5 Reasons Why Working For Free and Exposure Can Kill Your Freelancing Career

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When starting out a career as a freelancer, exposure is one of the hardest things to acquire. In a profession that relies heavily on a good portfolio to land jobs, newbies looking to establish themselves as credible freelancers often find it hard to break into the market.

Due to this, the temptation to work for free — in order to gain exposure and have the credits to build a portfolio — is prevalent. Many freelancers make the mistake of thinking that working for free in the beginning is beneficial to their careers. This could not be further from the truth.

In this article, we have compiled the 5 reasons why working for free as a freelancer (even if just starting out) can actually be detrimental to your career:

1. People Don’t Value Free Things

Anywhere in the market, if something is free or acquired for cheap, it’s likely of poor quality and little value. As a freelancer, whether it be writing, graphics design, or photography, your service must be seen as something of great market value.

The product of your efforts and time need to justify their price and that wont be easy if you’ve marketed yourself as a newcomer willing to work for free. The idea is to work to get paid and you can only do that if you offer something of value, not by offering freebies.

You’re Cheap – Cheap GIF from Yourecheap GIFs

2. You Might Be Exploited

There are many employers out there who are more than willing to exploit novices with the promise of future jobs and payment. You will end up spending hours and energy into a gig that will end up being either rejected or plagiarized.

You bear the brunt of the costs by working with no pay and the commissioner would have gotten the finished product for free.

3. Your Reputation Suffers

Reputation is just as good as a portfolio when freelancing. When you prove yourself as capable of delivering quality work that justifies payment, your reputation improves.

People will come to know you as the dependable Filipino freelancer you are and will know who to go to when work of your kind is needed. There are very little to no reputational benefits to you by working for free.

As stated above, people don’t associate quality and value with things that are given for free.

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4. It’s A Waste Of Time

Productivity and time-management are the name of the game with freelancing. How much time, work, and dedication you put in your chosen field will set you apart from the many others who tried to freelance full-time but failed.

Once you know this, you will understand the value of your work. This is why you should always think twice on spending time on pro bono gigs. This only means you are wasting scarce resources that you can never recover on work with no definite return on investment.

5. Its Just Bad Business

When you begin to freelance you are essentially starting your own micro-business. Businesses operate to generate and maximize profit by marketing and selling products of value.

With freelancing, you are both the owner and employee of this business and what you are selling is your services. If businesses market their products to the masses in order the gain traction in the market and drive up sales, in freelancing you are marketing yourself.

Instead of offering up your services for free in the hopes of future paid work, think more like an entrepreneur and focus your energy on maximizing your time, marketing yourself, and building a good relationship with paying clients. It may take longer but is definitely more rewarding and sustainable.

In Conclusion:

We hope that this article helped you in learning about the negative impacts of working for free. Freelancing is not an easy thing to do — everyone has different experiences regarding the difficulty of finding your footing in this highly competitive market, and mistakes can be frequent. But with some determination and a good amount of research, you can certainly etch out a great and profitable future for yourself.

A&D Creative lab is Article & Design’s specialised unit which strives to help everyone (digital business owners or freelancers alike) who wants to upgrade their skills and expertise to the next level through our courses and workshops.

A&D Creative Lab is made by freelancers for freelancers. <3 

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The Most in Demand Skills in 2020

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Now more than ever, social media and other digital platforms are prioritized when it comes to connecting and reaching target customers for business growth leading to a high demand for people with digital marketing skills.

Here are the five (5) most in-demand skills for Digital Marketers this year:

1. Content Marketing

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Data Analytics

5. Product-driven marketing and User Experience (UX)

Content Marketing

Being a digital content creator is the most important skill. The ability to create quality content that effectively conveys the message to your target audience is important. This is one of the most essential strategies to build a long lasting relationship and rapport with your audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful ways to organically acquire customers through content marketing and technical implementations. This can make search engines like Google or Yahoo to interpret the importance and relevance of your website and start prioritizing it within the search results first page. SEO plays a vital role in a digital brand’s success.

Social Media Marketing

A Social Media Manager or Marketers must possess a creative mindset and skills to develop engaging content. With the evolution of skills required to maintain a connection with the audience, it is important that social media managers also know how to adapt to data-driven strategies that produce conversion-based outcomes.

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Data Analytics

Data analytics skill for digital marketers include an understanding about the proper structuring and storing of unique data points. This also includes understanding how integration of cross-platform tracking tools in measuring conversion goals take place.

Product-driven marketing and User Experience (UX)

This encompasses almost all aspects of digital marketing: sales, marketing, engineering and design. The digital marketer must possess an understanding on how to drive user acquisition and retention from internal product features including ability to design engaging landing pages.

