When you are just starting freelancing, it is truly inspiring to read stories of other successful freelancers. It is beneficial to learn from their experience and see what successful strategies they used and how you can apply them in your budding freelance career.
In all the freelancer’s success stories, you will see a common thread: hard work and dedication. And also, there is a lot of passion and love for what they do. This provides the drive to go on and never give up. You pursue your goals regardless of the obstacles and difficulties that arise!
Also, you can source ideas and motivation from their experiences and mindset that you can adapt to taste the magic of the freelancer lifestyle yourself.
Emilina Lomas – a 27-year-old freelance writer earning $10.000 per month
Emilina Lomas was only 23 when she decided to leave her corporate 9-to-5 job to pursue a freelance career. She decided to pursue her passion, and so, the first thing she did, was to get certified as a personal trainer with a degree in nutrition.
Then, she noticed the increasing growth of fitness and wellness Instagram accounts, so she started regularly posting fitness-related photos with her diet and exercise advice in captions.
Half a year from then, her followers grew to up to 10 000. It didn’t take long that gyms and fitness influencers started reaching out to her to help them with Instagram captions and blog posts. So she decided to start advertising her skills on platforms like Fiverr. By 2019, two years after quitting her office job, she earned $10 000 per month from her freelance writing.
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Here are some valuable tips that have helped her along her way to freelance success:
- Stand out from the crowd – show the effectiveness of your work in action. In her case, it had a thriving Instagram account.
- Put attention and care into each project – make sure your style and tone match each client.
- Introduce yourself in a video that is short, informative, and with a professional quality
- Keep your rates low until you have good reviews.
- Build your credentials – degrees, certifications, and other recognitions of past projects will make you stand out.
- Always be respectful with clients – as a freelancer, you can deal with celebrities and other influential people, so always show respect and recognition.
- Always be professional. Double-check your messages and emails for lousy grammar. Reply promptly, and always under promise and overdeliver.
- Respect yourself – if someone uses disrespectful language straight from the beginning, chances are he is not a good match.
Kelly Vaughn quit her government job to become a successful freelance web designer.
Kelly Vaughn from Atlanta, USA, worked at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but she was unhappy with the job’s lack of freedom.
Since she was a teenager, she had a passion for coding and building websites, and she kept this as a side hustle. Her colleagues at the CDC told her that there was a spark in her eyes when she talked about websites. She should pursue this career full-time, they said.
This is what she did. She started by building WordPress sites for small businesses. Later, she decided to take on more complex projects – like Shopify eCommerce sites, that enabled her to grow and learn new things in her field.
When she became more experienced with eCommerce, she shifted her focus to Shopify sites exclusively. She became an expert, and now her biggest challenge is which projects to accept to do herself, which to outsource and which to turn off completely. That many inquiries she has!
To complement her role of website builder, she started managing a small team of professionals – as graphic designers and other developers.
She describes the qualities and factors that determined her success as a freelancer:
- Be prepared to go against the grain – as a woman in a field dominated by men, she needed to brace herself to face the gender gap. Now she is helping create a community that supports other women who choose coding as her career path.
- Choose to work only with good clients – a business plan that is ready to invest money in a successful product that will give them fast results.
- Stick to high standards for yourself, your clients, and your collaborators. Select your future clients with care and qualify them according to criteria that you decide ahead of time.
- Before you leave your office job – you need to build a solid confidence and client base – this means to use most of your free time to work on side projects. This period can extend from 6 months. It is worth the effort!
- Take advantage of co-working spaces – there, you will meet other professionals, have a chance to network, and make connections that will lead to more work.
Seek help when needed – if your business is successful, you will soon have more projects to work on than time to complete them. You may ask for the collaboration of other freelancers and outsource some of the projects.
David Nuff – living his best freelancing life as a Toptal digital designer
David Nuff has been freelancing for more than a decade. His field of expertise is digital products, branding, and art, and he has worked for some renowned brands like Cisco, Nestlé, and Google.
He shared that the flexibility the freelancing work offers adds more quality to his life and fulfills his true potential. When he has the freelancer’s freedom, he feels much more creative, and his work’s quality raises exponentially.
David grew up in an open-minded family, his father was working for a multinational company, and every two to three years, he moved location. This gave David a vision of the broadness of possibilities the world has to offer. Thanks to his parents, he could cultivate the interests of arts and computer technology and merge them from an early age.
Background in computer science defined his approach to being a digital designer. That allowed him to communicate with engineers and developers and bring the creativity and visual expression needed in digital design.
First project as a freelance designer which he got, was for a bike-sharing company. That gave him recognition – in a time he still had no portfolio. Since he did a fantastic job there, soon he was working with some of the best companies in Silicon Valley while traveling the world.
David highly values the “location independent” aspect of freelancing and says it contributes enormously to the quality of his work and the spike of creativity he has experienced.
Here is his advice for being a successful freelancer:
- Focus on building good relationships – as you are not working in a shared space. Try to communicate as often as possible and establish good interpersonal relationships with them. This is an excellent foundation to build towards a joint mission and goal!
- Prepare a marathon and not a sprint! Freelancing is not a race, so being consistent and regular in your work and routine will allow you to see the results and have a solid foundation.
- Invest in doing excellent work – this will make you get hired again. Rather than finishing a project quickly, think about how to spend it excellently. The client will be satisfied with the result, and you can show the project to companies that have similar needs.
Freelancing has become a successful lifestyle for a growing community of remote workers worldwide! If you are starting your career, make sure you get inspiration from successful freelancers’ stories and life experiences – and meet some of them in co-working spaces in your area! Also, read some useful tips on how to get a job as a freelancer and stay motivated. If you are already reaping the fruits of freelancing success – share your story with us so you can inspire others!
