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[Music] this video is sponsored by the ultimate freelancing bundle from study web development com which gives you everything you need to start your freelancing business including 130 page in-depth guide invoicing and client proposal templates website templates an SEO checklist and much more visit the link in the description use the code brad 20 to get 25% off hey guys in this video we're gonna talk about freelancing as a web developer and I just want to say that everything in this video is from my own personal experience in what I've learned I'm not someone that has worked for big corporations so my personal advice isn't the best in that area but being an entrepreneur freelancing running my own businesses is something that I've done for about a decade now okay even to this day my business is now focused on education but I work for myself and it has a lot of parallels with freelancing so what we're gonna do is talk about the pros and cons of freelancing as a web developer or programmer and also talk about things like what to do before you start how to find work how to deal with clients and so on and I will say that freelancing isn't for everyone it's one of many avenues that you can take as a developer but hopefully this sheds a little light on it and helps you decide if that's what you want to do or not and then maybe you can take something away from this presentation that'll help you in the future okay I'm not promoting or discouraging freelancing I'm just sharing my experience and my thoughts on it alright so when it comes to pros and cons I'd say that there's an equal amount of pros and cons it just depends on the person and which one's matter to them the most so for the pros the the main overall advantage is freedom and flexibility not all of us were made for nine-to-five jobs in punch clocks freelancing really gives you a lot of flexibility in many areas such as where you work so you could work from home and your pajamas you could have your own office space you could work from a Starbucks or a bookstore anywhere you want also anytime you want you can create your own hours if you want to sleep all day and work second or third shift you can do that but you have to be someone that will actually be motivated to work and not say you know I'm tired forget it I'll work twice as much tomorrow because chances are you won't so you have to be very disciplined in order to be a freelancer and I'm gonna talk about who freelancing is not for in the neck in another slide so another advantage is being able to pick and choose which projects you take on and you want to work on which is really something you can't do if you're working for a company now I would suggest really thinking about it before denying work unless the client is being very unreasonable I've actually had someone ask me for a social network that was quote similar to LinkedIn to be built by myself within three months for a thousand dollars I think it was something ridiculous like that now when you're just starting out with little to no experience you probably will won't be making a killing but you also don't want to be taking advantage of so you really need to know how to say no to people some people are just very out of touch with what goes into building a social network or an e-commerce site or something like that and then the other reason that I would reject an offer is if it's something that just is impossible for me to do if it's something that is - the technology is just way beyond what I know or if the timeline is too short if I know that I just can't I can't do it no matter what then I would reject it other than that I think I would have taken on just about anything as long as I knew it was possible for me to do unless of course my plate was absolutely full and I couldn't I couldn't do any other work which is a good thing so the next one can be a pro or a con depending on who you are I'm an extreme introvert so I've always enjoyed working alone so it's a pro to me they may not be the healthiest thing as you know as healthy is working with people but I find it much less stressful and much more peaceful if you're an extrovert and you always have to be around people all day then this is definitely a negative for instance my wife is a hairdresser and she's very going and she would go nuts doing what I do and she tells me that all the time all right so what are some of the cons or disadvantages of being a freelancer and working for yourself I would say unpredictability is a huge one when I was freelancing I would have weeks or months where I was rolling in dough because I maybe I got two big deposits on a couple jobs but then the next month I made significantly less so what I would suggest is to really manage your money well and maybe even take everything you make and put it into the bank and then give yourself a salary so that you create your own steadiness of income because it's not going to come naturally when you're freelancing so another disadvantage is you have no benefits being a freelancer you have to buy and manage your own health insurance which is actually something I'm going through right now which just sucks you also get no retirement no 401k or anything like that okay lack of community again this depends on the person but even speaking as an introvert it would be nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of and stuff in the flesh I mean I do have a lot of communication through email and stuff like that with people but having that community of developers and coworkers can be nice motivation can also be an issue for some people it's up to you to create your schedule and stick to it in the next slide I'm gonna talk a little bit about some qualities that people may have that may prevent them from being a successful freelancer all right separation from work and home is another big one many people that work from home have a hard time not checking emails not doing work throughout the day often it's very sporadic and you shouldn't do that you should really try and set a solid schedule and follow it as much as you can so that you can have your family time or your time with your friends or whatever it is you like to do instead of you know working all around the clock alright so by no means am i making this video to either glamorize freelancing or discourage it but it is not for everybody in there are