Freelance jobs are an excellent source of extra income. Freelancers can build their portfolio, grow their professional network and even develop their own brand that can flourish into a successful business. Here’s how you can get and succeed at freelance jobs online.
Create an Online webform
If you already have your own website, that’s great, but you need to have a clear bridge of communication within that website. Even if you don’t have a website yet, you can create a contact form or even a request service form with an online form creator, like MightyForms, and simply share the link to the online form to your target audience.
A personalized web form helps you make sure that you’ll only get requests from serious inquiries. You can determine which fields are required for form submission, get more specific information that will help you build your pitch and see how your form is performing with form analytics and Real-time Data Capture.
This is also a great opportunity to show off your abilities. Depending on your field, whether it’s design or creative writing, you can edit the form so that it also speaks for you. Use the same colors as your website, make the question fields match your tone and definitely add a personalized pop-up message after submission.
Have an updated Portfolio
While you don’t critically need a portfolio website if you’re a freelancer (since you can always make yourself accessible through freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and others), a portfolio website certainly improves your credibility and you can create a landing page where you include your personalized online form to receive requests.
A good website portfolio is about quality, not quantity. Feel free to show off the results that were achieved with the help of your work. And always ask for feedback and testimonials from past clients with a feedback form for a more organized and objective process.
Develop online Presence
Yes, your website portfolio is not enough for your remote job offers to skyrocket. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to join the more mainstream social networks, though they do provide extra impressions. You can be more effective by joining more relevant online communities and social media groups that are focused on the problem that you help solve.
Becoming an important member of these relevant communities is also a great way to share articles and even market research forms. Getting feedback is always valuable, but getting feedback from professionals in your field can be much more helpful.
Determine your Workflow
As the old saying goes “Work smarter, not harder”, if you don’t have a workflow process established yet, you’re in trouble. Establishing an optimized workflow early on is vital and it doesn’t need to be overly complicated from the get-go.
Try to establish the key points of action that happen in the transaction between you and your client from start to finish. Even you start out with a simple flow like: Receive service request > Confirm request receipt > Analyze workload > Send quote > Execute service > Request payment > Thank the customer for their trust.
Get more done with Automation
The great thing about establishing a workflow is that once you can visualize the whole process, you can automate most of it. There’s an app for almost everything nowadays and you don’t need to waste time with simple tasks.
Take your service request web form for instance, with MightyForms Form builder you can set it up so it automatically sends a personalized message to your user and an e-mail notification to yourself, plus it can send the data to Google Drive or Outlook and create a task on a productivity tool through Zapier. This makes more time for you to focus on what only you can do.
Analyze and adapt for better performance
With all the tips so far you should be doing pretty well. You have a customized service request web form, which is embedded into a killer website portfolio, supported by your online presence and automated workflow. But is it working?
Analyzing your website’s, your form’s and your own performance is key to making sure that your freelancing business is actually working and has the potential to grow. Sure, this might require some digital marketing skills, but Google offers extensive tutorials on how to analyze the numbers they pick up from your site.
Using an online form creator to create your form also allows you to integrate it with powerful performance tracking tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. You can also enable form analytics, like Real-time Data Capture that lets you see form submissions as they are being filled out, so you can see where people drop off.