Starting Out

Ten quick lessons for freelancers and contractors

Author: Leif Kendall Comments Print This Post Print This Post

10-quick-lessons-for-freelancers

Freelance Advisor and Web Consultant Lief Kendall offers some quick tips and tricks for freelancers

Gosh, well… what a year! If you don’t know me, then you won’t know that this year I turned 30, quit my day job and had a baby. It’s been an amazing, exciting year (and it’s not even finished yet!).

And here I’d like to review the freelance copywriting aspect of that. Partly to share some ideas with you, and partly to record my own thoughts.

So starting today I’m going to be posting a series of ten lessons that I’ve learnt during my time freelancing. These will be super-short micro-posts.

Feel free to share your comments

Lesson 1: Look busy

Even if work slows down, you should be able to find plenty of things to do. Things like: updating your website, updating your CV, calling potential customers, calling clients and saying hello, arranging meetings with colleagues, book-keeping, admin, back-ups, blogging, networking, reading books and blogs, skill-swapping and evaluating your competition.

You should never be ‘finished’.

Lesson 2: Make em pay! >>

By Leif Kendall, freelance copywriter and web marketing consultant

Image by foreversouls


More articles in: Starting Out
  • YES! There are plenty of ways and tools to market yourself, where you won't see residual income. But using places like Twitter.com, or Vois.com is definitely a start.
  • It's really nice to see that a number of things you mentioned are part of my day to day routine. And as for the comment that "you should never be finished", you're absolutely right, even if it does get a bit much when you're still reading the news and networking at 1am! Still I'd always rather be doing that than sitting in ANY office at 3pm...
  • Hi Joanna - that's the difficulty: making sure you keep the admin and marketing activities running even when you're busy.
  • The activities that you mention often fall by the wayside during busy times, so I agree that it's important to make the most of any quieter times. While they're not 'billable', networking, blogging, CV updating etc always pays off and keeps the work coming in over the long-term.
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