Top 3 Freelancers types behind failure and successful career

type of freelancer

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What type of Freelancer you are?

Freelance services are the fastest-growing earning medium over the internet.

Pakistan was declared at the #4 position in the global online survey report.

It means there is a huge potential for Pakistani IT professionals to grow and rank higher in the list of 2020 top 3 fastest growing countries in freelance services.

Are you a New / Beginner Freelancer?

So if you are new to the Freelancefront blog, please refer to the following freelancing guides from scratch.

Despite the millions of new freelancers joining internet job marketplaces each year, a disappointingly low number achieves success. While the reasons behind this divide are many, I will focus on the most common ones I’ve observed in my personal experience.

The primary factor? The type of freelancer.

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What type of freelancer you are? Let’s analyze

There are 3 types of freelancers on the internet who have their way to deal with the freelance clients community.

Their behavior plays a vital role in their failure and success.

Based upon my assessment over the years at different freelance services and businesses, I finally understood the following 3 types of freelancers.

Average Freelancers

Compelled Freelancers

Confident Freelancers

Let me elaborate on each type of freelancer.

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1. Average Freelancers

Some Freelancers deal with the client according to their nature.

They don’t know the online business nature.

Mostly they think the online business nature is the same as their personality nature.

If their nature is kind of selfish, they just want to make money online without any interest in the buyer’s profit or loss.

They see the online business from their perspective.

One of the most common thinking of this kind of freelancer is, just get hired, do the job, deliver the result and that’s all.

Over the years, I’ve talked to hundreds of clients and buyers.

Sadly, they mentioned a big average of selfish freelancers.

I’m sorry I don’t want to hurt anyone. This is a fact and I experienced the same as a client.

So I’ve reasons to believe.

This kind of freelancer understands that they shouldn’t go over the limit in providing freelance services.

Honestly, they are not wrong when it comes to online freelancer services over a job marketplace like Upwork, Fiverr, freelancer guru, etc.

Every freelancer knows the job marketplace terms and rules.

For example, Upwork strongly suggests freelancers avoid doing the job out of the job description.

I don’t disagree.

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even reply to the clients when they contact you for a little help or any remaining fix after the job is delivered.

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2. Compelled Freelancers

The other side of the picture is different. Some freelancers deal with the client according to the client’s nature.

They willingly or unwillingly get the job pressure and perform under pressure.

They try to do everything the buyer says. They just try to get rid of the job as soon as possible.

They just follow the guideline provided by the buyer without adding their personal acceleration.

Although they deliver the job successfully this is like an average freelancing

Unfortunately, sharp clients, who want to get the most out of a single job, try to find this type of freelancer.

They find new freelancers most commonly because they realize the new freelancers are compelled to get hired for not even a low price but for the sake of good positive feedback.

The new freelancers have no arguments for low pricing, more than the job description, accepting many revisions and edits, again n again sampling or mockups, etc.

They are compelled to look for:

Quick jobs to stay in the field
Positive feedback to get more jobs
To develop their work skill and experience
To add real projects to their portfolio
Finally, the money, they are doing everything for.

These freelancers are mentally prepared to accept any editing, revision, or even totally different editing that was out of the current job description.

They compel to accept as they think they need to stay in the competition.

The dark side of this is, the clients cunningly, use the freelancers for more than one job in a single hiring.

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3. Confident Freelancers

The third type of freelancer is related to sharp business-minded freelancers.

They find jobs that are easy to do.

Also, they try to understand the buyer’s nature in the first meeting, chat, or phone call.

They don’t get the job pressure as well as the buyer’s unnecessary demands.

They try to counter weaknesses in the job description and suggest better ideas to enhance the results.

They do care for the nature of the client but they argue for their own perspective and opinions for any overload demand.

So once the buyer and freelancers come to an agreement, it always is a settled, peaceful, and profitable deal between both parties.

They try to play the game without any fouls. Their goal is to provide “satisfactory” job results under the settled limit.

This kind of freelancer does the following:

First, analyze the job description thoroughly
Analyze the workload, expertise, and skills requirements
Estimate the job hours for delivery time
Offer estimated cost under the client’s budget.
They sometimes offer the cost over the client’s budget when they realize the job description may require more work hours that possibly the buyers don’t know about.

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In my 8 years of freelancing career, I came across several clients who posted the job with a very low budget but I submitted the job proposals with a higher estimate.

They contacted me and asked why I’m asking for more than the allocated budget.

I positively tell them about my expert analysis of their project and added some features and give them suggestions to run the project successfully.

Also offered after-sales services so they accepted and realized the facts I told them.

They accept that they didn’t either know about that or they ignored such things that can be profitable and beneficial after the job is delivered.

So positive reactions and confidence always bring the buyer to a successful freelancer’s table.

Once the buyer recognized the freelancer’s skills and experience level and positively takes the suggestions and analysis from the freelancer, s/he happily increases the budget to get satisfactory results.

I must say and recommend after-sale service and support to the clients to convert a one-time freelance job into a long-term business relationship.

If you want to know, how successful a freelancer career is,

Just check the freelancer’s profile for analyzing how many “repeat jobs” or “repeat hiring” the freelancer received in his/her career.

Just to let you know how important a business relationship is, I tell you that my very first client is still in my contact even though 8 years have passed.

Apply my saying in your daily freelancing routine and see the power of positive services and after-sales support.

Conclusion:

A freelancer should be confident and positive when going to adopt freelancing as a professional career.

The freelancers should have a balance in taking the job according to the job description but a little bit of improvisation and after-sales support can increase the chances of success in hiring.

Also, better suggestions and honest opinions with a little offer of after-sales support can significantly increase the opportunities for repeated jobs and repeated hiring from the same client.

Also, the client may become your advocate to convince other clients for hiring you.

So don’t shy in providing a little more help and support to convert a one-time job into a long-term business relationship. That is the keynote of this guide.

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