#that are incredibly shallow and would be improved by talking to literally anyone actually involved. where is your primary source sarah. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

annmargarette0809 · 4 years

Text

How to Become a Successful Freelancer (A 5-Step Guide)

Did you know that according to PayPal's 2018 Global Freelancer Insights Report, at least 2% of the Philippines' population is said to be freelancers? The report also found that 84% of freelancers use a freelancer online platform such as Upwork and Freelancer.

Working on a freelance basis can feel incredibly liberating. Being your own boss, a relaxed working schedule and cherry picking your projects are among the most alluring benefits. You're in complete control of your own destiny and have more control over your working life than most people who work a 9:00 to 5:00 office job. Well, reality is a tiny bit different. Freelancing is no Cake Walk! Self-employment may come with the desired flexibility. But, such flexibility has its own downsides, not to forget. You have to figure out how well are you ready to treat yourself like a business owner? Where do you begin? What processes and structures do you need to have in place? How do you find clients? And how do you know how much to charge?

Freelancing is not just sitting at home and work comes to you. The reality is you have to fight for it, and fight hard. As freelancer, you have to maintain your dignity as being a boss of your own and practicing patience radically increases your capacity for success.

In this blog post, I am going to share with you the Top 5 secrets to Becoming a Successful Freelancer coming from an expert view. “First: you must strive. Nothing good is ever easy.” says Emil Lamprecht, an avid startup and personal advisor in Berlin. He has 7 years of freelance with clients across the globe. He shares the most essential tips on becoming succesful freelancer in your chosen niché.

1. Contact everyone you know.

Literally. Everyone.

A robust network is a freelancer’s best friend. The goal is to start your business with “a group of people who really care about you” and who are ready to support you along the way. Reach out to the people closest to you to let them know what you’re doing.

This doesn’t have to feel like you’re begging for work though. In fact, taking people you like out to coffee or lunch “before you have an ‘ask’” and offering to help them out in any way you can. “It’s the equivalent of doing informational interviews. You’re just making clear the kind of work you’re doing now and that you’re available to help anyone who might need it.

Being in touch with your network isn’t just important at the beginning. It’s crucial to build time into your schedule going forward to continue networking. You never want to be so busy that you can’t reach out to the people who can help you.

2. Work on your Personal Brand.

The reason is that as a freelancer, YOU ARE YOUR BRAND.

So help me god [or deity of choice], this is a truth among truths, irrespective of whether you’re a web developer, a user experience designer, a writer or a marketer.

What do I mean when I say you are your brand?

I mean that when you are selling your services, you are actually selling yourself. So how you come across online or off is reflective of your success, your ability, and your professionalism. Your personality counts. Big time. If people don’t like you, they won’t buy what you’re selling.

So, how did I build my personal brand?

1. I got myself on LinkedIn and I fully filled out my profile. Every single detail of my experience. Every relevant job I ever had. Every morsel about me that could be interesting.

2. I then did the same thing on Facebook. I joined relevant groups for my field and started asking questions, lots of questions, as well as answering any I could.

3. I did the same on Twitter.

4. And on Instagram.

5. And when it was made available I did the same with Quora, which has become the fact-filled platform for experts.

6. I then went to every industry-relevant event I could find, afford and get to, and hustled like a maniac.

If you’re someone who still believes social media is the devil, you’re in trouble, because it’s never a single tactic that will get you anywhere, it’s a combination of many intelligently coordinated pieces.

Asking and answering questions is the easiest way to get people involved and invested in what you do, and while you could meet 15 people during a night out, you could meet 100 online. And perhaps yes, the contact is “shallower” but you can be a hell of lot more targeted. So I recommend starting online, understanding who’s important for you, pre-empting offline events by connecting with people via Twitter, and leveraging LinkedIn connections into meetings for coffee.

If you combine a strong digital brand with meeting people in person, you’ll make yourself:

Easy to find

Easy to remember

Good to know

You want to be understood as an expert and an influencer in your field, and in a world where most industry communication is digital, you better be all over it!

Just remember not to get discouraged if you don’t get 1000 Twitter followers instantly, because what’s important here is that quality wins over quantity every time. Stay focused, stay targeted and talk to every new connection like they’re your best friend.

And vice versa, if you’re awkward and depend entirely on social media to drive your network, you’re doing it wrong. You have to get out, you have to meet people and confirm that you’re real and worth investing in. As Jon Norris explained:

“Although it can be awkward attending networking events, it’s a great way to build contacts. Get out there, hand out business cards and make friends.”

3. Write a Plan of Action.

I want you to pay very close attention to the next statement.

Never, ever, undervalue time taken to plan. Never.

For each of those 30 days before I quit my job I had a goal. Sometimes that goal was to email a relevant contact in my field asking for advice. Sometimes that goal was to expand my network by X number of people, answer a certain number of questions, or attend a meetup.

