I got back into FFXI and while I keep enjoying it I decided to quit for a simple reason. I'm going to be self sufficient this year. In this economy you can never have too much work and to be honest to a freelancer this is a goldmine. This might sound difficult to believe but its I'll share with you a few tips about freelancing today.
What can I expect?
Expect competition. Furious competition. Maybe you still have your job, maybe you don’t but I can assure you many of your comrades are out on the streets and just like you would have fierce competition for a full-time job right now, expect a lot of competition for contract jobs. You’re going to need to be faster, cheaper (I’ll explain in a minute), and better than all of them. You achieve this by picking your battles and by befriending as many people as you can. Most of my gigs come from friends I’ve made along the way that can’t take a project for some reason or that need assistance with a project they have already taken on.Where are the Jobs?
Everywhere. While going into past workplaces and recommending they update their Point of Service systems with one that I can custom build for them, has not gone well. (I swear I will change that video store’s cataloguing system if its the last thing I do! ) I don’t think it was a waste of time, if I see a system that I can make better I immediately talk to whoever is in charge and leave my card. These are mainly just practice for when you really need to pitch your work to somebody since they will mostly be happy with their current system, but if they do decide to change it they’ll think of you. Talk to your friends, let them know that you have some extra time now that your WoW character is in hiatus and you would like some extra work. Maybe they’ll hear something and they’ll pass it along, its better if you have a whole bunch of people with their eyes open than just you. One point I’d like to stress however, talk to your friends, do not whine to your friends. We want good leads, not somebody who has no idea what he/she is talking about that mentioned something about a website. We are trying to make more with our time, not waste it. Finally, scouring Craigslist and other job boards will be where the bulk comes from, with all the people looking at job boards these days a well constructed, resume will go a long way. Lots of companies cut in-house staff and are looking for contractors to pickup the slack. This is where most of the opportunity lies if you are not friends with many people or would rather not discuss your job search.How do I choose a Project for Myself?
This is going to be the most important part of your new solo career. Picking your projects is important because if you pick too big of a project you might end up losing money in other, smaller, opportunities. What has worked for me personally is making sure all the projects I take are about 10-20 hours of work. This is because I have a day-job and I have weeklong projects there. I really prefer to just have projects that take a weekend or two of part-time work rather than slave over it for weeks and weeks. If you are looking for work and you have the time, the longer projects pay more. Try and find projects that require a specific rare skill that you possess process automation, bug-testing and flash games come to mind as things I always see demand but not enough supply. I try to take projects that do not require me to build a whole CMS from scratch and, in the interest of full disclosure, I preach WordPress and Joomla. These open-source CMS are very coder-friendly. I can do band websites and small community sites in no time I just have to get the theme together and build custom plugins for the user the whole permalinks system and back-end editing, publishing, comments and user system is provided for me. This is something I tell the client beforehand of course. I explain that if he wanted me to build a completely custom solution that were nearly as polished the price would go up (a lot). Most of the time, they really have no problems with this. A few points about this:- Do not be afraid to tell the client how much a project will cost if you build him a whole CMS.
- Do not promise a completely custom solution and come back to him with a WordPress implementation.
- Do not just install WordPress/Joomla. You need to harden these installations so that they are technically bullet-proof. This means changing the permissions of some key files and installing a caching system so that if they get dugg the website can survive the hit amongst other things.