a lot of people that it's it's not for and one of the the purposes of this video is to help you guys realize if it is for you or not now I'm not saying if you have any of these issues or traits you shouldn't be a freelancer in fact I have some of these maybe if you know you have every single one you shouldn't you definitely shouldn't but a couple can be overlooked or even better they can be fixed so some traits of people that that at least should think twice before being a freelancer are if you have trouble with motivation you know motivating yourself to to write code or to do anything to to do with managing your business if you lack that passion and that energy then things are going to be difficult and you're probably better just working a nine-to-five job if you have trouble managing your time or if you're easily distracted you may have issues setting a schedule and sticking to it don't pause your work for two hours to go play a video game and it's hard because technically you can do that you know you don't have a boss over your shoulder that's watching you but you won't be successful okay if you're doing that all the time things like that so the next one trouble dealing with clients this is one that I definitely had issues with and I still have so this is a good example of something that you can have but still be successful and I just had to work on my communication skills and just just tolerating pushy clients and things like that I actually have a video on how to deal with difficult clients if you want to check that out so if you hate being alone a freelancing web developer or programmer may not be the best path because most freelancers do work alone and if you don't like to learn i would say programming and technology in general may not be the best path because things are always changing and you're always always having to learn more that's one of the things about development I wouldn't say one of the bad things because I enjoy it most developers do I'm guessing if you watch this channel you probably don't have this problem because my videos are that's the sole purpose is to learn so most you guys probably don't have to worry about this but if you know if someone doesn't like to learn they're probably not going to want to be a web developer or a programmer in general all right so I hope that that didn't put freelancing in too much of a negative light I just want to be a hundred percent honest and I don't want to steer people down the wrong path freelancing was actually really great for me it led me to have a great successful life being an entrepreneur so it was a great thing for me but it's just a fact that it's not for every single person every every developer all right so let's say freelancing is for you where do you start so first of all you want to learn as much as you can so that you can provide the services that people need and you can actually get the jobs done you need to decide the scope of what you're gonna offer as far as services and technology are you gonna do front-end UI web design WordPress Drupal full-stack JavaScript you know nodejs Python what is it that you want to specialize in and I'm not saying that you should never take a project that isn't in your specialty but you should have some kind of foundation of what you do if you're the WordPress guy people are gonna come to you for WordPress and you're gonna be very popular for that specific thing if you're the UI guy people will come to you for front-end stuff and you probably specialize in things like react or angular things that will that allow you to build really cool dynamic interfaces if you specialize in large web applications you'll need to know you know a back-end language and database something like MySQL or MongoDB you probably already have some kind of skill set and you want to build on that if you're looking for something to specialize in then go on sites like upwork and look at the projects that are being offered and what are they what what are they asking for now once you have some skills and you're able to build things and create projects you want to build up your business plan what do you expect to accomplish and be realistic also come up with your pricing create your contracts and invoices in fact the sponsor for this video the freelancing bundle includes sample invoices and everything you need to get set up to be a freelancer so if you're interested I would definitely suggest checking that out I'd also suggest meeting with an accountant to discuss taxes and stuff like that once I got in the countin things were so much easier because I didn't really have a clue what I was doing in that aspect and it was just a real pain in the ass to do on my own so he helped me out with a lot you also want to build your website in your brand you need a place where people can see our services and what you offer and I realize when you're just starting out it's hard to create a portfolio but it doesn't matter or it doesn't really matter if the items in your portfolio are actually from paying clients they could be your own projects or they could be something you did for a family member or a friend or maybe a website you even built for free for like a local business a local pizza shop something like that anything that shows that you can actually put something together ok these are the things that I would suggest doing before you actually start looking for work so once you're ready where do you find work these are all the things that helped me out so of course you have your websites that were created to connect freelancers with clients and I'm gonna give you a list of those resources for those sites in the next slide now a lot of people do criticize these sites because there's there's a lot of freelancers usually from more poor countries that will apply for a job for just a ridiculous amount and that's what you're competing with and this used to piss me off and it still does because I feel like they're lowering the value of of web development in general of programming on a global scale and I realize they're struggling and they just want whatever they can get but ultimately they're hurting themselves if they plan on staying in this field so just be aware that you you will be dealing with that alright but not everyone wants the cheapest third world programmer and I don't mean to offend anybody when I say that I'm not talking about any specific country or