Work From Home Starter Guide for Freelancers
By: Kathryn Guillermo
Tags: Freelancing, WFH, Freelancers, Tips For Freelancing, Work From Home

Approximately 57 million Americans were freelancing in 2019, and if trends continue, more than half of Americans be will freelancing in the future, according to a study conducted by Upwork, a large freelancing platform provider.

Some of these workers are full-time freelancers; others are still holding down a 9–5 job, but doing side hustles in their free time. The proliferation of such part-time and freelance work has people talking about a new kind of labor market: The Gig Economy.

If you are interested in joining the gig economy and earning money outside the context of a full-time job, you’ll have to understand the many advantages and disadvantages of this type of income generation. Taxes will be different for you; you may need some basic accounting skills; and you’ll need to rearrange your lifestyle to accommodate working in this manner.

What Is Freelancing?

A freelancer is a self-employed person who offers services to clients. These services often, though not necessarily, are offered to businesses through the proliferation of sharing economy platforms like TaskRabbit, Mechanical Turk, or Upwork. However, individuals can offer their services directly to clients, without third-party resources that often take a cut of the pay.

CHOOSE YOUR PROPER FIELD/NICHE

Nearly every type of service needed by a business can be provided by a freelancer. Some of the most common freelance opportunities include:

Some freelancers focus in general areas while others focus in specific industries, such as real estate assistants, or in niche skills such as pay-per-click (PPC) copywriters.

Freelance income varies depending on the skills offered, your experience, and the market you’re targeting. In general, freelancers earn anywhere from $10 to $75 per hour. Skills that require more education or experience, such as accounting or website coding, generally pay more than skills that don’t require as much.

A Work From Home TIPS

Whether you’re looking for a side hustle due to the coronavirus or you’re simply embarking on a long-held freelancing dream, if you’re a new “gig economy convert,” you may have found yourself struggling to motivate in a work-from-home (WFH) environment. If so, here are a few tips and strategies to help you focus in and get hustling.

Start with Your Environment

Your WFH environment is a crucial starting point. Try to find an area of your home that can be cordoned off and treated as an exclusive workspace. Avoid working from bed or in recreational areas, as it can blur your work/life boundaries (more on those later). Instead, focus on separating a portion of your living space exclusively for you to get work done.

Create Routines

Setting up schedules and routines — such as waking up at a certain time, exercising before work, and ending your day at a predetermined hour — are essential to maintaining both your productivity and your sanity while working from home. Without the need to get to the office and with so many distractions surrounding you, a routine can be your lifeline to long-term remote work success.

Establish Strong Lines of Communication

“Communication” here is referring to both your tools and your soft skills. For instance, it’s obviously important for you to have the right tools to communicate with others virtually. It’s wise to familiarize yourself with the various name brand tools available and even set up accounts on popular communication applications such as Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Skype.

It’s also good to associate yourself with collaborative tools such as Trello and Asana so that you can become accustomed to maintaining excellent communication throughout work projects by interacting within a central virtual workspace.

In addition, take some time to hone your virtual communication soft skills. Practice writing concise and informative text and gauge your ability to sense emotion and deeper meaning when receiving virtual messages from others. This can be invaluable, as the lack of in-person experience that comes with virtual communication can make it easy to miss out on traditionally present things such as tone, facial expression, and posture.

As you set up communication channels, it may also be a good idea to look for other WFM-ers who can help you maintain accountability as you strive to establish routines and keep up your productivity.

Invest in Relationships

The world of freelance work is filled with comings and goings as contractors flow from one project to the next. However, that doesn’t negate the power that comes from investing in professional relationships.

Telecommuting is already infamous for its degrading effect on personal relationships between coworkers. If you want to maintain a healthy balance in your work life, look for ways to communicate and invest in the relationships that you do have at any given moment. This doesn’t have to be complex and can be as simple as acknowledging emotions and considering the human element of your interactions as you use technology to collaborate with others.

Remember Work/Life Boundaries

Finally, throughout all of your WFH efforts, remember to prioritize your work/life boundaries. When you eat, sleep, work, and relax in the same space it’s easy to blur everything together. If this happens, it can both affect productivity and make it difficult for you to disconnect from work.

As you acclimate to a remote-work scenario, strive to work during work time, and then stop working when you’re finished.

Surviving and Thriving When Working from Home

From good communication to your environment, work/life balance to established routines, there are many ways to set yourself up for remote-work success. As you tailor your own particular WFH situation towards your own strengths, you’ll be able to discover how you work from home best, allowing you not only to survive but to actually thrive in your new work scenario.

In our World today, we continue innovating and technology keeps on improving. Therefore we need to search on ways on how to earned money even in the comfort of our home.