Being a freelancer can be very rewarding, and offers both creative and personal freedom that’s pretty rare in other lines of work, but how the heck do you get started?

It’s all about surviving the first year, which can be the downfall of the unprepared, and serves as a test not only of your creative skills, but more importantly - your ability to sell yourself, plan financially and deal with difficult clients.

Preparation..

Once you get a taste for freelancing, you probably won’t want to go back to a regular job in a hurry, so in the early stages it’s all about making sure you have enough to live on for the first 2 or 3 months while business is slow.

1. Save enough money to keep you going for at least 2 months. If you can’t do this, don’t tell your boss to ’shove it’ just yet - you might have to freelance in your spare time until it starts to pay enough.
2. Get advice from an organisation like Business Link or Princes Trust. They can help you see how marketable your skills are. They might even put you in touch with potential clients, as they deal with startup companies every day who could be looking for a freelancer.
3. Start building a portfolio - if you don’t have any commercial work to show, use your personal stuff or make mock-ups. Nobody expects you start with a catalogue of real clients, but they do expect to see what you can do for them.

Everything was going great..until…

Argh!.. My client refuses to pay me. Do I have any rights?

Yes, you wrote them into your contract… Didn’t you? If your answer to this is “What contract?” then you’re in a pickle. If you did get something in writing, there’s good news and bad news..

The good news is, you can use the written agreement to negotiate with the client with terms like “It says right here, I retain all copyrights to the work until I’m paid in full”.

The bad news is two-fold; firstly, it’s entirely up to you to enforce a contract. As a self-employed individual, your rights pretty much start and end with a written agreement between both parties. Second, if it’s not worded clearly and explicitly, it may not carry as much weight as you think.

You should rely on good communication and clearly defined, measurable goals to enforce an agreement and get paid on time.

Gah! My client keeps changing the project requirements, and expects more work for free.. My life is over!

This happens all the time, and is the perfect example of why milestones are so important. Breaking a project down into measurable goals (agreed by both sides) allows you be firm with a wayward client without sounding like a git.

This also gives you the opportunity to ask for part payment after a certain stage is reached, helping with cashflow.

Make sure you agree on milestones that are indisputable, and not open to interpretation. This way, when the project requirements change, you can confidently (and justifiably) ask for more beer money.

That’s all well and good, but I can’t seem to get any clients!.. Blah.

By the time you get organic search engine hits on your website (assuming you have one), you’ll have starved to death. Luckily, there are loads of other things that can get you noticed in the mean time..

• Start a blog. Blogs are a good way of attracting targeted visitors, and give you a captive audience for your portfolio. You can start the ball rolling by promoting your blog on sites like FuelMyBlog and MyBlogLog.
• Use sites like StumbleUpon to share your site with others.
• Put an ad in the Yellow Pages, and local paper. It’s not all about the internet.
• Join us, and we’ll take care of the nitty-gritty, leaving you time to pick and choose clients.
• Find out about grants and soft-loans available for advertising and membership fees etc.. (see point 2 above)
• For repeat business and referrals, send a business card to every client with your finished work.

One more thought; late payments and delayed projects are pretty much inevitable. Putting a small percentage of your fees into a savings account will keep the cash flowing when things go wrong, and keep you freelancing well into year 2 and beyond.