Paul D. Jacobs – Freelance Web Programmer

If you’ve been a freelancer for a while, you’ve probably heard the advice that you need to select a niche. It’s much easier to stand out if you don’t try and be all things to everybody.

Many freelancers start off as generalists, and then narrow their focus down to one or two specialties. For example, if you’re a freelance copywriter, you might specialize in writing case studies for the B2B marketplace. Or a technical writer might specialize in user guides for networking-related products.

When you’re starting out, you often sell the skills you used in Corporate America as a service. Ideally, you find something you are good at that people will also pay you to do.

As you mature as a freelancer, however, you may find that you want to sell a different service. That’s perfectly okay. In this post, I’ll describe how I changed my niche and why. I’ll also list the steps you can take if you’re ready to change yours.

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Freelancers may have escaped office politics to pursue what we love from the comfort of their homes… or the nearest coffee shop. But that does not make us immune from stress.

In fact, if anything, life as a freelancer can be just as stressful–or even more so–than life as an employee.

When business is bad, we worry about bills, what we’ll feed our children next week, or where our next client is going to come from. When business is good, we struggle with deadlines and the fact that there are ONLY 24 hours in a day.

Whether our workload is heavy or light, we may have to contend with isolation (no more chats at the water cooler), lack of sunshine and exercise… all of which add up to one stressed out freelancer.

In this post, I’ll identify ten techniques you can use to zap your own stress.

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Eventually in the course of your freelancing career, or even in your personal work, you’ll come across a project that requires more than what you can do. There are several ways you can handle this, and most often, I’m happy enough to only do the part I can do and send the client somewhere else.

But sometimes if the project is one you’re really interested in, or one that has a large budget, it can be to your advantage to take on the entire thing. But if the project calls for a designer and you’re a developer, or vice-versa what do you do? This is the time where your involvement in the community comes in handy.

Partnering with other freelancers can be a challenge. You both have completely different ways of working and invoicing, and sometimes those different ways don’t mesh. I’d like to offer some tips and the best ways to find and get along with another person you have to depend on for a job well done.

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Are you frustrated because you can never seem to get your freelancing business to where you want it to be?

If you don’t determine a destination, you probably won’t arrive anywhere. This is true for travelers and it’s also true for freelancers.

Most freelancers understand that it is important to set goals for their business. What most freelancers don’t understand is how to set goals in such a way that they can actually be achieved.

It is possible to set your freelancing goals in such a way that they can easily be achieved. In this post, I’ll describe one such method that you can adapt to your own freelancing business.

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