HDD failure (also works for other technical problems)

The best solution is: purchase a netbook or keep your old laptop, so in case your primary computer fails you will be able to take the information out and finish the work.

As for some of my personal experience, I had dozens of situation when windows started crashing somewhere at the booting phase (note from Alex: buy a mac :) and all these situations were solved with a simple filesystem repair. So if you have problems with booting simply plug in your hard drive into an external drive USB adapter (also a very useful thing) and run a simple fsck operation on the second workstation. If everything is okay, then you will be working again in 20 minutes.

Another good solution is to keep all the work on an external drive (flash preferred). In more than a decade of using the PC I’ve seen a lot of dead hard drives and not one dead flash drive. So in the worst possible crash situation you can simply plug out the flash drive, plug it into your second workstation and finish the work.

Power failure

While such things as power failures often happen only in the developing countries (usually lot of freelancers are from these countries), there is no guarantee that your younger sister (brother, cat, dog, girlfriend or drunk roommate) wont accidentally mess with the power cable or crash into your workstation. And boom, you are sitting in from of a rebooting PC. While most of the data will definitely be saved (if you have autosave enabled) it is still not a very pleasant situation. It can happen that all you loose a small part of the code and your concentration, but it also can lead to things like damaged hard drives and even burned parts of the PC.

The whole problem has one great solution – laptop computer which is the best friend of every freelancer or, if you prefer desktops, – an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

Internet failure

This is bad only for some type of work (like SEO) and for situations when you need to send the completed work to the client. So it is important to have a second internet connection nearby (the best one is to get a cell phone that can be used as a modem), to notify the client about the delay or email the completed work. One of my friends also used another solution: he took a cab to the nearest cybercafé. Not the most effective one, but can definitely be used as the last possible solution.

Define your easiest article

The easiest article is a great tool for work. Basically you need to specify the amount of words that you can write about the given subject in five-seven minutes without thinking too much or searching for additional info. For me it is 150-250 words. Later you can use this easiest article amount of words to split some large articles into smaller ones. It will help you.

Split the articles

This hint works for large articles, but can be used in any case. If you have a 1000 words article, you can write a 100 words intro and split the rest of the article into three or more parts (the mentioned easiest articles or even smaller ones). From this moment you will have three 300 words articles or five 180 words articles and they will be much easier to write.

Add some extra info

You can always cover a part of the article with additional extra info. For example if the article is about auto insurance, you can add a small part about auto insurance in general. Such additional information blocks are a great solution if you lack few hundreds of words to finish the article. Of course this works only if the client is ok with such info.

Start with the facts

If you don’t know how to start the article, start with the middle facts part. For example if it is a description of a product you can write the specifications of the product color, length, general market info. At some point you will see that you already have 150-200 words and you got some additional ideas while you were writing the facts.

Write parts

If you have a large number of articles to write, you need to start writing as soon as possible. Create all the empty documents, do some information search and start writing. As soon as you run out of inspiration for one of the articles, switch to the next one. Eventually you will end up with all the articles 20-60% done. At that point it will be very easy to finish such almost done articles. You’ve got to be careful with large amounts of articles, if you get stuck with one article you can easily spend too much time and miss the deadline. So it is better to start writing small parts of all articles.

Concentration

This works basically for every type of work. You need to concentrate to get the job done. Turn off the messenger, turn of the music (or turn on the one that you like), if it is possible even turn off the Internet. When you are left alone with your articles, you will be able to do the double of your usual work. I manage to do up to 12 articles per such offline day and only 4-5 per a day with dozens of things distracting me. Of course it is not easy to work 10-12 article days in a row, but I recommend mixing easy days with hard working days.

First thing that you must remember – sleep is the enemy! Well, not always :)

An adult human needs seven hours of sleep every day, also nine hours are widely recommended for good rest, but generally seven is enough. That leaves seventeen hours available for work every day. Even when you take four or five hours for eating, shopping, cleaning and offline rest you still have like twelve hours that can be used for work. If you sleep eleven hours you automatically cut the whole available time to 8 hours. Usually there is nothing good in oversleeping, you will still be sleepy and not able to concentrate for a while. Also it’s better not to experiment with sleeping like five or four hours. You can end up as a sleepy worker who can’t concentrate and needs too much caffeine to go on (check our caffeine article for more info).