And sometimes it was simply to plan out the next steps.

For each of those 30 days I wrote down my trials and tribulations into a short (often emotional) blog post, charting my ups and downs in that final month before taking the leap.

I also carefully drafted and redrafted a personal business plan, including my financial requirements, goals, and how I thought that would actually translate into work. I realized that if I landed the equivalent of 2 short projects a month, I could survive. Well barely, but it’s good to know where your survival limit is, because when push comes to shove, it’s accomplish that goal or be stuck eating dry toast for a month.

Unless you’re one of these eternally adventurous types, freelancing is no fun as a hand-to-mouth game. Nobody chooses this path with the goal of living on a financial knife edge. And by the way, it’s ok to be scared, in fact if you’re not, you’re either invincible or a dumb ass, so keep your eyes open, know your limits, and plan accordingly.

I also used this as another excuse to grow my network, reaching out to experts in my industry to ask for advice:

· How much should I charge?

· Where do I best find my clients?

· How difficult is it to close a deal?

· Should I template my pitches or create new ones every time?

This created an opportunity to learn, improve and perfect the skills I would need in a month while growing a power-network of professionals in the field. Two birds in one stone at its finest!

Do your research and pay attention to competition.

Whether it was hours scanning social media, reading blog posts like this one, offering my services to friends, or just generally building a network however I could, I absorbed as much information as possible.

Sure, it’s overwhelming; anyone who has spent a 4 hour stint on a single topic online knows that the rabbit hole is deep, and easy to get sucked into. At the end of the day, you have to pick and choose what’s important for you, but what I found most helpful was taking a real good look at what my competition were doing. And there is always competition.

Looking closely at what others were doing, I found out 3 things that helped me a lot:

1. I had local competition, and I mean local. As in down the street from me. But even if they had been doing it for a while, they didn’t seem to be effectively marketing themselves, it took effort to find them.

2. People who were looking for someone of my expertise had no central data bank to find me, or other freelancers like me. I had to be in the right place at the right time.

3. I could easily differentiate myself from my competition by having an attractive personality, and a digital presence.

Leif Kendall likes to tell people to:

“Deliver work that is better than anything your competitors are doing.”

and truthfully, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe you have a lot of experience, and maybe you don’t, but your job is to perform better than everyone else in your field, both in the work you do, and the way you act.

But how did I know what my competition were actually doing?

Remember that old adage “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”? This is one way of looking at it, but in a world of freelancing where your network is everything, you can’t afford to have enemies at all. So try this instead: “Keep your friends close, and make friends with your enemies.”

Don’t be guarded, don’t be defensive. Share, trade, and exchange what you can from your own knowledge and then keep doing it better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better.

In the end, you’ll find that some people have big egos, but a lot of people are happy to have a friend. Freelancing can be a bit lonely sometimes as by its definition you often lack those daily colleagues who understand the work you do. A lot of people out there are just like you, and happy to have someone they can relate to about work, and even share a bit of knowledge and experience.

Get yourself a mentor—and your first client.

The best piece of advice I ever received was simple in theory and tough in practice:

“Don’t burn any bridges.”

If you’re a freelancer, this quote should be read in all capslock and underlined, because you can’t afford to. Every contact counts , and on behalf of your reputation and livelihood, although it’s very tempting to give your boss the finger as you storm out the door, it’s not something you can afford to do, ever.

No one likes “kissing ass” and I don’t really recommend it, but now that you’re leaving you need your employer more than ever before, because face it: your current employer is your strongest link to your first job as a freelancer. If your job is at all related to what you plan to do, they may themselves be your first client.

In my case, the karaoke bar owner would eventually make it very clear that he “didn’t give a flying f&%$” what I was doing beyond his bar. But I needed something, so I went and found myself a mentor. Aka, I willingly became a slave to an influencer in my industry. It was the smartest decision I ever made because despite totally over-working myself, I sure enough gained Experience, made Contacts, and walked away with one hell of a Reference.

Oh, and yes, I did this on top of the study, the job, and the prep. If you want something, don’t half ass it.

So how did I manage to get myself a mentor?

Well if you have a boss who knows anything, that’s the best place to start. But if you’ve read this article then you can probably guess how I did it: I networked like a maniac, showed my plan of action, and proved I knew how to work like the competition.

In the end, I convinced my would-be mentor that I was worth that little bit of time and effort, and sure enough Richard Levy passed me my first client after only a couple weeks. And Bam! I was officially a freelancer, on schedule and making money.

Whether it’s a boss, mentor, professor, uncle, slave driver, or homeless dude with good advice, the people you see daily are most likely to have the biggest impact on your transition. So be accommodating, be thankful and be willing to work your ass off for an opportunity to do what you love.