A&D Creative lab is Article & Design’s specialised unit which strives to help everyone (digital business owners or freelancers alike) who wants to upgrade their skills and expertise to the next level!

A&D advocates for the creation and transformation of digital business owners and freelancers to be globally competitive through our courses and workshops.

A&D Creative Lab is made by freelancers for freelancers. Hey, who will understand us better? 

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5 Tips On How To Start Your Freelance Career While Still Working Full Time

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If you want to listen to the audio version of this article, please click below. Or subscribe to our Podcast – Super Freelancers PH.

Here is a brief work from home roadmap you should consider starting your own freelance business while still working full time:

1.    Define Your Goals

You need to decide what you actually want to accomplish and why you wanted to do freelancing even if you are working full time. If one of your ultimate goals is to make enough money to support yourself then figure out how much you are going for and how many projects you can accommodate in a month. It is best that you should be able to track your projects and schedule your time.

2.    Find a profitable niche and Identify your Target Market

Determine and assess which niche you are going to be able to stand out and do work better. In freelancing, you are actively taking part in an industry where clients value quality over price.

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3.     Build Your Own Website and Showcase your Portfolio

You should get organized and show off your skills and abilities. You need to prepare your portfolio as your weapon to convince your clients why they should hire you. Start going through your previous works and choose those you think would best represent the skills you are offering. Your own website helps promote your professional image online.

Write Your Work From Home Roadmap

4. Market yourself as well as the skills and services you can provide

Learn how to pitch yourself. Make a strong impression and introduction that shows you know what you are doing and you are great at what you do. Know your strengths and sell them. Your work samples and past works are your visual representations of experience.

5. Be a networker, not a loner

Meet other freelancers and get advice about how the freelancing industry works.

A&D Creative lab is Article & Design’s specialised unit which strives to help everyone (digital business owners or freelancers alike) who wants to upgrade their skills and expertise to the next level through our courses and workshops.

A&D Creative Lab is made by freelancers for freelancers. <3 

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Outsource Your Website Needs: Better than D-I-Y

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Can you think of something better than leaving the fate of your site to a professional? If you can’t then its time to outsource your website needs.

Remember the time when you decided to paint your room by yourself? You wanted to save up money and decided to do the painting yourself. It was good at first but in less than a month, you noticed that paint wore off leaving the surface with paint bubbles. It looked messy so you decided to scrape the paint off. The story ended with you contracting a professional to do the painting for you. At the end of the day, did you really save money? That would be a big NO, right?

Article and Design - Efficiency

This is the exact same logic that we are driving at vis-à-vis you and your website needs. From web design down to website content, it is still best if you leave the fate of your business to the experts. This is way better than having to do all of those by yourself. Still unconvinced? Read on as we discuss, in details the benefits of having to outsource your website needs.

  1. Hiring Writers To Supply Content: The Benefits

With all the stringent algorithms being released by search engines in an effort to eradicate spamming, the path available to all, when talking about online business success, is to write passionately about what you are promoting and selling online. This sounds easier said than done, by experience. Yes, it will be easy on the first few days or weeks of your article writing tasks, as there will be a lot of things you have in mind to write about your product. The real challenge starts when you have exhausted every possible idea you have about what you are promoting. To save you the hassle of having to go through these motions, why not leave it to the experts? Less effort, very good result. Who wouldn’t want that, right?

So why do you need to hire writers? You can read  my previous post about Web marketing for start-ups here.

2. Optimizing Websites and Website Design – Aesthetics Matter

What do you mean when you say optimize your website? Well, that term actually means to review you site design, lay-out, content, and navigation to achieve an excellent goal conversion rate. So what now is the goal of your website? Each website owner wants to have an interactive website – a website which can communicate with the clients and the visitors to be able to close in the deal. And who can do this better, in your behalf, than your experts! With just a minimum amount, you get your business moving and going further!

With all that has been said and done, need I say more? Outsource your website needs now and save yourself from the pain of having to do it yourself.

A&D Creative lab is Article & Design’s specialised unit which strives to help everyone (digital business owners or freelancers alike) who wants to upgrade their skills and expertise to the next level through our courses and workshops.

A&D Creative Lab is made by freelancers for freelancers. <3 

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2 Things Why You Need To Hire Article Writers for your Website?

