Freelance opportunities come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The problem is, we often look at them in big chunks. Then, they look unwieldy. It’s hard to look at freelance opportunities for all the freelance work trees.
Photo by Denise Johnson via Unsplash
The simplest way to look at your freelance business is through the eyes of incremental progress. Incremental progress comes in many forms, but it carries across pretty much everything we do in freelancing. And it folds up from the most achievable point in time through to the large-scale situations.
Creating space for freelance opportunities is super important to the growth and stability of your freelance business. Yet we often look at things in an ‘all or nothing’ sort of framework. Yet, there are always steppingstones to what we need to do. And even the freelance opportunities we covert.
Let me demonstrate how you can re-frame your freelance opportunities into a more manageable format
| Big version | Easier version | Easiest version | Result |
| Write the website for a new product or | Write the page | Write the blog | You can still test adoption, educate and check analytics to see if the idea is attracting attention |
| Quarterly BAS | Monthly reconciliation | Using software to issue the invoices and expenses as they happen | Small movements mean you no longer have to spend days sorting out the accounts and can spend them on other things |
| Blog writing day | Writing a blog in a sitting | Using a blog shell to get the crux of the idea | You’re still producing content to educate people on your new services and products, but you’re not losing contact with inspiration as it happens. Or losing your whole content library by betting the farm on one day |
| Scheduling a month’s worth of social media | Doing it each week as it is needed by client or your business | Fitting in social media in the dead holes of your day | You can gain inspiration as you read the internet and talk about topics, trends, and news. PLUS, you can use social media creation as a boredom beater |
| Schedule the working week on a Sunday or Monday | Schedule the day as it happens | Choose the topics most important to tomorrow as you knock off | You can still have the structure of what you want to achieve but respond better to disruptions and keep the TO DO list free from distractions and ‘nice to haves’ (therefore avoiding procrastination) |
| Pay super in a lump sum once you know what EOFY tax looks like | Do super contributions every BAS | Set aside super with each invoice | Each raindrop makes a fuller bucket. If it’s sitting around waiting to be added, it rarely is |
| Researching freelance opportunities – get out swatches of reports and data to make full and complete assumptions | Use tools and blogs to help inform what freelance opportunities are on trend | Put out your own survey to ask questions directly | Capturing your own data can help you shape the questions and take out the reading. Just make sure you leave enough time to promote it and get it out there! |
| Lead generation- Contact every business in town | Contact every yoga business in town (or every suburban business in your postcode etc) | Contact the top ten businesses you’d like to work with | Doing smaller tranches of lead gens with a stronger focus means you can customise the approach to the business and make them feel taken care of and special |
| Please everyone on social media | Please the potential leads on social media | Please the direct buyers on social media | Popular social media is great- but if only your peers are cheering along, what’s the point? Be distinct. Speak generously to the people you care about |
| Build the fancy lead generation page | Write the blog with an email capture | Setup a Wufoo form | You don’t always have to have the big whistle to attract attention. What you need to do is gauge interest in what you’re doing. Start with the problem you solve and see if people are willing to exchange their email to find the solution! |
| Do the SEO course | Watch the Google videos and read the Webmaster blogs | Play with Yoast (or similar) plugin | You can begin to dabble in SEO by understanding the mechanics and experimenting on your website. Make sure you have Google Analytics attached so you can see the difference. Demystify it and grow your capacity |
| Educational offerings – Professionally produce the video series | Shoot the class via Crowdcast or Zoom with a PowerPoint | Start streaming with Facebook Live | The more you position yourself as a position of authority and give of your knowledge, the more people will trust what you have to say and buy the bigger product |
| Build the course on a dedicated learning platform or via Learn Dash | Test the course on Patreon or Mailchimp with a series of emails | Host an event online or off and see who attends | Before you spend time and energy on a course, step through it. It helps get the bugs out and shape the learning to suit student needs instead of teacher knowledge. |
| Send a multiple of emails for the life of a project with a client plus lots of documents with instructions | Create one centralised onboarding document and hope the client reads it | Use proposal software and Slack to educate the client and manage them through the process of project delivery | Centralising information and making it easy to search makes it much easier for time poor, disinterested clients. |
What are some of the ways you might be making your life more difficult than it needs to be? What can you breakdown as big version, easier version, and easiest version to get the job done?
Freelance opportunities are there for the taking
What we often forget is that a journey of a thousand steps starts with small commitments to progress. You can even further slimdown the time and energy it takes to maximise freelance opportunities by:
- Commit to working on things for 15, 30- and 60-minute lots as opposed to demanding that you finish tasks completely
- Breaking down projects via line items and giving those line items a priority based on how important they are to the life of the project and the progress
- Scheduling gaps in your timetable between meetings or blank air to support small works on your freelance opportunities or project ideas
- Getting in a routine of working in small batches through Pomodoro Technique to prove the progress adds up over time
- Looking for the outcomes you want to achieve over the laundry list of ‘nice to have’ items
- Creating space to play with and explore ideas to help you imagine the next idea (instead of drowning in work stress)
- Letting yourself see the progress by capturing your DONE LIST somewhere so it’s not always simply viewing what is yet to be completed