OnlineFreelance.com

Long-term projects are the main goal of every freelancer. You have a project that you are paid for during a certain period of time, you don’t need to spend time looking for new projects and you are focused on one main work. Still this type of project has some negative sides. If it ends before the scheduled time for some reason, you will be left with no work and in some cases even no money. On every freelance site getting a new project takes time and you could have no projects for one or maybe even two weeks.

Short-term projects actually need even a more serious approach. First it is usually hard to control a big number of small projects. Second if you run out of work, it will also take some time to get a new project, and it is easy to loose track of your deadlines if you have for example five of them. So we recommend not focusing on this type of projects and only taking them as “extra cash” projects, if you have some free time. Also taking such projects from time to time will give you a lot of experience in interviews with buyers.

If you are a newcomer it will be hard to get a long-term project and there are also a number of things that you must remember. One of the usual newcomer strategies is “low prices” (we will have an article about that in the future). I actually did some of my first projects for some small rates, just to get some working history and ratings. In getting long-term projects it can work against you. If you get a 6-8 month project for your beginner rates, after three or four months you will most definitely understand that this project is just not profitable for you anymore and you can earn more from current smaller projects. At that point not every buyer will be willing to pay you more. This can be solved during the initial negotiation with setting a test period or a lower rate period. It is also better to have two or three small project completed before getting the first long-term one. It will not only give you an argument in asking for higher rates, but also give you experience in completing projects, which helps to avoid beginners mistakes like missing deadlines for uploading working hours for example.

The best possible scheme for a newcomer is to have a “15-40 hour per week” main project and additional 3-4 smaller projects. It will allow getting new buyers and don’t depend from the main project. At some point you will understand that you have five six people who can provide you with enough work and you will have enough income even if one or two of them will run out of work for you. Basically the thing that people don’t understand at first is that you must be looking for buyers and not projects. A good buyer can constantly provide you with work and that might be even better than having a big long-term project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 06:32 and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.