Your Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming a Freelancer

A 4-week plan to make 2021 the year you take the leap.

I’ve been a digital nomad ever since I finished college and it has been the most exciting three years of my life. I have traveled to a dozen countries, learned to dive and to ski, lived on paradise islands and in fascinating cities. All the while I paid my bills and managed to put money aside by working as a freelance journalist and non-fiction author. It’s been bliss, and I consider myself incredibly fortunate.

I also remember how scary it was when I started off. When I finished my higher education, one thing I knew with certainty was that I wasn’t ready to settle into a 9 til 5 routine. That is one thing my internships and summer jobs had taught me. I felt less creative working from an office space, and I preferred to have several projects on the go at the same time.

At the same time, I was absolutely terrified about starting off as a freelancer, and so I did what I always do when I’m scared — I read a lot. Maybe that’s what brought you to this article as well! I read books and articles and listened to podcasts. This guide is a compilation of the things I learned back then, combined with the tips and tricks I have picked up since. I hope to use my errors and successes to help you on this new path! It is particularly adapted to Freelance Writing since that is what I know the best, but many of the steps and resources can be adapted to any form of Freelancing. The exercises I give take a few hours every week — you can do the program quicker or slower depending on your availability.

This is a time of change, whether we chose it or not. Covid-19 has transformed the world we live in, and we are still waiting on a “new normal.” Why not make your own “new normal”? One thing is certain, this pandemic has shown us how much work can be done remotely, which means that it is a great chance to be a freelancer. You might already have a job that has put you on remote work — consider asking to work part-time so that you have time to develop your freelance gig on the side.

2020 has been a tough year, dreams and plans have been put on hold while many people struggle just to survive the day. Let’s hope for better in 2021, and for those fortunate enough to be able to, start building a ‘new normal’ that is closer to our dream life ❤

Week One: What kind of Freelancer are you?

Exercise One: Ask yourself the right questions

Do you want to be a full-time or a part-time Freelancer? Would you like to start with your freelancing life as a side-hustle or are you ready to go “all-in”? Do you want to be a Freelance journalist, copy-writer, coder, website designer, illustrator, graphic designer …? Do you want to continue living in the same place or work and travel?

Sometimes when we dream about being a Freelancer, we’re not entirely clear on what that means. This is the opportunity to put words to that dream, to visualize what a Freelance life might mean for you. Put a timer on for 5 minutes, close your eyes, and daydream. This will probably feel silly, but it’s an important step to shine a light on what you actually want.

It might be hard to picture anything at all apart from working on a laptop next to a steaming cup of coffee, possibly overlooking a beach — that’s normal until you start doing research, it’s hard to imagine all the possible options.

Write down your ideas, however unrealistic, however vague. We’ll narrow it down in the next stage.

Exercise 2: Brainstorm what you can offer to clients

The question “what do you have to offer” is always daunting, but trust me, everyone has things to offer thanks to their unique life experiences.

Think about your current work: is it something that exists in a form online? If you’re a student, what skills have you mastered or what topics are you able to write about?

Think about the rest of your life, what hobbies do you have? Could you write about them? Produce videos about them? This could be anything — perhaps you are amazing at taking apart electronics and putting them back together. Or maybe you get a lot of compliments on your make-up. Go through your daily routine, think of all the things you do, and recognize them as skills. Then think about whether or not you could market these skills.

Maybe you speak several languages that you can offer translation services in, or maybe you’ve had unique life experiences that you can transform into thought-provoking writing.

Think about what you enjoy doing, what you are good at, and what you want to do. Think about your skills, and pick up on the ideas that came out of your visualization session.

Write down all your ideas.

Exercise 3: What is there a market for?

Make a table. On one side write the list of all the ideas you had for things you could offer clients. Then make three columns:

Things you are good at / Things you enjoy / Things there is a market for

Go down the list of ideas and check the boxes that correspond. If you don’t know if one of your ideas has a market, put a question mark.

Once you have finished your list, go online a do a bit of research about the ideas your not sure of, and find out if the service exists already and is something you could sell or not. Think about who could be interested and maybe send out a few emails to ask, directly, if it is something they might spend money on.

When that is ironed out, look at your list. Eliminate those things there is no market for.

The things you are good at and that there is a market for will make up the initial base of your freelance business.

The things you enjoy and that there is a market for are areas in which you need to get training so that you can add them to what you offer at a later stage.

Exercise 4: What ressources do you have, what do you need?

This is when you think of what concrete tools you need to start working. What will you do for office space? Buy what you need to make a home office, or find a coworking space that’s affordable and practical. If you’re anything like me, you will, sometimes, work in bed in your pajamas, but that is not a good habit and it certainly won’t be your most productive time.

