Entrepreneurship | Graphics and Innovation

4 Easy Tips To Survive In A Rapidly Changing Freelance Marketplace

Running a business isn’t easy because often an industry could literally change overnight, and you couldn’t be able to adapt to these changes quickly enough to survive.

If on one hand there’s a ton of freelance work out there, on the other hand there’s also plenty of competition and it becomes a daily fight to win the battle. One of the best things about being a freelancer is that when you get success, you don’t have to go looking for work or advertise often.

However, if you’re not careful to keep up with the industry, no matter if you’re the best in your topic, you could lose your clients or find them in somewhere else.

Research New Clients

One sure-fire way to die in the wilderness, is make the mistake to remain static and hope to maintain a high standard of living. That’s a great mistake.

Once you’re become popular you don’t have to stop look for new clients. You could be forgotten.

Keep your blog updated regularly, increase Twitter followers, or use other social mediums to put yourself in front of new clients. Use a bit of your time to search new contacts and partners. Just because you never advertise yourself directly, doesn’t mean you no longer put yourself out there.

Pack Your Survival Kit

If you want to start a business, you might specialize in one area, or being well versed in most sectors, but in both cases it’s important to have your core skill.

For example, my core skill is affiliate marketing as money saving as well. I make sure to be informed about latest affiliate programs, latest case study, tips, profitable affiliate niches, but I also share free advices on how to saving money, manage your budget and expenses on groceries, food, energy, fuel, travelling and more.

Arrange Your Workstation

How can you works well if the business side of things is a mess? Without a good organization, you’d forget to pay taxes, invoice clients or find actual work. So, I suggest you to spend a bit of time to organize your work.

It’s better to cut three hours off your work day to figure out how to arrange your workstation, than not caring at all and letting junk pile up.

Change Your Community

Another great mistake freelancer do is to be choose the wrong community. Not every community has client with the right budget for you. So, take a minute and see where you and your business stand.

There will always be other competitors who will charge even more than you. Of course, moving somewhere else is scary, but often repositioning yourself is great for getting a jump start to a community with more clients.

Image Credit: Darwin Bell

9 Lessons That Helped Me To Turn My Blog Into A Money Making Machine

Today I’ve created this list, because I would to put how much I have learned in the last 4 years. I am especially thankful to my readers that have followed me on this blogging journey, but also many mentors and Mastermind Colleagues who have contributed to this knowledge and experience.

Lessons About Money And Life

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Image Credit: Ian Muttoo

1. Use multiple methods to monetizing - Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I always attested that you need to use as many methods as possible to make money online. Often, who start blogging tends to use one or max two strategies to monetize their site such as Adsense and banner advertising. If on one hand both are good ways to make a montly income stream, on the other hand you need o know that advertisers come and go and no month is ever the same. Also, contextual advertising solution like adsense has need of a lot of traffic before to make a good amount of income.

So, I reccomend to Diversify your income by using other ways to monetize such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, email lists, banner ads, coaching, ebooks etc, and with affiliate marketing, promote multiple offers, so you can to end up with a very large percentage of your income coming from one site (as has happened to me)

2. Take your time – Often, can be pointless to write many post daily. Instead to rush by trying to writing 2 or 3 blog post every day in order that readers had something to come to your site for, focus your efforts by working at least 2 days or 3. I’ve noticed that write a long post in 2 or three days a time, he made double my daily traffic. So, remember, don’t rush to write a post.

3. Everything can happens in life and business – Just because your business works today isn’t means that it will work again in future. There’s no guarantee.

Some of my sites, created in different niche market, are failed just after some months. So, no matter what your business is, financial crisis can hit anyone in any moment. You always need to be prepared to the worst as ready to start again as well.

4. The 3 hour work week isn’t for me – Often I read phrase such as: Learn how do to work 3 hours week. Sure, I like this lifestyle as I think just like most of you, but it works only just if you want to get a modest income. If you really want to build a successful business you have to work many hours per day.

5. Consistency – The rule is very simple. When I work on the3dtechnologies new readers come to my site via social networks such as Facebook and Stumbleupon or social bookmarking like Digg and De.li.cious, while rss subscribers that wait new content don’t see nothing on their RSS feed-management service and most probably will forget about you.

6. Difficult to blogging - Yesterday my Facebook friend Aswany wrote a wall:

This has never happened before. I am finding it very difficult to manage my time these days. Unable to visit and comment on blogs. Even, I am not blogging myself. Hope it doesn’t last long..

I admit, it doesn’t impressed me a lot, because it happened to me to be frustrated about blogging. In these case usually I’ll take a look on other blogs in my niche that make me desire to get started blogging and give me new ideas to improve my blog.

7. Content is king -In general your readers have followed a trail that will lead them to their goal. Once come to your site if you want to get someone to do something, you need to get their interest first. If you write weak, boring contents, you’re giving the readers an express invitation to leave.

8. When You’re Stuck – Many bloggers get stuck to post because they no have idea of what to write. These ideas and topics are helpful to kick start your next post.

How to choose the right niche.
What is a business plan?
The best ways to make market research.
How to know when it’s time to quit your day job?
Make money online: How to get started
Describe a service you use that you just couldn’t do without.
Introduce new services providers you recommend.
Define commonly used terms in your niche that a beginner might not understand.
What I learned from a current event, or a person, or an experience you had.
The good the bad of affiliate marketing.
How to write a sales letter that doesn’t suck.
How do I use Facebook, Twitter, social media to attract new clients?
The Ten Biggest Mistakes I Ever Made in blogging

9. Advertising through Newspapers – If you know some local newspaper, you can email them and tell your story and how you had success online. If the newspaper has a lot of access it can give you a lot of exposure to your site.