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Only The Best For Your Website: Hire Article Writers
We would sometimes ask how our website and our business benefit would if we hire article writers to provide content. Or maybe, we wonder why hire when we can very write for ourselves? Well, you see there are a lot of things that a professional content provider can do for your site and for your overall business visibility. Let’s discuss in details a few of the most important ones.
1) Increased Visibility Online
What is the primordial reason why you want to go into business? To profit, right? And how do you profit? By selling more. And how do we sell more? We advertise. We seek out our market and gather as much buyers as we can. That’s the simplest equation we can come up with. That’s pretty simple, right? But you then again, we both know that advertising alone will not deliver us what we expect. We need to be the first and the ultimate attention gatherer among our competitors. Yes, my friend competition made life a little bit complicated in this case. That’s where your professional content provider comes in handy. That is where you will see the leverage of your business if you hire article writers.
With these writers, you can create a specific niche and focus on that to drive traffic to your site. You can very well rely that these people are well-verse in such online advertising rules as keyword density, search engine optimization, and the likes. You don’t have to burden yourself of learning these rules and mastering the art of writing with the intention to sell as you have writers who will do that for you, for a very reasonable per article price. At the end of the day, you increased your online visibility by the wonders of linkages and networks an article made. It wouldn’t be long when that visibility be translated to profit.
2) Sensible Selling Through Unique And Original Write-Ups

writingforselling
Gone were the days where selling was upfront and the products being overplayed and the benefits from the same were downplayed. Surely these days buyers are becoming more aware of the principle of caveat emptor. As such, they are more vigilant and picky with their product choices. They don’t just simply pick a product or purchase a service from the shelf and see if it will satisfy their whims. Instead, they thoroughly read product and service reviews first to gather as much information about the same. Before purchase will be made, they thoroughly scrutinize a product.

This is where sensible selling through blogs and on-site products review will come in handy. Your professional writer, through various article directories, can write product and service reviews for you with the intention to sell your products and services. These articles will be linked to your website so that when one reader reads it, they will automatically be hooked to your site where purchase will be processed.
I can actually write a litany of many other benefits one can get when they choose to hire article writers for their sites. These are just a few of the primordial and important ones. So, what are you waiting for? Hire today and who knows, you might just figure out something to add to this list.

A&D Creative lab is Article & Design’s specialised unit which strives to help everyone (digital business owners or freelancers alike) who wants to upgrade their skills and expertise to the next level through our courses and workshops.

A&D Creative Lab is made by freelancers for freelancers. <3 

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Get inside our Free Newsletter for The SuperFreelancer’s Tips!

Hitting 2 Birds with 1 Stone: Learn Online Marketing & Help a Cancer Patient

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Over the past years, the internet has played a vital role on how people deal with one another and do things. According to reports, there are 3.4 billion internet users and more than 100 billion Google searches done every month. With these figures in hand, the internet undoubtedly has become a great tool for everyday transactions.

With the internet’s rise to fame and power, online marketing correlatively has become the new wave marketing strategy that will surely boost your business and open the doors for more opportunities worldwide.

I’m inviting you to join an event and get your toughest questions answered by the best online marketers on February 29, 2016, Monday, at 7 PM GMT. What’s more phenomenal about this happening is that the admission is absolutely FREE. Also, you don’t need to spend on gas or be stuck in traffic because the event is done via online streaming. The best part is that you’re able to help Dylan Peters, who is battling brain cancer for 12 years.

Join now!

Get Some Free Online Marketing Advice AND Help A Cancer Patient!

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Cancer is a killer. I bet all of us knows that. And it isn’t a silent killer. It’s a painful one. It hurts greatly. And cancer not only hurts the patient; it also hurts those who love and care for him. Those of us who had the misfortune of seeing a loved one battle cancer know how it feels. More so, those of us who have lost someone dear to cancer knows how serious this is. And it’s not only the physical and emotional pain that gives us distress.

Cancer is a very expensive disease to get around with. Curing it is a Herculean task. The costs of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and drugs can punch a giant hole in anyone’s bank account, no matter how much money they have in there. Some even get into debt because of cancer. Debts that will bother them for a good part of their lives. Cancer not only kills people; it also kills dreams. The dreams of the people paying hard-earned money to keep their loved one alive may no longer be realised, all because of debt. Again, those of us who have had a loved one face cancer would know.

Right now, there is one person going through the same thing. His name is Dylan Peters. And this isn’t just his first time; this is his fifth. He’s a survivor, and he’s a tough one. His cousin, Jeremiah Baker, described him as “a kind hearted man that would do anything for anyone. He has been dealt a hard hand of life, but has always made the best of his situation and has always been so strong.” Sure, he may be a tough one, but he still needs your help.

If you were thinking of donating money, hold up for a second, because you don’t have to. All you have to do is to is attend this free event, which takes place on February 29, Monday, 7 PM GMT. You don’t even have to go anywhere. This event takes place via online streaming, so you can participate anywhere you are! More details here.

So then, subscribe to this Blab and help Dylan without even spending a single cent! You also get the advantage of learning from the best and brightest experts in online business and marketing! Getting advice from any one of these people may cost as much as $100,000; here, you get it for free! All the more reason to join!