If you need to make calls for work, check that you have a quiet space to do so. Check your cell phone contract: will you have enough data and minutes once you start working from home? What about your wifi: is it strong enough to work on?

Do you need to invest in a printer? Will you need organizers for invoices? Do you need some shelves at home to store work stuff?

How about software? I invested in Scrivener, an amazing program for writing that allows you to organize your work as you go along. Depending on your work, the right software can make your day a lot more efficient.

If you don’t have the money to currently invest in these things, make a wish list, in order of priority, and buy then once the cash starts trickling in.

Work out how much time you will have available. Take a blank timetable and fill in the activities you already have planned, and your day-job if you have one. Then calculate how many hours you’ll be able to, realistically, devote to freelancing. This will allow you to make achievable goals in the following sections.

Exercise 5: Get in the right headspace

A large part of productive freelancing comes from taking care of your mental health. You’ll need confidence to deal with setbacks and rejection. You’ll need to learn to compartmentalize between work and leisure time as the line between the two gets blurred. Knowing yourself, think about what challenges your mental state might pose — whether it's a fear of criticism or a tendency to procrastinate. Find resources to handle this, before it becomes a problem: find meditation videos on the internet that help you to unwind, or start saying affirmations every morning to start improving your confidence. I strongly recommend The Writing Coach Podcast with Rebecca L. Weber which focuses on many topics, but always looks at the mental processes that cause us to stand in our own way. Understanding this helps to overcome the limits we set ourselves because of our fears or anxieties.

Exercise 6: Start calling yourself a Writer

Now that you’ve started the process, you are a writer/freelancer. It’s important to say it because it develops confidence and heightens the commitment you show to your work. By acknowledging it, it stops being a side gig and becomes a real job. It doesn’t matter if you’re not making money yet. You are a writer, so start telling people, and start telling yourself.

Well done on this first section! Next week we’ll be getting into the nitty-gritty what services to offer to who.

Week Two: Meet the clients …. and the competition

Exercise 1: Define your dream client

Take your list of services again, and work your way through it, thinking of who your ideal client would be each time. Find examples on the internet of which publications or companies are likely to need your services. Check out their social media accounts, find where they are the most active — and take note because that is where you will have to be the most present too. Try and get an idea of what precisely they will be looking for.

For journalists, this means sitting down with your favorite publications and analyzing them from top to bottom. Look at what the different sections are, how long the articles are, what kind of reporting they rely on. Look at the sort of topics that have been tackled. Make sure to jot down any story ideas that come up as you work through the publications.

Exercise 2: Start your address book

Take the information you have found about potential clients and start an excel sheet address book in which you put a small description of the client, what they are looking for, where they are active online, and their contact details. If you have found out information about how much they pay, put that in there too — for writers, a great resource is Who Pays Writers? which is a crowdsourced listing of different publications and how much they pay. Hunt down the names of editors of the sections that you like, and their email addresses. On your social media accounts, follow editors or clients to keep an eye out for calls for pitches or job offers, and keep up with the latest industry news.

Exercise 3: Suss out the demand and where to find it

Check out platforms that offer freelancing jobs to see if there is anything that matches your criteria. Some popular ones are Fiverr and Upwork. Find out if there are any others in your field. Find newsletters that might contain offers. Keep an open mind while reading the offers to see if there might be services you didn’t think of or didn’t initially appeal to you, that you might want to add to your repertoire.

Exercise 4: Suss out your competition

Find people offering services similar to what you’d like to do, and do a full investigation into their work and online presence. If you’re not sure where to find examples, do a search on Linkedin. Check out their websites, their social media, and examples of their work. Jot down what seems to be working and what comes across as professional in their presentation and what doesn’t. Think of what you could offer that they can’t. If you can, find out how much they are charging.

Exercise 5: Define your primary services and rates

Based on what you have found out during this research, you should be able to narrow down the services you had on your original list and be able to define your primary services and secondary services. Prioritize the ones that seem to have demand but less competition. You might, later on, find that you were wrong about this, but then you can course-correct later. Define the rates you’ll charge for each service, work out whether you’d like to charge by the hour or by the piece. It is always difficult to work out how much you should be charging, but you should have been able to get a general ballpark idea, and you should define your absolute minimum. Let that be a strict rule and idea in your head so that you don’t end up working for less than you deserve.

Week Three: Get the word out

Exercise 1: You now run a business. Accept it.

When you are launching your own business, a large part of your work is marketing yourself. This is a huge investment of time in the beginning, but once it is up and running, it goes a lot more smoothly. The first step is acknowledging that you are in fact now running a business. You might feel like a writer, a coder, an artist, but you are in fact also a business owner, and thinking of it in those terms makes it a lot harder to skip on the necessary, albeit boring bits of freelancing. I personally find these aspects of my work very boring. I hate marketing. I hate having to change my writing to suit the new demands of the internet. I hate that SEO has been the death of the poetic headline. Yes, I am an obnoxious creative, but I’m also bitingly aware, as you must be too, of the importance of these aspects if you’re running your own freelancing business. And in the end, I came to find pleasure in these aspects too.

