An employee working online job, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of
the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can have the effect of reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.
Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing
is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.
Productivity systems like Getting Things Done might help – although their complexity could actually cost you time too – but really the most effective way to increase your productivity
is to create short bursts of focused attention. Work in a café, for example, and you’ll know you’ve got a seat for about two hours, long enough to complete one task. That mini-deadline could be enough to keep you staring at the screen, instead of looking through the window. And if that doesn’t work, you could always choose a café without an Internet connection.
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