The peculiar thing about freelancing is that you need to keep yourself up-to-date with all the skills and latest developments in the freelancing world. Just in case if you think that you donโt belong to the freelancing world, you are definitely making a huge mistake as it should be your topmost responsibility as a freelancer to stay up-to-date with the market and up-skill your knowledge as well as add skills that can be useful to your daily job.
It is true beyond the shadow of a doubt that in a competitive environment like freelancing, the only way to stay afloat is by frequently improving what you do and enhancing the skills to find more and more opportunities.
How to enhance your freelance skills
As a professional freelancer, you may find yourself so absorbed to wholly forget how significant it is to enhance your skills to move forward. It is worth mentioning that as of 2019, the number of freelancers in the US is more than 57 million and which has left many Americans wondering if the amazing world of freelancing is ideally fit for their lifestyle.
With more and more people switching to freelancing, the competition for jobs has also grown to a great extent. That is why it doesnโt matter as to whether youโre a veteran freelancer or a newbie.
Here are some of the ways that can help you in enhancing your skills as a freelancer. Letโs dive in,
1. Decide where you want to be
Once you have decided where you want to be in a while, it can be rather difficult as it requires a lot of thinking. Just ensure you give yourself an aim, not compulsorily an unreasonable one but one that you ponder you can attain with dedication. You may be a content writer and want to become an expert. You may be a junior developer and gearing up to become a senior freelance developer and similarly others.
2. Know your strengths
Along with enhancing your other skills, itโs also a brilliant idea to keep your focus on your potential, both personally and professionally. The best thing about finding your strengths is that it allows you to decide what you can enhance or learn, depending on how strong you feel youโll be in that particular area. If you are good with numbers, you can conveniently decide to enhance your analytics skills.
By bringing together all of these analyses, youโll get a full picture of yourself and also your career and what your lies ahead.
3. Try to work on your shortcomings.
If you opt to focus on improving your skills, the best practice would be to decide on what you should improve. For example, in the case of a digital marketer, you may not be well aware of anything about affiliate marketing or PPC.
And in case if you are a Virtual Assistant, you wouldnโt have a clue about the invoicing. The shortcomings are the things you may want to enhance if you want to excel at freelance jobs.
4. Gain as much knowledge as you can
If you want to enhance your skills as a freelancer, the best practice would be to gain as much knowledge as you can. Reading is undoubtedly one of the most productive tasks that can keep your skills updated as a freelancer.
While going through the pages of books or websites, freelancers can easily find innumerable ways to enhance their knowledge, keep up-to-date on trends, and learn more and more tips to sharpen their freelancing skills.
The basic concept is that the reading material doesnโt necessarily have to be limited to your occupation only. Letโs say youโre an IT professional, you can get far better help from a book or website on how to operate a small business and which can help you in becoming a shrewd businessman.
In the same way, if you want to live a luxurious life after retirement, a book on financial literacy will help you decide what to charge and how to save big for retirement.
5. Try to learn extra marketable skills.
In the case of traditional jobs, the majority of employers opt to seek workers having single expertise. In the majority of the cases, a jack-of-all-trades resume doesnโt often translate better to these positions, most importantly senior or upper-management jobs.
However, things are the other way around in case of freelancing, where becoming a one-stop-shop is amazingly marketable. Most of the companies donโt have to hire 4-5 people; instead, they hire just one person.
Let us take the example of a social media marketer. If a particular candidate can write, edit, search engine optimization, as well as graphic design, it can make you a comparatively more attractive candidate.
In this case, your client only will have to work with a single person to complete regular tasks. Not only will this prevent a communication breakdown, but it will also free business owners from completing other tasks.
Try to learn the basics of several other jobs that can link to your expertise. The best way would be to identify the skills to make you a multi-threat in the extraordinary freelance marketplace. One of the convenient ways would be to select an appropriate online class to master these skills.
6. Try to gain the maximum number of certifications.
In the case of freelancing, bachelorโs and masterโs degrees can help you in entering the game, but if you want to enhance your skills and prove your proficiency in a specific job, things can become more difficult.
There can be so many reasons behind the aforementioned factors, and the most prominent of which is that the degree is broad and it doesnโt give you a particular skill set. That is why; a freelancer should go for industry-recognized certifications that can give him/her an edge in the freelancing game.
In almost every freelance or remote profession, the best practice would be to go for certification as it can help you in the best possible way to master the skills that employers want. Some of the certifications include Google Analytics Certification, Google Cloud Certification, Facebook Blueprint Certification, Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification, and Amazon Web Services Certification to name a few.
7. Mentors can help in the best possible way.
Mentors are undoubtedly the most significant part of the learning process, and it is an admitted fact that none of us have all the information and skills in various fields, and that is why having the best support of competent in anything you donโt know but that you want to master is a move you should always consider.
Basically, there are two kinds of mentors: the famous and renowned and the people behind the curtains. The first type is what everyone is searching for: theyโre well-known, renowned and they apparently have all the skills you could need. Moreover, they are expensive, and quite often theyโre often less competent in what they think and do.
The reason behind the aforementioned fact is that these people like themselves โmaestros,โ and most of them are positioning themselves as maestros and working on their brand. Try to focus on getting mentorship from someone that may not be renowned but has the skills that you shouldnโt have but also the evidence of these skills: youโll come to know that your knowledge will improve rapidly.
Moreover, you should also consider becoming someone elseโs mentor and opt to exchange knowledge and enhance it together.
Wrapping Up
In the contemporary world of digital marketing, there are amazingly large numbers of unique skills that can help you earn big money. And, with so many employers searching for freelancers rather than taking on the overhead of new employees, this is undoubtedly the best time you should learn new skills.
However, you shouldnโt spend many years developing and polishing skills in order to make money as a freelancer. Instead, you should try to learn more and more skills in order to excel in this field.
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