anything I'm just being very honest and I say how I feel but anyway many people realize that if they hire a guy to build a large website for a hundred bucks ten times out of ten they're not going to get a good product and they're gonna they're gonna have to start from square one anyways now if you get some feedback on your profile on these sites you're gonna be looked at some good feedback I should say you're gonna be looked at as someone that can do the job and I'm not pulling this out of my ass I actually had this exact experience when they see that other people are leaving these really good reviews and you gave them what they want they're gonna they're gonna want to have you do their work even if you're charging more than the other guys all right so just remember that at first it's gonna be tough because you're not gonna have any reputation but once you you build that up you might have to do a couple jobs for a really you know small amount of money but just get those reviews so next you have online or social networking so Facebook Linkedin other professional based networks you want to join groups get yourself out there and let everyone know what you do even for your personal accounts let it let all the people that you went to high school with on Facebook know that you build web sites or web apps and if they if either they or someone they know has been looking to put a website together maybe they'll they'll contact you alright in addition to online networking you can do some real-life networking so go to conferences meetups conventions anything to do with technology and just network with people you might find a bigger company looking to outsource to a freelancer and I've had quite a few of those jobs in the past I enjoyed those because I got to deal with people that actually knew what went into a project and they also pay very well and that's something I haven't really mentioned yet is that you can get regular clients that you know want a website for their restaurant or something like that or you can get other developers that have projects that they just don't have time for or maybe they're they don't know enough and they need someone with that with a with more skill I've had quite a few of those and those pay off very well also advertising maybe something that you want to do I did a a a an ad in my local paper for web design and computer repair when I started out and I got quite a few calls on that it was the only one in the paper it was a smaller paper so it wasn't it wasn't expensive this was quite a while ago I'm not sure how effective this would be now but then you also have online advertising with like Adwords or Facebook or even other websites that have ad spots available and you could also publish quality content on your own website so create a blog specialize in you know development topics this will drive traffic to your site and expose your services to people when I had my tech guy web solution site I did a blog post maybe every other day and at one point I was getting a ton of traffic from Google and I know that these days SEO is tougher being found on the Internet is tougher but it can still be done alright so these are just a few of the things that have worked for me in the past one way or another some are better than others but if anyone else has any other tips you can go ahead and leave those in the comments I'm sure a lot of you guys have experience with with some of this stuff as well so this is a list of sites that I compiled where you may want to start looking for projects we have a bunch of freelance based sites also sites like Craigslist even github and Stack Overflow I believe have a job section and you also have more traditional job sites like indeed and and monster sites like that and I know a lot of these postings are for actual company positions but it doesn't hurt to look and see if there's anyone willing to outsource projects to you and I'm not going to go through and read all these but just check some of them out even if you're not ready at least you can get an idea of what's out there and what's being asked for alright so the last thing that I want to say is to just be confident when you're working for yourself it's very overwhelming you're not going to be an expert when you first start it may seem a little awkward dealing with your first couple especially if you're like me and you're more of an introvert but trust me it gets easier as you as you go on you're gonna build your skills with people and with your development knowledge as each project completes okay or as you complete each project and as far as being scared to take on projects don't be unless like I said before you know you can't do it or if it's too much for one person or maybe it's a technology you've never even heard of things like that other than that you'll be able to figure it out I can tell you from my experience that I had very very few projects where the client explained what they wanted and it just popped right in my head what I was gonna do it just doesn't work like that I would have to do a lot of research and figure out what technologies what plugins I'm gonna use things like that and I just figured it out as I went along so as long as you try your hardest and you have patience and ambition you'll get it done and you'll do a great job so don't let any low self-esteem stop you from thriving and then just make sure you give the client a realistic timeline and I've said this to guys before in other videos never give a shorter timeline just to sound good make sure you give them a longer timeline and then if you're done sooner than that it's a nice surprise to them okay so that's gonna be it guys hopefully you enjoyed this and it helped you both figure out if freelancing is right for you as well as how to get started if you liked it please hit that like button and I will see you in the next video hey guys one of the best if not the best resource that I can refer you to for starting a freelance business is at study web development comm slash freelancing the creator Kyle shared it with me and I can personally vouch that this bundle is well worth it and it gives you a hundred and thirty page guide to freelancing and also comes packaged with things like in invoicing template client proposals HTML CSS templates a portfolio website access to a private Facebook community and much more so use the code brad 20 and get 25% off today