In recent years, the gig economy has been gathering pace. According to recent estimates, the number of folks earning an income from freelancing is close to 60 million. That means the demand for freelance workers is at an all-time high.
The beauty of freelancing is the freedom it affords you. You can pick what tasks to take on and, so long as you have a reliable internet connection, can work from anywhere in the world you choose.
P.S. Freelancing is the easiest, fastest, most efficient, and most flexible way there is to earn from anywhere in the world you choose. In the two decades I’ve been working on freelance networks—and the 15 years I’ve been helping fellow baby boomers find their way into freelancing—there are a few strategic mistakes I frequently see.
Perfectly qualified and talented baby boomers fall into a low-earning spiral because they don’t understand the strategic principles that can help them build a lucrative online freelance business. But once these missteps are fixed, it can open the floodgates to a successful portable income career.
Here are five strategic tips that you need to know:
1. Adequately Capture an Exhaustive List of Your Skills
Most baby boomers think of themselves as their current or most recent occupation. But in order to carefully dissect and strategically attack the world of freelancing, you’ll want a much more granular view of your skill set.
Ask yourself:
- Do you know how to make PowerPoint presentations?
- Do you know how to do proofreading?
- Do you know how to handle customer service interactions?
Chances are, these skills, and usually a dozen more, are in your inventory, whether you realize it or not.
Consider the special training programs you have had, consider the software you use, remember the job advances and the skills you were using just before you got promoted.
Creating an exhaustive list of your skills takes a week to 10 days to flesh out. Once you kick the dust off some of your hard-won expertise from days past, you’ll notice long forgotten skillsets coming to mind, even while you’re relaxing or in the shower. Be prepared and write those down.
2. Create a Buyer-Centric Profile
One big mistake new freelancers make is creating what we call the “I”-centric profile.
You’ll recognize them by sentences that starts out with “I am,” “I did,” “I worked in,” and they are very centered around the individual wanting to freelance.
Done properly, your profile becomes your own little salesperson, faithfully recounting your superpowers, skills, and knowledge 24/7 for years to come. It makes perfect sense to get this right.
The buyer-centric profile is very much “you”-focused, in terms of your freelance buyer.
You don’t want to say, “I have 30 years’ experience as an electrical engineer.”
You do want to say, “My 30 years’ experience in electrical engineering means that you’ll have a proven project manager seasoned in demanding corporate environments. My ability to control cost, and deliver projects on time means you have the horsepower to get you project done right.”
3. Think Beyond Your Skills
Skills are only part of the secret freelancing sauce.
Most new freelancers mistakenly believe that if they want to do proofreading, for example, the buyer will be looking for the world’s best proofreader in the freelancer networks, and they don’t stand a competitive chance.
This is a popular misconception.
Your buyer is looking for the intersection of a good proofreader and someone with knowledge of the topic they’re writing about. So, you don’t have to be the best proofreader if you have some knowledge of their topic.
We call these “domains of knowledge.”
Your domains of knowledge could be knowledge of aviation, knowledge of supervisory management, knowledge of planning and budgeting, or anything at all. You might even have more than one.
Domains of knowledge can come from your career, but they can also come from your non-career life.
Ask yourself:
- Are you a volunteer?
- Did you ever coach your kids’ sports teams?
- Do you have a hobby?
All of these activities produce domains of knowledge that can be very valuable in freelancing.
The best jobs you can get are the ones that have the greatest intersection of your domains of knowledge and your skill sets. More importantly, these are the ones that lock out your competition.
4. Focus on Clients, Not Jobs
Long-term success and growth is primarily a function of the clients you work for rather than the jobs you do.
Some novice online freelancers do an endless stream of simple assignments without any consideration given to how their unique skills, knowledge, and wisdom can more fully overlap with their best clients’ ongoing needs.
The way that you find new clients is by finding assignments you’re interested in. But you should never do an assignment for a client unless you can see the prospects for ongoing work.
5. Aim for Repeat Business
One thing most new freelancers don’t understand is that the best buyers are using these networks to audition new talent. They will hire you for a smaller assignment to get to know you, and if the job goes well, they usually have more work for you.
Many of them are faced with record low unemployment and are having great difficulty hiring the skills they need in employees, so they’re having to turn to freelance networks more than ever before.
As a baby boomer, your decades of experience translate into deep knowledge and, usually, a fair amount of common sense. This makes you an ideal candidate for finding repeat clients.
The key to building repeat business is to cultivate relationships with clients you like. Those are the ones that will give you a consistent paycheck and nourish your freelancing empire as you move forward.
Note:With just a handful of freelance clients, you could earn $600, $1,000, even $5,000 or more a month, working as few as 10 days out of every 30—from anywhere you want to be.