As Rik Lomas wrote in his blog post about freelancing on Medium:

“Do not piss people off. Remember that you’re a professional and are soon to be leader of your own company. Act like it.”

So finally….

So what’s my last piece of advice? What’s that final nugget of understanding you need to open the doors to your new career, new lifestyle, and impending financial freedom?

The simple answer is that there isn’t one. There is no one solution, there is no one path. Your puzzle is your own! And understanding how the pieces fit together is what will guarantee your success.

If you’re hunting for that single piece of magical advice that will get you out of your job and thousands of clients a year, let me tell you, it doesn’t exist. Like in life, relationships, and all other forms of comedy, it’s your ability to understand the big picture and refine each detail to pixel-perfect clarity that makes you who you are and good at what you do.

So my advice is don’t forget that, don’t get hung up on singularity in a world full of complication, because what will make you successful is knowing how to apply who you are to what you want to do to the best of your ability.

As for the rest of what you need to know? Start by reading this article! People will say you’re crazy to set out on this path of uncertainty, which if you’re like me is just confirmation that you should be doing it! Freelancing is something you really have to want, and be prepared to work hard for. And the result of that is a lifestyle, and a sense of freedom that is unrivalled by any other job in the world.

So prep it, work it, and then LIVE IT for all your worth!

URL. https://annmargarettelandi.wixsite.com/admin1/post/how-to-become-a-successful-freelancer-a-5-step-guide-1

#freelancing

1 note · View note

symbianosgames · 7 years

Link

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

"That's just my opinion!" This sentence or a variant of it is often put up as a kind of protective shield for people's statements and arguments when talking about games. Of course this phenomenon can be observed in other forms of media as well. At first sight, the critical discourse about art and entertainment is primarily concerned with the audience's personal opinions. However, given the youth of the professional industry and its still fairly underdeveloped theoretical foundation, the "opinion safety factor" is especially high when it comes to video games.

On top of that this state is quite regularly praised as something positive: "How great that there are so many different opinions! Otherwise it would be boring!" On the one hand this attitude is totally fine. In private, where self-portrayal, personal experience and emotional preferences reign, there might as well be an infinite number of perspectives. But when it comes to serious discussion, i.e. justifying and defending arguments, mere opinion will not suffice. If we want to talk to and not past each other, some common ground has to be established. Otherwise there is no reason for designers, developers, critics or gamers to argue in the first place.

So, what can we do? After all, who is more and who is less right if not everyone can be at the same time? Eventually we will have to develop specific and complex criteria at this point (e.g. for strategy games), and we should certainly have a lot of discussions about those at another point.

But as a first step, it is very important to objectify the perspective on games in general to an extent. Of course this should not happen by distancing oneself from making any judgmental claims at all. Instead we should rather establish a common way of thinking about the medium. In the end this is what will lead to useful results that push the entire games discourse forward.

Now, when trying to assess games by the amount of "value" they provide for their players across their lifecycle, we immediately notice that this is an entirely subjective model. Not even looking at biasing factors such as taste, nostalgia and so on, the personal gaming history of the respective players will lead to dramatic changes in their evaluation. For example, a child might be fascinated by simply being able to move stuff around willingly on a screen. On the other hand, experienced RPG veterans will often simply shrug off even the most elaborate modern open world titles.

In internet forums, it is regularly possible to encounter such diametrically opposed points of view next to each other as well. The latest entry in some famous AAA series will be judged by one user as: "Incredibly fun! Brilliant flow! I have nothing to criticize!" Just a couple of posts later another user will respond: "Shallow gameplay, bland storytelling, technical issues, I rate it 4/10!" The problem is that they are both right from their very own perspective. Therefore, if we actually care about making progress, we need to look at their differences in detail.

To shift the focus away from personal gaming backgrounds, we need to establish an imaginary third party in the discussion that functions as a judge. Now we need to position this judge somewhere along the spectrum implied above, i.e. somewhere between "Games? Huh!?" and "Dr. Ludo - games expert". Besides the two extremes, a third reasonable starting point can be found in the middle, i.e. in the average game literacy.

The concept of game literacy (incidentally a recent topic of the video series Extra Credits) does not just incorporate "player skill", but also more high-level abilities to analyze and classify games in the context of their sociocultural environment. Those are also a regular topic of academic discourse surrounding communication, education and learning in the landscape of modern media. Among others, Tom Apperley and Caterhine Beavis have tried to establish "A Model for Critical Games Literacy" (2013).

