketing is the ability to target audiences based on metrics such as age, gender, location, and more. 

As long as you have some way to harvest data, make sense of it, and know what to do with it, digital marketing will help you reach the people most likely to need your service and pay for it. 

Sales Nurturing

In a nutshell, nurturing is the process of developing and strengthening relationships with potential clients in hopes of securing business at a later time. It involves regular communication, follow-up, and personalized attention, which in the long run builds trust and positions you as a reliable and expert professional in your field.

One thing to remember is that it’s normal to go through hundreds of people before you get to the five or ten people who will actually pay for your services. With as much as 80% of leads never converting into sales, it’s crucial for you to be strategic about nurturing your leads. 

Apply the famous Pareto principle here: focus on the 20% of your leads that will generate 80% of your profits. Those 20% are most likely to convert to paying customers, so do your best to find them and focus your nurturing efforts on them.

I’m not saying that you should abandon the remaining 80% of your leads. Reach out to them every once in a while by shooting them an email or two to remind them of your services, just so they don’t forget who you are. 

Remember that just because they don’t need your services now doesn’t mean they won’t need them in the future or that they don’t know someone who could be your future client. 

Time Management 

Owning your time as a freelancer means gaining the ability to chart your own working hours, for as long as you’re able to hand in your deliverables at the date and time that you agreed upon with your client.

While this seems easy and convenient enough on paper, developing excellent time management skills is harder than it looks. With no one to dictate your working hours, you will be in charge of setting realistic deadlines for yourself and maintaining open communication with clients about project timelines.

Many freelancers struggle with this, especially in the beginning. But as you are running your own business, you will want to develop this quickly to keep booking clients and cultivate a reputation as a dependable freelancer. I suggest finding a project management tool to help you stay organized such as Trello, Airtable, or even Google Sheets. Whatever works best for you and your style, use it and perfect it.

Financial Management

In addition to you keeping track of your person finances, you’ll also want to know how to manage your business finances. With no HR or accounting department to keep your books in order, the responsibility of ensuring your financial stability falls squarely on your shoulders as a freelancer.

You’ll want to learn some basic bookkeeping, as this will come in handy when you report your income for taxes. Besides, how would you know if you’re actually making money without having a clear picture of your finances? 

However, financial management isn’t only about bookkeeping. The most crucial aspect is ensuring that you are paid on time. If you have multiple clients, you need to be on top of invoicing, setting clear payment terms, and having a strategy for handling delayed payments. 

All of this can seem overwhelming at first, but as a newcomer to the business, you shouldn’t find it impossible to get your books in order by yourself. This will change as your career progresses, but once you have enough clients, it may make sense for you to hire specialized accountants and bookkeepers to help you with this side of the business.

Coaching

As a freelancer, it’s tempting to treat projects and clients as mere transactions. Finish your deliverables, get paid on time, and move on to the next project. But with certain freelancing niches becoming more saturated, it’s the freelancers who go beyond the mile who will stand out.

To really stand out in a sea of freelancers, I would suggest delving deeper into the client’s business goals and challenges. For example, instead of merely offering to create social media content, you can suggest that they explore email marketing and see if more direct forms of communication can also help them achieve their sales goals.

Besides potentially getting another contract on top of your original one, you also position yourself as an expert in multiple fields that work well together, allowing you to hit two birds with one stone.

Developing these five skills will help you level up your freelancing career, but don’t worry if you’re not there yet. Just start working on these skills as you go, and you’ll be a freelancing pro in no time. Rooting for you!