What type of Freelancer your are?
Freelance services are the fastest growing earning medium over the internet.
Pakistan declared at #4 positions 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.
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Every year millions of new freelancers join internet jobs marketplaces but a very low ratio of those freelancers become successful freelancers.
There is a long list of the reasons behind their failure and success but here I want to discuss the most common reasons according to my personal experience.
Actually, the main reason is the type of freelancer.
What type of freelancers you are? Let’s analyze
There are 3 types of freelancers on the internet who have their own way to deal with the freelance clients community.
Their behavior plays the vital role in their failure and success.
Based upon the personal 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 each type of the freelancers.
1. Average Freelancers
Some Freelancers deal with the client according to their personal nature.
They don’t know the online business nature.
Mostly they think the online business nature is same as their personality nature.
If their nature is kind of selfish, they just want to make money online without any interest of buyer’s profit or loss.
They see the online business with their own perspective.
One of most common thinking of this kind of freelancers 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 fact and I personally experienced the same as a client.
So I’ve reasons to believe.
This kind of freelancers understand 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 suggest freelancers to 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.
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 from the buyer without adding their personal acceleration.
Although, they deliver the job successfully but this is like an average freelancing
Unfortunately, the sharp clients, who want to get most out of a single job, try to find this type of freelancers.
They find new freelancers most commonly because they realize the new freelancers are compel to get hired for not even 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 compel 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 in their portfolio
- Finally, the money, they are doing everything for.
These freelancers are mentally prepared to accept any editing, revision, 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 jobs in a single hiring.
3. Confident Freelancers
The third type of freelancers related to the sharp business minded freelancers.
They find the jobs that are easy to do.
Also they try to understand the buyer’s nature in the first meeting, chatting 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 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 the parties.
They try to play the game without any foul. 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 work load, expertise and skills requirements
- Estimate the job hours for delivery time
- Offer estimated cost under the client’s budget.
- The sometimes offer the cost over the clients budget when they realize the job description may require more work hours that possibly the buyers don’t know about.
In my 8 years of freelancing career, I came across several clients who posted the job with very low budget but I submitted the job proposals with the higher estimate.
They contacted and asked why I’m asking for more than the allocated budget?
I positively tell them about my expert analysis on 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 the positive reaction and confidence always brings the buyer on a successful freelancers table.
Once the buyer recognized freelancer skills and experience level and positively takes the suggestions and analysis from the freelancer, s/he happily increase 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 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 8 years have been 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 improvisation and after sales support can increase the chances of success in hiring.
Also the better suggestions and honest opinion with a little offer of after sales support can siginificantly increase the opportunities of repeated jobs and repeaed 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.
Shahzad is founder and C.E.O of freelancefront.com He Ranked in Top Pakistani Blogs and Bloggers List. Expert Freelancer + Enterpreneur, Domain investor & Digital Marketer since 2011. Read his complete bio from the link below.