If you aren’t already freelancing, give it a try! As long as you aren’t violating your contract with your current company, it can be a great way to make the transition from day job to gainfully self-employed.
What You’ll Learn
The gig economy will teach you to be a successful businessperson as you find clients, close sales, and gain repeat business. You’ll learn marketing, negotiation, and customer service. Even if you don’t ever quit your day job, you’ll be better equipped to run a business, sell yourself, and be more persuasive.
Explore your skills in new ways. Have you only done graphic design for the uniform company you work for currently? Have you only marketed luxury bicycles to those with high-income levels? Freelancing allows you to try a wider range of tasks in the skill area you enjoy most. Testing your boundaries will help you perform better at your day job and for future freelance clients.
Working as a freelancer will help you learn the ins and outs of running a business. You’ll need to be a salesperson and marketer. Learn to write contracts, purchase tools and technology, keep track of business expenses, and do the required accounting.
Manage Time and Money
Discuss your freelancing goals with your family. Find a reasonable schedule that works for everyone. Set clear limits on when you will and won’t work. Freelancers tend to get unbalanced if they don’t set clear boundaries.
This is a good time to go over the household’s finances. Can you cut expenses and reduce your hours at your day job? How much can you reasonably invest in your side hustle?
Build Your Portfolio
Freelancing is an excellent way to build your portfolio and poise you for future growth. Unless you’ve already chosen a niche, try to work with a variety of industries to develop a wide-ranging portfolio.
Test your Pricing
Charge what you’re worth but use your freelancing as a litmus test for what the local market will tolerate. Can you make more if you offer your work online in another market?
Increase Your Income
Moonlighters think the only way to increase their income is to work more. Get creative. Flex your freelance. What high-value offerings can you provide? Can you make more if you charge a per-project fee instead of an hourly rate?
Build Relationships
It’s easy to be shortsighted when you’re building your side hustle. Look beyond this month’s bills. The quality of the relationships you maintain will determine your success.
Be generous. Find local causes you care about and contribute to them.
Be interested. Turn cold contacts and networking events into opportunities to connect with real human beings. Discuss topics other than work. Find out what is important to your professional community. Travel in circles that you feel good about and you’re sure to get gigs you enjoy.
Don’t search so hard for new clients that you forget about the existing ones. Keep in touch with clients. You’ll work harder to convert a new contact into a client than you will to get new work with a previous client. Connect on social media or send a monthly newsletter. Provide them with valuable content and they’ll look forward to your communication.
Send handwritten notes to say thank you or congratulate. An occasional gift is nice. I often send books as a thank you.
Reward loyal customers by making it easy for them to do business with you. offer a prepayment discount or new order discount for existing customers. Referral discounts will encourage them to send more work your way.
Connect with other freelancers. If their schedule is full or a project is outside of their wheelhouse, they may send work your way.
How to Get Gigs
If you do a Google search for “how freelancers can get gigs” you’ll see more than the 2.5 million results that the search engine returned to me today. Many of the top results are websites for freelancers. I’ve tried a lot of them. They each have their pros and cons.
Freelance websites are an okay place to start but you’ll soon find that unless your skill is quickly reproduced, you might not make enough money. Here are some alternatives.
Look at job listings. A great way to start freelancing is to offer your services to companies that can’t find the right candidate. They get to hire someone without the onboarding process and the overhead or commitment. You can look locally or remote. Try indeed.com as they collect jobs from all over the web. I’ve had some success with craigslist.
Some free and low-cost marketing options include developing your website’s SEO, blogging, social media marketing, guest blogging, offering to speak/teach at your local chamber of commerce or community education center.
Write a press release and send it to your local media outlets. Enter contests and nominate yourself for awards (where allowed). I won Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 from the local chamber of commerce and wound up on the front page of several local papers. This is the best kind of free publicity!
Look up former bosses. They know your work ethic. Ask if they know of anyone who could use your services. Ask your family.
Do you have additional tips for moonlighters and freelancers? Please share in the comments.