A healthy seven to nine hours sleep is a must for every freelancer. I usually work for six days and rest on Sunday, so in case you really need to get some extra sleep – use Sunday. A big success is to beat the most common alarm clock problem. If you are not obliged to be in the office by 8:30 it is very hard to make yourself get up and start the day. One of the solutions is to get over to the computer and read some latest news from RSS (that are interesting for you of course). This will start your brain and you can move over to the bathroom and kitchen. Sounds strange but it definitely works for me.

Another common problem is to start working. It is always not very easy especially if you have some large amounts of work hanging over you. The solution is to start with some simple things, like half-hour of bidding or information search for the future articles. This will get you into working mood and you can start coding or writing. Another very good psychological thing is keeping yourself, your working space and your house clean. If you are stuck in some project and can’t find a solution or you just can’t start working – take a shower or grab a vacuum cleaner and clean your room. I promise you after that you will feel fresh, comfortable and ready for work.

So as you see freelancing is a big freedom that requires even bigger discipline. But learning to discipline yourself is great. Trust me when you can make yourself work, you will become to feel much more confident in all parts of your life.

The first tip is – be 100% professional during the bidding and interview. Make sure that your messages have no mistakes, that you are polite and that you are posting information required for taking the project (like samples of your work and some ideas about how to complete the project.)

Pay attention to the buyers profile. If the buyer has a lot of serious projects running or already spent like $20.000 on this marketplace – pay extra attention to this project and his projects in general. You can offer him to do the job for a small rate. If you impress him it is possible that he will offer you work on some of his upcoming or current projects, or will contact you in a while to offer some work.

Stick to the buyers that have no problems with paying you the money that you consider okay for the completed work. There is no need to waste your time on some poorly paid job if you can earn more. Still defining the appropriate sum requires a skill that will come after five six completed jobs.

It is important to remember that this is all real life and while the buyers may be looking for cheap top quality freelancers, they understand that a real professional will work only for some serious rates. There is nothing wrong about bidding more that a buyer offers and argument this with good quality. It at some point the buyer will understand all the negative sides of low-quality work or simply gets tired of low paid unreliable workers (especially if he provides work in some serious areas like mobile devices or large web development projects). So it is possible that you will be the one who will rework or finish the project for the price that you set.

It is important to remember that a project is lost only when it is completed by someone else. I had some situations when I wasn’t selected during the interview, but due to some problems with the selected provider, I ended up as the one who finished the project and was paid for it.

And the final tip – don’t be upset if you lost the job especially if you were interviewed. It means that the buyer was interested in you and you already have some chances to get his next project. So try ending the negotiations with something like “Thank you Mike, feel free to contact me if you need some of my services.”

1. Examine the rules of the website concerning the profile and the profiles of the top freelancers in your field. This will help you with some basics of how a good profile must look on this website.
2. If you already have a resume use it as a basis, if not take some time and make a document with your complete work experience and skills. It is important to remember all your previous work experience before filling out your profile.
3. Try to choose a general strategy of yourself as a freelancer. For example if you are good in SEO focus the first lines and words of your resume on SEO skills and experience. Try not to present yourself as a do-all guy.
4. Try to highlight your main skills in the description and make sure that the client will immediately see these skills when he goes to your profile. There is no need to mention all the programming languages you know if you use only PHP or JAVA. You can make a list of these languages in some secondary information fields.
5. Avoid bright colored elements and any additional creative stuff, focus on the main thing – presenting information to the client.
6. Post samples of your projects if you have done some outside the website that you are working on. It is also good to post the offline working experience, especially if you worked for some serious companies.
7. Check the project sample links from time to time, especially if you are in search of new projects. It might happen that the website with your work is down or the URLs were changed. Also be honest about your work, if the work was done some time ago and it was done not very well, better drop the link from your resume.
8. Be sure to have everything clear with the copyrights of the work that you’ve done. If you are not listed as a developer it is better not to present the project in your portfolio. It can lead to some misunderstanding with your previous clients.
9. The best thing in a profile is a list of projects already done on the website. So if you are a newcomer try to get three-five properly done projects, it will show that you are a trustworthy person.
10. If you are a writer – get a blog. If you are a web-developer or a SEO guy – get a website. And give your best effort to keep this website good looking and properly coded. Be sure that it presents you as a professional.
11. Make a small downloadable and printable version of you portfolio.

That’s all for today, folks :)