Thoughts on Working From Home and Starting Out as a Freelance Web Worker

Thrilling Heroics is about personal development & lifestyle design for college students and young professionals. We talk about freelancing, leadership, personal branding, blogging, social media, personal growth, travel, and more. If you like what you see, please share your comments and subscribe to future updates.
Optimize your Life, Rock your Career, and Make the World your Playground!

As a follow-up to my post the other day, How to Make Friends with Career Columnists and Influence Mainstream News Organizations, I’d like to share some more of the insights from my conversation with ABCnews.com columnist Michelle Goodman. She asked a number of really great questions, and naturally only a very small part of our discussion made it into the final print article at ABC. I’d like to take the opportunity to share about my experience as a freelancer so far, and I’ll also take this time to officially invite you all to visit ThrillingDesign.com, my business site and sister site to Thrilling Heroics where I offer business blog consulting and WordPress help aimed at professionals and non-geek users. If you need a blog redesign or are looking for some simple tips and tricks to increase your blog effectiveness with the WordPress blog platform, I hope you check it out and share it with friends. And for those of you who are interested in working from home yourselves, or interested in learning about web design, check out the conversation below. Michelle’s questions really got my wheels turning, so hopefully there are some good tips in here:

How long did it take me to fill my schedule with freelance work?

I’m actually consciously building my freelance business as a part-time venture to allow myself to concentrate on writing and a few other pet projects in my spare time. But, I left employed life about 11 months ago, and I strived to over-deliver and impress the pants off of my first several clients, which has paid off ten-fold in referral business. I’d say that after four or five months of freelancing, the work just started to come in on its own without me having to chase it too much, because I had built a good reputation, a great network, and a quality communications platform for my business.

Who do I consult with and where have I found my business clients?

I work with all kinds of small-to-medium companies and professionals, but my consulting is definitely aimed towards authors, columnists, speakers, coaches, and other thought leaders who already have decent writing skills or something important to say—blogging is a great tool for broadcasting a discussion and maintaining client relations, and particularly for personality-driven businesses where a CEO’s personal brand is tied to the business, for instance.

My first few gigs started with a few mentors of mine and clients who just happened to stumble across me, and I went all-out to deliver the best product to them at a low cost, so that created a lot of word-of-mouth and referral business which still keeps my freelance inbox full to this day! I’ve also found many clients and partners just through interacting with writers and users on existing blogs and social media sites, or just through conversations with other professionals at business conferences for example. But for me, it’s been truly impressive how many interesting people I have been able to connect with virtually through the blogosphere, and how much work one can find globally via the web! I’ve had clients across the States, and now in Canada and even France.

What skills or strengths does it take to be a freelance blog consultant?

Personally, people tell me that my strongest ability is in translating technical information and jargon into business-oriented language. My favorite part of what I do is actually hashing out ideas with my clients—talking directly with authors and business owners and helping them learn how to use their technology or interact with other online writers. So as a consultant, you definitely need some people skills and you need to be able to sell yourself. On the other end of the spectrum though, I currently do every part of this process from finding new clients to customer service to coding, and to be successful at the web design and programming, you just need the patience to sit at a computer screen for 10 hours straight some days, and a hungry desire for continued learning and improvement.

What are some good resources to learn the basic skills necessary for web design?

My college degree was in religious studies and history, so my business and web design skills have been completely self-taught over the last two years, often through lots of trial and error. Some people may not realize that web design and development are actually huge spheres, so there are tons of niche-specific resources and organizations, but the World Wide Web Consortium, W3Schools, and A List Apart are a few good places to start learning to write valid, attractive code. If you work with open-source content management systems like I do, there is usually a large, knowledgeable developer community with lots to offer (see the WordPress Codex, for example), or guidebooks like Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress might be useful.

What surprises have there been working as a web developer? What should other hopeful freelancers know?

As a consultant in any field, some people will expect you to be available at all hours, and some clients will have unreasonable expectations, so you need to learn to establish firm boundaries and you need to learn to say no sometimes. The earlier you learn these things, the less painful your experience will be. Other things to think about are the stigmas and challenges of self-employment and working from home, so I would recommend you do some research on those things before you take the jump, but I also highly recommend it to anyone who’s got the determination to do so.

One other huge tip I’d offer is to establish relationships or partnerships with people who complement your weaknesses or just areas you don’t focus on. So for instance, my niche is blogs, but I can pull in someone who’s a great graphic designer, or a wiki or podcast expert, or a web hosting guy when necessary.

How much have I invested to start my business and what were some of the biggest expenses?

Most of my operation has been budget-free because I work from home and use a lot of tools I already had from school. After I’d had some cash-flow, I did invest about $2k in a new desktop Mac for my development work, but I use all open-source and web-based design and development software, so licenses are almost always free or very inexpensive. My next move will be to put some money into very targeted online ad campaigns, but my research shows that investing even just a few hundred dollars via Google Adwords can be very effective.

Great related resources on the web about freelancing:

• 10 Misconceptions the Self-Employed Deal With Daily
• How to Ensure Working from Home is Not Boring
• How Working from Home Improved My Social Life
• A week of journalism: How to be a freelancer without starving
• Freelance Switch

What Next?

 Subscribe to Free Updates!

 Stumble This Page »

 Bookmark This Page »

 Email This Page To A Friend »

 Leave a Comment »

Support Thrilling Heroics

If you enjoy the free articles on this site and find my writing helpful, consider buying me a cup of coffee! You'll help keep us online and ensure that the Thrilling Heroics community thrives.

(Click here to make a PayPal donation that supports the Site!)