You may need to put some time into learning how to use the different tools available. I advise learning at least a little about social media marketing and SEO, unless you are already an expert. Luckily, there are plenty of tools around today to quickly master the basics.

Exercise 2: Create your website

Maybe you already have a webpage, or maybe this is new to you, either way, it’s important to have a website towards which you can direct potential clients, or that they can find via a google search. Your website needs to give a clear vision of what you offer, as well as samples of your work, either through links or a portfolio on your website.

You don’t have to go all out and make a beautiful, complicated page. The minimalist look can be preferable — as long as you make it airy, easy to read, and to navigate.

I recommend either WordPress or Wix for making your own site easily, but feel free to use whatever you prefer.

On your website, you need to have an about page, a contact page, details of your qualifications, and samples of your work. If you don’t yet have any samples of work, that’s ok. Don’t worry, you can create a good portfolio before you’ve had a paid gig from schoolwork or “sample” pieces. (This will be the subject of a follow-up article so hit follow and keep your eyes open!)

Make sure the page you create is mobile-friendly, since people are increasingly using the internet on their phone or tab and there is nothing worse than reading a page gone haywire.

Decide whether you want to have a blog on your website or not. A well-kept blog, in which you discuss the industry you are working in, provide a behind-the-scenes view of your work, or write about topics related to your work, is ideal. A slumbering blog that hasn’t been updated in months is more of a liability than an asset. Be realistic about what you can do.

Make sure you link your website to your social media so that there is a flow between the two.

I recommend purchasing a domain name, it looks far more professional than a blog URL.

Exercise 3: Build your social media

A minimum presence on social media is important to connect with potential clients, make a name for yourself and showcase your work. I recommend being active on Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram — but this really depends on your sector.

Your first decision is whether to create separate accounts or update your personal ones. If you know your friends will be tagging you in pictures of drunk nights out, I strongly recommend making separate accounts. Follow important personalities in your field and potential clients. Think back on how your competitors used social media to draw attention to their services, and decide what tone and content you would like to post to do so. This may be a process of trial and error — get started now, that way you can start building your following and finding your voice.

Exercise 4: Marketing

Brainstorm different ways of advertising your products and services: Weekly blog posts, Medium posts, networking on social media, networking in person, pitching via email, writing guest posts, cold calling, Google ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads. Check out prices when relevant, work out a preliminary budget for marketing services.

Again, through the course of your business, you will probably use different methods at different points in time. This brainstorm will give you a starting point.

Week Four: Get Started

Exercise 1: Sort out your administrative status

This will depend on which country you are living in or intend to live in. You will need to work out what you need to do to run a business wherever you are — you will likely need to found your own company so that you can pay tax on your earnings. Sometimes this takes a bit of time, so get the ball rolling.

Exercise 2: Work out your finances

Are you happy with your bank account and savings account? How do you intend to bill clients? Are you likely to receive payments from abroad or in different currencies? If so, you might like to think about using services such as Transferwise or Revolut, which are designed to make money transfers between different currencies cheaper.

Create a sample invoice using Microsoft Excel or Google sheets so that you can easily change the input each time.

Create a budget — work out how much you have to earn, how long your savings can last you, what your necessary payments are each month…

Exercise 3: Set SMART goals

You’ve probably heard it before: to work, goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-based.

That means you need to know precisely what you want to achieve, have a way to tell when it has been completed, you have to be realistic in what you can achieve, your goal has to have real meaning to your overall projects, and you need to give yourself a deadline by which to achieve your goal.

Set yourself SMART goals for your first 6 months of freelancing: this can be the aim to work for a certain amount of clients, to earn X amount of money, to have published X pieces of writing…

You should make goals both for your marketing and for your producing, the two sides of your business.

Break down your goals by month, then by week. Then put them in your calendar. This will help you check your progress.

Exercise 4: Get your first client

Now that you are all ready to go, it is time to find your first client. This could be through the marketing tendrils you have already lain out, through a networking event, or through a freelance website. The important thing is to get started, get the ball rolling.

At the beginning, freelancing is trial and error. It takes time building your network. You find your balance between what you enjoy and what pays, between low paying and high paying clients, between your time working and your time off. Mindfulness is particularly important for freelancing: it’s good to be in an ongoing process of seeing what works and what doesn’t, and not loose sight of the big picture — your freelance business — as you chase each individual gig. This all comes with time — don’t get stressed about it. You got this.

Congratulations, you are now a Freelancer!

ENJOY YOUR JOURNEY!