Now, for a start let's take a look at the uninformed judge. His view on games is very innocent. He does not know genres and their conventions, and he is also not oversaturated from experiencing the same core mechanisms year after year. In a way this judge is reminiscent of Conan O'Brien's role of the "Clueless Gamer". He keeps asking basic, but reasonable questions regarding everything he encounters in a game: "What's the point? Is that interesting? Is this a worthwhile usage of my time? Why am I supposed to find 35 more pine cones and 15 pebbles now?"

This is the advantage of the "gaming illiterate": A mind free from decades of video game brainwashing, not having gotten used to all the weird idiosyncrasies of the medium. However this of course comes with the issue of significantly reduced competence. This judge is not able to classify a game or recognize improvements compared to similar titles. He will have to discover the core fascination of interactive entertainment again and again without establishing consistent language or making any really profound statements.

"Are we literally pushing a car through a desert? Why is this a game?"

So, even if looking through the glasses of cluelessness can help finding the forest for the trees once in a while, discussions with the unknowing judge will in practice not lead too far or deep. That is not only true from the point of view of critics, designers and other experts, but also for any layman somewhat involved in the gaming hobby as a whole.

Let us therefore gear up. Our second judge is more or less the average gamer. He exhibits mediocre knowledge regarding games. He does know all the genres more or less, but not enough to be fed up with any of them. The majority of the industry creates their products around this stereotype, whose profile can serve quite well to make predictions about what many potential players may currently like.

On top of that many critics are using the same evaluation basis these days. Even though many of them would theoretically have access to a deeper expertise, they find themselves forced to maximize clicks and tell the masses what they want to hear. Most game ratings these days, and especially those of big platforms and magazines, are basically predictions about which games might be successful on the market.

The majority of people fall under the average game literacy.

At this point the disadvantages of this approach become quite apparent. Of course we can discuss game mechanics, the market and broader trends in the evolution of the medium with our average judge quite well. But will he be ready to break into uncharted territory? Probably not. His mindset is rather conservative and he will prefer to play it safe, to "feel at home". He will favor a solid sequel over a genuinely novel indie game which would require quite some effort to get into.

The following quote is often attributed to automobile pioneer Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." This describes our middle-rate judge quite well. But what if we are actually interested in innovation and progress?

Now this is where the absolute experts come into play. Of course this perspective cannot be taken by anyone. The respective judge is extremely well-versed regarding his area of expertise. Therefore we will need several of those specialists, each one responsible for their own well-defined area. They view games as scientific publications, as experiments formulating a thesis and either proving it by working, or discovering certain problems that prevent them from doing so. If executed competently, both will be regarded as valuable contributions to the craft.

Donald Knuth: „We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.“

Lukewarm AAA games on the other hand will be regarded as works simply rehashing the current state of research without adding anything particularly new, i.e. basically worthless. Instead of trying to make predictions about the financial success chances, the scientific judge is interested in what "actually works" and can help advance the medium in the long run. This constant drive to be "ahead of the curve" also means he will likely lose most of the audience and discussion partners along the way. His perspective will seem alien to the majority.

As with other, more mature forms of media though, the sharp eyes of a few creators, critics, academics and deeply involved hobbyists will be what pushes the art form to new heights. Their perspective will be the one able to define the medium's true identity and lay the groundwork for a long-term sustainable future. This will make it possible for the industry to reliable produce valuable games, not just shooting in the dark and stumbling from one lucky guess to the next as before. The place where "I disagree!" will not just be followed by "That's totally fine!" but a thorough examination of the underlying theory, will be the one where the future of the medium will be shaped.

Depending on personal intent, different recommendations can be drawn from the above considerations. Initially, everyone potentially assessing or discussing games should be very clear about whether he or she is actually interested in serious, progressive discourse and its results. Should that be the case, it will become clear relatively soon that uncoordinated opinions and emotional estimations will not really lead to useful outcomes. Instead the basis for discussion has to be objectified by collectively assuming a common (in itself indeed subjective) perspective. Therefore one has to choose a neutral judge or, more precisely, a joint starting point on the spectrum of game literacy.

As described above, the clueless judge will not serve as a useful model for too long. Ideally he will lead to a few pointed questions and thoughts over time but not much more. As a next step, the average gamer is definitely able to discuss the medium in a somewhat fruitful, albeit rather conservative way. He is at his best when it comes to market research. Our expert "Dr. Ludo" on the other hand will not be too keen on that topic since he is primarily interested in the intellectual progress of art and craft.

In practice most designers, developers and critics will end up with a "golden middle ground" somewhere in between the two latter perspectives. It can then be adjusted in the direction of popularity and alleged financial safety (Objectification 2), or innovation and research (Objectification 3). From time to time, assuming the naive perspective (Objectification 1) might help refining the mix. In the end the most important thing for development studios, editorial teams, conferences, and basically any group seriously discussing games out there, will be to establish a common perspective. Ultimately this will result in a consistent vision and enable its productive pursuit.

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes